During my visit to the Museum of Modern Art, one artwork that stood out and caught my interest was “The False Mirror” by Rene Magritte. The work was created on 1928 at Le Perreux-sur-Marne which is a small suburb in Paris, France and was called “Le Faux Miroir”. Rene Magritte was a Belgian painter who followed the surrealism movement of art, in this movement a common theme majority of his artwork share was the sense for viewers of his artwork to “question their perceptions of reality.”
The work I selected is a picture of an entire eye, including the eyelids, with a view of the beautiful sky as its iris which is briefly interrupted by a solid black circle as the pupil. A small detail that is easily missed during the first glance is the lack of eyelashes which gets overlooked by the depiction of the sky. Overall, the description of the artwork is straight forward with what you see, but it can be interpreted in many ways.
In relation to modernism, the aspect being shown in this artwork is surrealism. The intention is to show more of the unconscious mind as opposed to the conscious and rational side of thinking. What Magritte shows through imagination and experimentation is unique to everyday life as it breaks the fundamental art style of realism. The aesthetics of the work are imaginary and creative which is depicted through an eye representing a mirror of the sky.
What caught my attention regarding this painting was the reflection seen in the eye, which is the main attraction of the painting and a focal point of confusion. Normally, you wouldn’t expect to see what the eye is viewing, but Magritte captures this perspective and puts it into art depicting both the instrument (eye) and the view (sky) into a single frame. To me it signified the difference between what we actually see and how we interpret it differently. It reminded me of Magrittes painting of the pipe we had seen in class where it was technically not a pipe, but a painting of a pipe. Using the inference of not being what it actually is helps with interpreting this painting; while it is an eye, it is not really an eye but what the eye sees. In a sense, everything we see is mirrored back to us through our eyes which justifies the title of the work Magritte produced, “The False Mirror.”
A question I have is why Magritte chose to depict the eye this way. Was it Magrittes goal to question the anatomy of an eye? The lack of eye lashes on the eye is also questionable.