The Ur-Satelloons of René Magritte

magritte painting from 1928 of a grey opaque orb floating about head height next to a tuscan orange wall on the left. a crown molding appears in a cropped section where the wall meets the ceiling, barely at the top edge of the painting, and a baseboard meets the wood plank floor, while what would seem to be the back wall is actually all black, whether it is a wall or a void seems intentionally unclear. the title is la vie secrète, but apparently magritte hated titling his works and outsourced it to his poet friends. so maybe don't overread it. anyway this painting is in the kunsthaus zurich — René Magritte, La vie secrète, 1928. Oil on canvas. 73 x 54.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zurich, image copyright adagp via Christie’s

Humans have always looked up into the sky and said, “wtf is that floating orb?” And sometimes it has not been the sun OR the moon.

René Magritte looked into the void—whether of the world or his own unconscious, I do not know, ask a Magritte scholar—and saw a smooth, mysterious sphere, a precursor, if not an ancestor, to the satelloon.

In 1928 he put a human-sized orb in a space, if not exactly a room, in his painting La vie secrète [now at the Kunsthaus Zurich], which was one of many orbs in his one-person show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussells in 1932. Magritte’s poet friend Paul Colinet was inspired to write an orb-themed poem, and even give Magritte a little sketch of a guy standing on a floating orb.

magritte's painting of a space with tan floor, white wall and ceiling, whose joint is marked by a thick molding, all frame three sides of the rest of the image, which is a large, featureless silvery orb floating over a craggy grey mountainscape. a man in a hat and suit stands atop the orb, which is 4-5x his height. this painting is selling at christie's london in march 2025 — René Magritte, La reconnaissance infinie, 1933, Oil on canvas. 100 x 70.2 cm, selling at Christie’s London on 5 March 2025, copyright etc etc i’m sure

Which motif Magritte turned into a painting, La reconnaissance infinie, which is now for sale in London.

in rene magritte's 1932 painting l'ombre monumental (the monumental shadow) a blue tinted featureless sphere sites on a grassy field next to a tree and a white complex of house and farm in the rural landscape. the clouds are grey, which makes me wonder about how much shadow might actually be cast. the orb is 2.5-3 times as tall as the two storey houses. the painting is in a private collection in florida, i think, and is discussed here in relation to other magrittes and the larger context of ten-storey tall orbs — René Magritte, l’Ombre Monumentale, 1932, oil on canvas, 33 x 55 cm, a private collection in Florida, probably, image via Christie’s

The rate of growth of Magritte’s orbs, and their escape into the wild put them into the timeline of the satelloon, though it’s not yet clear where. A giant orb overshadowed a house in l’Ombre Monumentale (1932), which echoes images of the test inflation of NASA’s Project Echo 1A in a disused dirigible hangar in 1960.

a 100-ft diameter silver mylar sphere sits in a dirigible hangar near the curved end, with rows of windows behind it. a shiny plastic surface has been unfurled underneath it, and a clear plastic tube reaches up from the ground, a method of inflating it. several human figures and a couple of vehicles mill about the bottom, lending scale to the image. there is a large transparent NASA banner hanging across the face of the sphere, a satelloon called Project Echo, which launched a few weeks later in august 1960 — Project Echo IA, 1960, NASA test inflation of a 100-ft diameter satelloon at Weeksville, NC

There is a direct resonance with Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s 1960 concept for Floating Cloud Structures, mile-wide communities of thousands of people living not on, but inside floating geodesic spheres.

shoji sadao's black and white photocollage of a rugged, treeless mountain range with two giant, featureless silvery orbs floating above it in the partly clouded sky. Floating Cloud Structures were Sadao and Buckminster Fuller's concept for communities living inside geodeic spheres.

The genesis of NASA’s satelloons, Project Echo, traces to the aftermath of the Sputnik launch, and a conference over what to do with the V2 rockets spirited away from the nazis after WWII. But the concept of a giant floating orb orbiting the earth and visible to the naked eye originated in 1955 with Wernher von Braun himself; he proposed an American Star to dazzle the Asian mind. Did von Braun see or know of Magritte’s orbs?

1964 photo of Echo I and Echo II satelloons crossing orbits in the night sky over Sandia Labs, via LIFE

We know, at least, that Magritte lived long enough to see von Braun’s. Project Echo 1A launched in 1960, and Echo 2 launched in 1964. So for the last seven years of his life, his night sky was occasionally crossed by at least one, and sometimes two, floating orbs.

La reconnaissance infinie: mysterious fruit of the friendship between René Magritte and the poet Paul Colinet [christie’s magazine]
5 Mar 2025, Lot 108: René Magritte, La reconnaissance infinie, 1932, est GBP6-9m [update: sold for GBP 10.315m] [christies]