Rene Magritte – 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 some other thing yet we still want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is always some sort of interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us.’’ (Shelley, 1) Those are the words Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte chose to say, in a 1965 radio interview, in an effort to analyse his painting ‘’Son of Man’’. ‘’Son of Man’’, like the most of Magritte’s works of art, looks like a game between reality and illusion; it depicts a bowler-hatted man, dressed in a suit with his face obscured by a suspended green apple. There are many theories that have been developed around the interpretation of the painting. A very popular one was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, an important French writer and filmmaker. According to Grillet, ‘’Magritte’s distrust of the bourgeoisie, even though he himself lived and dressed like a bowler-hatted man, has always been pronounced. This explains why he paints a man’s face -The face is every man’s identity- obscured by an apple. Magritte has painted man’s anonymity, his void, his emptiness, because, in essence, every bourgeois has the same face. (Robbe –Grill, 201) Another approach that has been made, this time not with socio-political, but with psychological, criteria requires a small retrospect in the painter’s childhood.
When Magritte was 13 years old, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. This was not her first attempt; she had made many over a number of years, driving her husband Leopold to lock her into her bedroom. One day she escaped, and was missing for days. She was later discovered a mile or so down the nearby river, dead. According to a legend, Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water. Supposedly, when his mother was found, her dress was covering her face. That image, according to the other theory, could have been the source of inspiration for many paintings, Magritte painted, of people with faces obscured by various objects, like ‘’Son of Man’’. (Unknown, 1)
Magritte’s obsession of hiding people’s expression in his paintings could have been caused by this fact or it could not. Magritte’s works, as it happens in the world of surrealism, are covered by a wide mystery; a mystery that if gets solved, his paintings may lose their beauty. After all, he him-self has said that his paintings are visible images which conceal nothing; he said that ‘’they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, “What does that mean?” It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable. (Shelley, 1)
Bibliography
1) Magritte, Rene, Robbe –Grillet, Alain, La Belle Captive: A Novel, University of California Press: California, 1995
2) Shelley, Esaak, Artists’ Quotes: Rene Magritte, page in about website: http://arthistory.about.com/od/famous_names/a/Artists-Quotes-Ren-E-Magritte.htm
3) Unknown, Rene Magritte and his Painting, article on rene-magritte.org: http://www.rene-magritte.org/
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