René Magritte’s the Son of Man: An Interpretation of Its Meaning
The painting is one of the most iconic artworks of the Surrealist movement.
Commissioned in 1963 to create a self-portrait, Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte—after running into a “problem of conscience” in painting his own image—finished the masterpiece that is The Son of Man.
The painting portrays a nondescript man wearing an overcoat with a red tie along with a bowler hat. He stands in front of a low stone wall, beyond which lie the sea and dark, cloudy skies above.
Nothing out of the ordinary—if not for the green apple that is seemingly floating in front of the man’s face. A less striking detail is that the man’s left arm appears to be bent backwards at the elbow.
Speaking about the painting, Magritte says that it’s a depiction of human desire and the conflict between what is visible and what is not.
At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, [and] 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.
—René Magritte
Magritte also created other paintings along a similar theme: The Great War depicts a woman in white with her face obscured by a flower, and Man in a Bowler Hat again depicts a man in a bowler hat, but this time his face is obscured by a bird in mid-flight.
Understanding Magritte’s divergent brand of Surrealism
Surrealism is influenced by and plays on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic methods and theory of the subconscious, which the artists of this movement employed in developing techniques to liberate imagination.
Hence, many of them, such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, elected to paint dreamscapes and seemingly random, illogical imagery that contrast against reality and the world we live in—resulting in a jarring experience that immediately throws us off when viewing the artworks.
René Magritte, however, went against the grain.
His style is, ironically, a deliberate lack of style. Using sterile and stylistically neutral techniques, he believed that style would only distract the viewer from the meaning of the work. He chose to depict flat, commonplace scenes—juxtaposed against an irrationality.
Because of this, the illustrative quality of his artworks often leads to a powerful paradox: images that carry clarity and simplicity, yet mystery and intricacy as well. The visual non sequiturs—a conclusion that does not logically follow from its premises—provoke a disorientating feeling and lure the viewer’s mind to keep trying to make sense of what is being seen.
Coming back to the Son of Man, you can see how the iconic painting is unquestionably Magritte: your attention is tethered to the man’s face, even though—or perhaps all the more because—it is obscured.
Magritte is interested in exploring our desire to see what is hidden. Like many of his images, the Son of Man alerts viewers to that desire and to how our perceptions shape our understandings and experience of the world. It is an endlessly compelling image because it shifts the act of meaning-making back onto the viewer, leaving us to consider whether what we see is concealing something else.
—Lily Pearsall, Curatorial Project Manager at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
What’s in a name? Interpreting “the Son of Man”
Another element of the painting that is commonly brought up when discussing its meaning is its title.
Besides the notion of an anonymous everyman, “the Son of Man” carries biblical implications. Often used in contrast to God and all that is holy and divine, the term is an affirmation of Man and his fallibility—in other words, to err is human.
The first human—and also the first to err—is none other than Adam. In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve committed the original sin when they gave in to temptation, to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, leading to the fall of mankind.
While translations and interpretations of “the knowledge of good and evil” vary, here I will take it to generally represent the interconnected concepts of self-awareness, self-determinism (free will) and the power/burden of choice and judgment—as Man learns to discern for himself the morality of what separates good from evil; right from wrong; and true from false.
Extending this idea to the painting, the apple in the Son of Man is the forbidden fruit that carries with it “the knowledge of good and evil”.
The apple, symbolising subjective perception, is hiding what we can see with our eyes, which is our objective vision. Our very desire to see beyond our own perception is paradoxically preventing us from doing just that.
The juxtaposition of subjectivity (thinking) and objectivity (knowing) blurs the boundaries between imagination and reality. It forces us to question ourselves: What do we think to be true? What do we know to be true? Which is which?
This—perhaps the conflict between the hidden and the present that Magritte spoke about—to me, is the quintessential philosophy behind this art movement, and why the Son of Man is the apotheosis of Surrealism.
What is your interpretation of the Son of Man? Share your responses below, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
