Golconda 1953

In Golconda, Magritte employs multiplication of a like image as a way to de-personalize. It appears like a late-afternoon downpour of bourgeois normality--each figure slightly different yet rendered anonymous by bowler hats and long coats. Magritte struggles against bourgeois cultural hegemony, yet he himself lived the life he mocks in his painting. After 1950, Magritte commonly appeared in photographs wearing a nondescript bowler hat like the subjects in his paintings. He lived all of his later life in Brussels in a modest middle class dwelling, opting not to return to the artistic hub of Paris. As an explanation for Magritte's conventional lifestyle coupled with his unconventional paintings, George Melly, with the BBC, wrote, "He is a secret agent, his object is to bring into disrepute the whole appartus of bourgeois reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving like everybody else."

The Interpretation of Dreams 1930

From 1927-30, Magritte painted a series of "word paintings." In an article he wrote for a Surrealist publication titled, "Words and Images," Magritte discussed the relationship between the two: "An object is not so attached to its names that one cannot find another which suits it better." In his systematic, compartmentalized composition, Magritte points out the arbitrary nature of language. (It is difficult to read the words in this reproduction, but they do not correspond to the images) Alphabetic symbols have no direct correlation to the objects to which they refer; this is the nature of semiosis.

The Son of Man 1964

Magritte was fascinated by the implications of hidden things in his paintings. Often he hid the subject's face from view, blocking it with a suspended object, a drape, or some other means. He de-personalizes the human subject by masking its individualizing identifier--the face. In a radio interview with Jean Neyens, Magritte discussed his use of the hidden in his painting, "The Son of Man": "At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present." Magritte toys with the notion of object permanence, a form of conditioning we all experience as infants. Experience has taught us to presume that there is a face behind the apple, so, in turn, we readily imagine a continuity to fill in the masked area. Magritte wishes to call into question the ease with which we unconsciously "fill in" what is hidden and the unquestioned faith that we place in our suppositions.

Personal Values 1952

With few exceptions, Magritte chose common objects for his paintings. He draws from a set of icons. The same objects appear time and again in his paintings like leitmotifs tracing the course of a career. He takes these common objects and alters their scale. He places them in unexpected settings. He makes what is giant, small and what is small, giant. He brings the outside, in and takes the inside, out. Such is the case with "Personal Values." The objects of vanity suddenly take on great importance.

The Human Condition, I 1934

Not only in the case of words, Magritte points out the semiosis involved with interpreting images. The image is not the referent, though it is easy to conflate the two given the similarity between a realistic painting and that which it depicts. Viewers mistake the canvas as a window to the world, but it is only mediated, symbolic version of reality.

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