Rene Magritte - Blog Posts

Why am I lost again?

Is the place?

Are the people?

Or is it me again?

The cultivation of Ideas   -   René  Magritte  1927

 Belgian  1898-1967

Art Improved: Son of Man

In 1964, the Surrealist René Magritte painted the iconic “Son of Man.” The image serves as a self-portrait with a lone apple obscuring his face. About this painting, he said, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” 

If Magritte had been alive during the 21st century, he would have, no doubt, modernized his painting for a contemporary audience. Kanye West would naturally be the most fitting subject. The idea that “everything we see hides another thing” is a theme that reverberates through Kanye West’s art and his life, in the grander sense. Magritte would have had a strong appreciation for that fact, and thus, would have improved the painting by the inclusion of Kanye West. Kanye West being obscured by the apple is a direct symbolism for how the media and other channels obscure the meaning of Kanye’s messages, whether intentionally or due to their inability to grasp his genius.

Same joke; different shirt.

No, it’s NOT a bear. Can’t you read?

René Magritte, L’empire des lumières, 1953-54.

[...]I suppose you want to see my rags’, she said. Gripping the table with both hands, I turned to face her. Still sitting, she lifted one leg high and wide above her head, and to open her gash still further, used the fingers of both hands to draw the folds of skin apart. Thus, Madame Edwarda’s ‘rags’ looked at me, hairy and pink, and as full of life as some revolting squid. I stammered softly: ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘You can see,’ she said, ‘I am GOD’. ‘I’m going crazy.’ ‘Oh no you’re not, you’ve got to see: look!’ Her harsh voice sweetened, becoming almost childlike as she said with such weariness, with the infinite smile of abandon: ‘Darling, the fun I’ve had . . .’ Holding her provocative position, her leg still raised in the air, she spoke to me with an air of command: ‘Kiss me!’ ‘But . . . ,’ I protested, ‘in front of all these people?’ ‘Of course!’ I trembled. I stared at her, motionless, and she smiled back so sweetly that I trembled again. At last, staggering forward, I got down on my knees and pressed my lips to that living wound. Her naked thigh caressed my ear and I thought I heard the sound of a sea swell, the same sound you hear when you put your ear to a large conch shell. In the absurdity and confusion of the brothel (I felt I was choking, flushed and sweating with the heat) I remained strangely suspended, as if Madame Edwarda and I were losing ourselves on a night of wind, alone together at the edge of the ocean. [...] Madame Edwarda went ahead of me . . . rising into the clouds. The room’s noisy indifference to her happiness, to the measured gravity of her step, was both a royal consecration and a flowering festival: death itself was present at the feast in the guise of what is called, in the nakedness of the brothel, ‘the butcher’s cut’. . . Madame Edwarda, Georges Bataille *Madame Edwarda: a figure which, in Hegel’s words, ‘attains its truth only when it finds itself in absolute laceration’, when the life of the spirit ‘contemplates the negativity of death face to face and dwells with it’. _Illustrations for Madame Edwarda by René magritte, 1946

René Magritte, The Land of Miracles, 1964

René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), Le monde des images [The World of Images], 1950. Oil on canvas, 100 x 80.6 cm.

L. V., you tell me it’s okay