René Magritte was born on November 21, 1898 in Belgium. He studied at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts and went on to become one of the most famous Surrealist painters and an important figure during the Belgian Surrealist movement. Much of Magritte’s works involve the inclusion of apples, a man in a bowler hat, and the sky, all of which are painted in unordinary ways. His paintings challenges the audience’s perception of ordinary objects and examines the relationship between image and text.
The painting that I selected is called The False Mirror (1928) and it is a painting of a single eye without eyelashes that takes up the entire canvas. A blue sky with clouds is painted in the iris of the eye while the pupil of the eye is painted fully black. I encountered this painting by walking around on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art. I saw this painting in Gallery 517 and what drew me to it was that it was placed really high up on the wall, above all the other paintings in the gallery, as if it was looking amongst the people. What also drew me to the painting was its vibrant blue sky that juxtaposed the eye’s flat black pupil, making the unblinking eye seem lively and lifeless at the same time.
The False Mirror reflects the aesthetic preferences associated with Modernism because it’s drawn in a way that doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t make sense as to why there’s a sky painted within the iris or why there’s only one single eye on the canvas. The painting also embraces the skepticism that is seen within Modernist works as well by challenging what we already know about the eye. From a technical standpoint, we use our eyes to observe the environment around us. In the painting however, the view of the sky makes the role of our eyes more complicated. The eye seems like a mirror, reflecting what it sees, but it also seems like a window in which we see the sky through. Thus, the painting seems to suggest that our eyes aren’t just a mirror, but perhaps, it’s also a window into our consciousness. When we look at our environment, we don’t just look at them. Everything we see forms some kind of thought in our minds, whether it’s consciously or unconsciously. So, like the title of the painting, the eye is a false mirror because it’s more than that.
A question I have about the work is: Why did Magritte specifically choose to paint the sky in the irises? Some of his other works also include depictions of the sky so why is Magritte so fascinated by the sky?
Sources:
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “René Magritte”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Nov. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rene-Magritte. Accessed 25 Nov. 2021.
Thanks for sharing this work and for all of these excellent insights into its meaning and significance vis a vis Modernism. As I studied the painting, particularly because of the way the eye extends beyond the frame of the painting, I had the feeling that there was someone (or at least an eye) behind the canvas looking out at me, reminding me that making visual art is also about seeing. I have no idea why Magritte so often painted the sky, but I do feel that there is something about his skies that reinforces the idea that surrealism captures the strange, dream like quality of life.