The Painting The Son of Man by Rene Magritte

The Son of Man -1964

The Son of Man (1964) was painted by Rene Magritte as a method of depicting the real and hidden about human nature. The picture shows an apple covering a man’s face with his eyes sticking out over the apple watching the world. The left arm of the man bends backwards from the elbow creating an unnatural body position. The sea in the back and the half height wall all help to draw attention to the absurd. The picture being absurd only because we cannot understand what the purpose is of something so blatantly in front of us and designed to block our complete understanding.

The picture draws us to try and see the face so that we can recognize who it is even though it has been confirmed to by the author to be a self-portrait.  The apple being an apparent distortion of that recognition that creates a level of frustration and conflict for the viewer. There is almost a desire to knock the apple away to see who it is that is peering out over the top. This frustration draws us to look for other clues in the painting leading us to the half wall, the sea, and the clouds. None of these appear to provide any apparent meaning. Yet they do create a context for the work once its meaning has been discovered.

Some have argued that the apple is a sign of human nature and that it is difficult for people to truly understand and recognize that nature. The apple being from the original sin of man spawning from the Garden of Eden while the blue ocean coming from heavenly divinity. In the picture it is possible that the sight and nature of man is obscured from divinity.  This could be one of the reasons why it is labeled “Son of Man”.

 According to Rene Magritte in a 1965 radio discussion he states, “At least it (the apple) hides the face partly. Well, so 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.”

According to this concept there is always something new behind what is apparently in front of our face. What we see is not always all there is in life or all that we need to know. That we keep seeking what is hidden from use in order to understand its nature and the nature of ourselves. Those things that block our sight create the frustration of not being able to see and remove those objects that hinder our understanding. Is this the nature of man? Is this the nature of original sin? Certainly one could make the argument that the nature of man and his apparent ability to sin obscures our view of the world and divinity.

Whatever conclusion scholars and lay people come to it is apparent that the painting helps us feel something that draws our interest. This is the very point of Rene Magritte and other surrealist painters. Such painters view their paintings and writings as a philosophical movement with the actual artistic works being artifacts of that effort. Originally based in Paris France the war scattered the artists which spread their work into varying industries. In modern times we can see their works in movies, music, and other popular cultural expressions.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory 1931

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali in 1931 represents a surrealist perspective of deep understandings of the nature of the universe. The painting is more than meets the eye and much deeper than its first impression. Even though the work was started from watching melting cheese it is also a deeply moving unconscious experience. The painter and his work were part of a movement that delved beneath the human psyche and tried to project that understanding for others to ponder the complex nature of human experience. 

The melting watches were representations of the continuum of space and time and the melting cosmic order. Time is relative to activity in the environment. If everything within the environment is moving fast while the object is moving slow, time will seeming slower than if an object speeds up and the environment lags in speed, then time is condensed. The creature in the picture represents the fading of images in dreams that we have a hard time formulating an understanding of and the ants represent the eventual death of time. Wow! I bet you didn’t expect all that!

It is possible to see the picture as an impression of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. All things in the universe are relative to everything else thereby creating a cosmic order. Even though we may have thought of riding the moonbeam as pure fantasy we soon learn in history that Einstein was correct. The universe is a machine of order with subsequent rules and laws that govern its existence. It is possible to move faster than the moonbeam. As with all genius, others have a hard time following their train of thought and simply consider such inventions and works as irrational only because they are unable to learn all of the pieces that make such far reaching constructions possible. As Louis Aragon stated, “We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.”

The Persistence of Memory painting is part of the surrealism era of deeper human thought. Surrealism is a revolutionary movement springing from WWI and the 1920’s. It origin was out of Paris France and spread throughout Europe and the United States Accordingly. The art is expected to be shocking and represent the philosophical, social theory, and science of the era. Freud’s work of dream interpretation and free association became a cornerstone of the movement. The works of art were representations of realities that are perceived both collectively and individually. Many famous artists met in coffee shops and joined the movement because of its rich and vivid impressions.

Salvador Dali was born in 1904 and died in 1989. His surrealist works were attributed to an influence of the Renaissance masters. Dali was of Arab Moorish background but loved things of Western excess and luxury. He was born in Empordà region in Spain, which is near France, accepting both Eastern and Western traditions. He had an interest in mathematics, natural science and infractions of light which he incorporated into his works.