Artist René Magritte's The Son of Man is one of western culture's most famous paintings but also one of its most misunderstood. What the heck is going on in this painting? Who is this well groomed businessman? Why is there an apple floating in midair in front of his face?The Son of Man poses more questions than answers--and that's precisely the point. The true subject of the work is neither the man nor the apple, but human curiosity. The apple intentionally blocks the man's face, which would otherwise be the focal point of the painting. Human curiosity kicks in, and people want to know what the man's face looks like all the more because it is obscured. Magritte is playing with your senses. At showings of the painting, its not uncommon to see people shifting their heads and standing on tip toes to try and sneak a glance of the man's face behind the apple.
As Magritte explained, "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."
The apple and bowler hat are all tangential to the painting's message. They could just as easily been anything else (Magritte also produced derivative works featuring a woman's face obscured by a flower and businessman's face obscured by a bird). However the apple and bowler hat have become iconic in their own regard--see the climax of The Thomas Crowne Affair, where Pierce Brosnan breaks into a museum dressed as the Son of Man. In so far as the apple floating in mid-air deepens the sense of mystery, it contributes to the painting's evocation of human curiosity.
"Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, that it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well." -René Magritte
i like this painting a lot. i think i can kind of see one of his eyes. nice job G
ReplyDeletefunny thing... I was walking through Barnes and Noble the way to my car and I saw 3 books with these pictures. 2 of them had their faces covered, while the other had a person facing the ocean standing next to a curtain with the silhouette of the man. Unfortunately, the books were either novels or one of those self-help books. go figure
ReplyDeleteI just watched "Stranger than Fiction" again and the green apples come up alot as well as the existential questions of "who am i"? Interesting that this artwork reminds me of the movie. BTW...
ReplyDeletelinked in from Flickr's ARTyfish...