René Magritte Gallery
oil on canvas, 100 x 81 x 1.6 cm (39 3/8 x 31 7/8 x 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Two of Magritte's favored themes were the "window painting" and the "painting within a painting." The Human Condition is one of Magritte's earliest treatments of either subject, and in it he combines the two, making what may be his most subtle and profound statement of their shared meaning.
The Human Condition displays an easel placed inside a room and in front of a window. The easel holds an unframed painting of a landscape that seems in every detail contiguous with the landscape seen outside the window. At first, one automatically assumes that the painting on the easel depicts the portion of the landscape outside the window that it hides from view. After a moment's consideration, however, one realizes that this assumption is based upon a false premise: that is, that the imagery of Magritte's painting is real, while the painting on the easel is a representation of that reality. In fact, there is no difference between them. Both are part of the same painting, the same artistic fabrication. It is perhaps to this repeating cycle, in which the viewer, even against his will, sees the one as real and the other as representation, that Magritte's title makes reference.
viewer |
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| Time Transfixed |
| Voice of Space |
Human Condition |
| Lola de Valence |
| Lovers |
| Perspective |
| Personal Values |
| Son of Man |
| Alice in Wonderland |
| Tower |
Biography
Bulletin Board
Renowned Art
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René was born in Belgium and in 1922 he married Georgette Berger. In 1925, Magritte painted what he considered to be his first major work, in 1927, he held his first one-man show at the Galérie Le Centaure. He toyed with everyday objects, human habits and emotions, placing them in foreign contexts and questioning their familiar meanings. He rehabilitated the object. He made the commonplace profound and the rational irrational. His work goes beyond escapism and serves to reveal some of the murkier and complex aspects of the human condition.
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