René Magritte

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The Son of Man, painted by René Magritte in 1964 as a self-portrait.

René Magritte (1898-1967) was Belgium's most famous 20th century painter. One of the icons of the surrealistic movement, he painted countless paintings with absurd images, many which have become famous, such as The Treachery of Images and The Son of Man.

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René Magritte provides examples of the following tropes:

• Alien Geometries
• Body Horror: Two paintings come into mind: a female face shaped like a female body and a pipe smoking man whose nose is stuck inside his pipe.
• Cloudcuckoolander : His paintings often looked like a madman made them.
• The Everyman: Ordinary men in bowler hats and black costumes are often depicted in his work, usually unfased by all the surrounding madness around them.
• Different As Night and Day: Literally subverted. The Empire of Light shows a night scene in broad daylight.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The painting The Treachery of Images depicts a pipe, with the caption « Ceci n' est pas une pipe » ("This is not a pipe").

René Magritte: The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying!

• Hidden in Plain Sight: Many objects, people or animals in Magritte's paintings are hidden. Sometimes by a cloak over their heads, sometimes because an object is floating in front of their face or sometimes because it is covered by a painting that supposedly shows what's behind itself.
  • He also made a few paintings where things that normally hidden are part of the object, like shoes with feet on them or a dress where the breasts and vagina are visible.
• It's Raining Men: Golconda is a literal example. Unless they're hovering, or floating upwards.
• Magic Mirror: The 1937 painting Not to Be Reproduced shows a mirror with an illogical reflection; it simply shows a man's back again instead of showing his face.
• Mermaid Problem: Magritte once painted a reverse mermaid, having the legs of a human and the torso of a fish.
• Mind Screw: By combining ordinary every day life images and putting them in absurd situations.
  • Or making images dissolve into their environment... if the images are accurate representations of the environments.
  • Or images that simply don't make sense
• Non-Indicative Name: The titles of his paintings usually have nothing to do with the actual content - until you realize later what the connections are between the titles and the artworks. For example:
  • The Treachery of Images: It isn't a pipe, it's an image of a pipe; thus the image is treacherous.
  • Not to Be Reproduced: Thus, it must not be shown in the mirror.
  • The Human Condition: Whether the paintings in the paintings depict what's behind them in the scenes is something that the viewer has to decide; thus the pieces as a whole are conditional on the human.
• Riddle for the Ages
• Selective Gravity: Certain things float on air in his paintings, like apples, trains, pipes,... but without any general consistency.
• Shrouded in Myth: The meaning of his art is open for all sorts of interpretations...