I walk by this building plastered with “variations” of “The Son of Man” every morning on my way to work. I always wonder whether Rene Magritte would weep about his painting being used to advertise restaurants.
Although he does not strike me as someone who is obsessed with the divide between high and low/pop arts.
Margritte painted The Son of Man as a self-portrait. This I knew. However, I never knew what he said about the painting until I wanted to tell the story of how I took this self-portrait and became curious of the story behind Margritte’s.
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.
Brilliant.
I know almost nothing about art but I do know that I love Magritte. So much so that I fell for a One King’s Lane sale today and purchased a print. I can’t wait for it to arrive!
Thank you for educating me in the meantime…
Ameena recently posted…winning
You are so luck!!!!
I’ve always liked this picture but because I’m an uneducated savage I never did the legwork to find artist or backstory. Just goes to show you that the more you think you know the less you actually do.
dufmanno recently posted…The Bathing Suit Mesh Disaster of Norwalk Connecticut
k, it’s easy now now that everybody simply has to google. However, the ability to write as well as you do is not that easy to come by. One has to be born with it.
Your posts often make me think… I like that…
Velva recently posted…Wordless Wednesday
Thank you. I love how we have come to know each other through my little piece of heaven. xo
You posts often make me think… I like that…
Velva recently posted…Wordless Wednesday
Oops typo! Delete.
Velva recently posted…Wordless Wednesday
Delete not working. LOL. 🙂
I am sitting at the train station laughing out loud now. People gave me weird looks. 🙂
Love you.
I am keeping both of these comments to add to my comment count. LOL. You should do this more often. 😉
The first time I saw this I was a bit tipsy and though that the piece was of someone who had been hit in the face with a piece of fruit.
It made for a very funny conversation many many years ago.
Jack recently posted…This Post Won’t Go Viral Or Make You Rich
LOL. What would you have said about this one then?
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/rene-magritte/man-in-a-bowler-hat-1964
😉
I’ve always loved Magritte. I like the clarity in his surrealism (oxymoronic though that may sound). His themes of hiding are fascinating – missing faces, hiding in plain sight, our many masks, the elements of his childhood that come into play in his work.
Aren’t we all more intrigued by what we think is hidden or withheld than by what is (theoretically) right “out there?”And behind what is hidden, there can be more, still.
BigLittleWolf recently posted…Courting by Text: Is the Non-Date the New Normal?
Everything you said!
As are you, love.
xxoo