“For me, Art evokes mystery without which the world would not exist.” – René Magritte
La condition humaine (The Human Condition)
René Magritte
1933
Oil on canvas, 100 x 81
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
René Magritte
1933
Oil on canvas, 100 x 81
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
“The problem of the window gave rise to ‘The Human Condition’. In front of a window seen from the inside of a room, I placed a picture representing exactly the section of the landscape hidden by the picture. The tree represented in the picture therefore concealed the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room in the picture and, at the same time, conceptually outside in the real landscape. This is how we see the world. We see it as being outside ourselves, and yet it is only a mental representation of it that we experience is inside us. Similarly, we sometimes place in the past something which is happening in the present. In this case, time and space lose that crude meaning which is the only one they have in everyday experience.”
(René Magritte, from a lecture in Antwerp, November 1938)
(René Magritte, from a lecture in Antwerp, November 1938)
Arguably one of the most distinctive, insightful and yet relatively less celebrated painters of the Surrealist movement, René Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898. Magritte is a Surrealist painter, although judging by the apparent simplicity, or straightforward facade of most of his pieces, this is not the impression the average person would derive from looking at his work. However, an analytical interpretative study of his work would reveal that there are profound insights lurking within the soft subdued intricacies of Magritte’s style.
Surrealists were generally very concerned with calling forth, drawing upon and taking apart a priori assumptions about the depiction of reality. Magritte might be said to be a Surrealist, but he himself did not choose to label himself so. It might be for good reason: Jacques Meuris says that for Surrealists, the key belief was that art was a form of escape, but for Magritte it was “a form of thought”, an expression of the curious nature of the world and what reality places on the table. Magritte chose to become a “realistic painter”, one for whom reality is the best medium for “turning convention on its head and transforming it into an enigma and, at the same time, revealing to the greatest degree possible the mystery that it contains with it.”[1]
Magritte’s brand of Surrealism is exceptionally steeped in subtlety, hidden meanings and an understated depiction of the element of enigma, compared to the wilder works of his more quixotic contemporaries such as Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. The Surreal nature of Magritte’s work bases itself on the idea that nothing is as it appears to be, that what exposes can conceal, and vice versa, and that the most mundane objects and images can have profound significance. Viewing a Magritte work, a systematic thought process is kick-started in the viewer’s mind. Moving through the picture, absorbing what is displayed, we move from passive viewing to an active engagement with the picture and its inherent meaning as we start to question the incongruities presented in the artwork, and the reality of what we perceive. By presenting in calculated juxtapositions things which to the uncritical eye appear normal or unremarkable, Magritte’s paintings reveals the absurdity of what appears ‘normal’, and the ability that images have to mislead, conceal and reveal, sometimes all at the same time.
In most of his art, Magritte shows a keen preoccupation with the malleability of our perceptions of reality, as well as the fallibility of art as a representation of reality, and among all of his pieces that relate to these ideas, it could be said The Human Condition is the most definitive piece of his which effectively epitomises them. This essay will describe the history behind the painting and explore interpretations of The Human Condition, highlighting the ways in which it may be used to represent or typify the most outstanding characteristics and themes of Magritte’s body of work.
While the painting appears simplistic on first sight due to the ordinary, unremarkable outdoor images of the sky and the calm sea, it is the juxtaposition of these images with an easel depicting exactly the same image that catches the eye. It plays upon the viewer’s preconceived perceptions of reality and representations of reality in art, an effect that most of Magritte’s work achieves.
The idea for La condition humaine has its origins in a previous painting by Magritte entitled La belle captive (The fair captive, Fig 1). Apart from the similarity in medium – both are oil paintings on canvas – the similarity in motifs is evident: the idea of concealment of one image by another. In both cases, the object that conceals the landscape is a canvas, which, ironically, is conventionally acknowledged as a medium through which images and ideas and revealed. In these paintings the canvas reveals, or appears to reveal, with keen accuracy, the very backdrop which it conceals.
Fig 1
La belle Captive
René Magritte
1931
oil on canvas
Hogarth Galleries, Sydney
La belle Captive
René Magritte
1931
oil on canvas
Hogarth Galleries, Sydney
La Condition Humaine is a development of La belle captive. The latter forms the underlying design for the former. This was revealed by transmitted light and infra-red photographs taken by the National Gallery of Art, showing that Magritte started out by incorporating part of that image into La Condition Humaine. What makes it different is that the easel in the later painting is indoors, including the depiction of a window, and the philosophical implications of this are notable.
In the earlier part of 1933 Magritte developed an interested in creating images by seeking out ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ posed by a given type of object. In the case of La condition humaine he deals with the problem of the window: its ability to reveal and conceal, and we may go so far as to say that this painting blurring the notions of ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ spaces, which meet and create a unusual perception of reality, unsettling in its inconsistency.
In a letter to Andre Breton in the summer of 1934 Magritte shares that “the scene behind the picture is different from what is visible, but the essential point was to abolish the difference between a view seen from outside a room from that seen from the inside. Although this was not my intention, the picture corresponds to a much older preoccupation: to find, in space, a phenomenon analogous to that of ‘false recognition’.”[2]
In AM Hammacher’s hefty analysis of Magritte’s work in Magritte, he postulates that the window, “which has played a role in painting since German Romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich up to Matisse, had the significance of the eye in the body – which is the house, and from which one observes and experiences the world.” [3]
Meuris picks up on Hammacher’s mention of German Romantics in René Magritte, shedding light on how that movement was related to Magritte. Meuris references Roland Recht, who explains that Friedrich Schlegel, one of the founders of the Romantic School in Germany, was concerned with “the problematic nature of windows as deriving from their situation between the landscape and the person regarding it.” [4] which is an issue that is reflected in The Human Condition, where Magritte sought to figure out the problem of the window in his own way. It is notable that slightly more than a hundred years prior to Magritte’s La Condition humaine, a very similar painting was created by the Dutch Romantic painter Bartholomew Johannes van Hove; namely Garden in the Hague (1828, oil on canvas, The Hague, Gremeentenmuseum)
Hammacher picks up on the significance of the curtains depicted in the painting, deducing that “... Magritte ... is the ‘curtain man’. Stripped of all support and logic that is usually provided by the windows and rooms which they serve, Magritte’s curtains are the final relics, like the balustrades, like the window and door frames, which provide a link with the interior.” The curtains effectively act as a transition point between levels of reality: that of what is perceived to be the outside world, and that of the inner world. Hammacher sees the red curtains as a representation of “the mental and emotional tension trigged by the dual image”; they appear to tremble with unease at the unfixed, layered nature of reality.
This unsettling effect is compounded by the colours used: complementary contrast of red and green is balanced by blue and yellow. The red shades appear stronger, somewhat more of an aggressive impact than the rest. It brings, according to Siegfried Gohr, an “unpleasant burning hotness into the colour chord, not only in the curtains but also in the reflections on the details of the easel.”[5]
Another notable feature is the way the landscape as presented on the canvas seems real, and yet Magritte imbues it with a sense of transparency, the resulting effect of which exists in the mind, because the landscape on the canvas actually obscures the “real” landscape in the background of the work. We may interpret this as reflecting the illusory nature of any form of expression: art, writing, performance or even everyday speech can only represent a portion of the authentic, vast landscape of our souls. Ultimately, any form of representation, whilst possessing the potential to reveal and convey authentic reality to a certain limited extent, also conceals a lot of the reality it appears to reveal. This is a theme that forms a vital undercurrent that runs through most of Magritte’s work.
The title of the work is noteworthy; by referring to such a broad, abstract concept as the “human condition” it hits directly upon the profundity of the philosophical nature of this piece, automatically inviting the viewer, being a member after all of the human race, to find a relatable, personable stance with which to view the piece and consider his or her existence. The use of such a title highlights the close relationship humans have with the paradoxes of representation and reality, which is a constant aspect of the “human condition”.
In remarks regarding the painting Magritte has also given us the following note that might encourage us to draw further interpretive insights: “There exists a secret affinity between certain images; the affinity also exists between the objects represented by the images.” [6]
Picking up from this idea, we may observe that the canvas might be seen as a metaphor for a window. It is, in other words, a window to the world, that an artist may use to present a representation of reality. After all, similar to a work of art, a window serves as a reflection of life and reality only as far as its borders allow; it is only a representation of a part of reality, and we are limited in our ability to perceive anything beyond its perimeter. We may go so far as to extend this metaphor, by suggesting that the window is also a metaphor for the average human’s perception and understanding of reality. It represents the ultimately limited view we have in several aspects of life: the mind, fate, spirituality, science, among others, and effectively brings across the message that what we think we know to be true or real may be a very small fragment of a mere imitation of reality itself, which is thus revealed to be copiable, and beyond the grasp of human understanding. This insight could hence provide the link between the title and the heavily metaphorical and layered artwork.
Magritte extends the complexity of these relationships between the images (the “affinity between images”) further in The Key to The Fields (Fig 2), which depicts an apparently shattered window pane, but the incongruous feature of this painting is the fragments of landscape visible through the ‘glass’ of the broken shards.
Fig 2
The Key to the Fields. La Clef de champs
René Magritte
1936
oil on canvas
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain.
The Key to the Fields. La Clef de champs
René Magritte
1936
oil on canvas
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain.
Magritte depicts the impossible here, highlighting the paradoxes of representation and the deceptiveness of the apparent realism of the painting. He hence effectively conveys what each of his pieces intends: a sense of mystery, of the unknown and unknowable, delving beyond logic and sense into the broader reaches of the imagination. Magritte himself remarked on the painting, “if what is at least possible should truly happen one day, I would hope that a poet or a philosopher ... would explain to me what these shards of reality are supposed to mean.”
In conclusion, La condition humaine, as well as numerous other ‘window’ or ‘extended canvas’ paintings and art pieces by Magritte, such as Les promenades D'eulicid (Where Eulicid Walked) (1955), Profoundeurs de la Terre (The Depths of the Earth) (1930), La cascade (The Waterfall) (1961) and Le soir qui tombe (Evening falls) (1964), to name but a few of several, have the potential to provide endless philosophical and psychological insight, regarding the illusory nature of reality and perception as well as the deceptiveness of images and the inability to fully understand what truly can never be knowable; these ideas being the key underlying threads of Magritte’s entire work, they are effectively embodied by these series of exquisitely intriguing and enchanting pieces.
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Bibliography
Gohr, Siegfried. Magritte: Attempting the Impossible. New York, NY: D.A.P./Distributed Art, 2009. Print.
Sylvester, David, and Sarah Whitfield. René Magritte Catalogue Raisonne Volume II; Oil Paintings and Objects 1931-1948. Vol. 2. Antwerp, Belgium: Mercatorfonds, 1993. Print.
Meuris, Jacques. René Magritte, 1898-1967. Köln, Germany: Benedikt Taschen, 1991. Print.
Hammacher, Abraham Marie. Magritte. New York: Abradale, 1995. Print.
Berger, John. "Magritte and the Impossible." Selected Essays. Ed. Geoff Dyer. New York: Vintage, 2003. Print.
[2] Sylvester, David, and Sarah Whitfield. Rene Magritte Catalogue Raisonne Volume II; Oil Paintings and Objects 1931-1948. Vol. 2. Antwerp, Belgium: Mercatorfonds, 1993. Print.
[5] Gohr, Siegfried. Magritte: Attempting the Impossible. New York, NY: D.A.P./Distributed Art, 2009. Print.
[6] Gohr, Siegfried. Magritte: Attempting the Impossible. New York, NY: D.A.P./Distributed Art, 2009. Print.
(originally written 20 September 2011)
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