René Magritte

Iolas Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist in March 1957)
Mary and Leigh Block, Illinois (acquired from the above)
Art Institute of Chicago (acquired as a gift from the above in 1988)

Dallas, Museum of Contemporary Art; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, René Magritte in America, 1960-61, no. 63

Art Institute of Chicago Annual Report, Chicago, 1987-88, p. 71
David Sylvester (ed.), René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-1967, vol. III, London, 1993, no. 846, illustrated p. 264

La double vue depicts the most famous image in Magritte’s oeuvre, the man in the bowler hat.  He first appeared as a secondary character in the artist’s work as early as the 1920s, but Magritte did not develop him into a subject of singular importance until the latter half of his career. In these pictures, he is consistently portrayed wearing a dark suit and simple bowler hat, the typical attire of a European bureaucrat.  In the 1950s and 1960s, this impassive figure appeared in countless situations:  with an apple suspended before his face, obscuring his identity; fossilized into ageless blocks of stone; rendered wholly or partially transparent; depicted alone or in an infinite number raining down from the heavens; and, as with the present work from 1957, standing before a landscape.  Although he is portrayed as an anonymous figure in these compositions, the man in the bowler hat is understood to be a representation of the artist himself (see fig. 1) and is regarded as one of the most iconic images of 20^th century art.   

Since the figure appears so frequently in Magritte’s compositions and without any indication of a response to his environment, it would be difficult to claim that the man with the bowler hat is actually contemplating the sight before him.  Suzi Gablik has offered the following interpretation of this character:  “Magritte was the most paradoxical of all the Surrealists.  Where the others deliberately created scandal in life, he tried to remain outwardly inconspicuous…Magritte’s reluctance to draw attention to himself is mirrored in the anonymity of the bowler-hatted man, a theme which developed mostly during his later years, and which has since come to be identified with himself.  The bowler-hatted man is rather like Ulrich in Robert Musil’s long novel, The Man Without Qualities; he has given up his ‘qualities’ as a man might give up the world.  Magritte’s bowler-hatted man is more like a figure in a book than a human being, he seems to live the history of ideas rather than the history of the world…Impassive and aloof, he fixes the world in his gaze, but often his face is turned from view, dislocated, or otherwise concealed or obliterated by objects, as if expressing a universal disinclination, for which there exists no complementary inclination" (Suzi Gablik, Magritte, Greenwich, 1970, pp. 154-156).

In accordance with his objectives as a Surrealist, Magritte generally added disquieting elements to his pictures in order to challenge the viewer’s understanding of the scene at hand. The somber image of the man in the bowler hat seen from behind is deliberately mysterious, particularly as the artist provides no explanation of the character’s purpose.   Around the time that he completed La double vue, the artist also executed three related works (Sylvester 837, see fig. 2; 838 and 839) in which random images are superimposed on the upper body of the figure, heightening the sense of the uncanny.  But here, Magritte leaves the torso of the figure unobstructed and carries out his Surrealist objective in a wholly new way. Positioned in front of a placid landscape, the man holds up a rose in his right hand, investing the otherwise dispassionate scene with an element of tenderness.  Magritte had used the image of a man holding a rose in two of his satirical vache works from 1948 (Sylvester 645, see fig. 3, and 1265), but its use in these pictures was more ironic than unsettling.  In the present work, the man’s firm and emphatic clenching of the flower between his two figures appears abrupt and punctuates the scene with an unexpected force of life.

In his monograph on the artist, David Sylvester provides a poetic analysis that captures the destabilizing beauty of these pictures: “Magritte wanted his pictures to be looked at, not looked into, wanted their mystery to be confronted, not interpreted, seeing it as the revelation of a mystery latent in all things, a revelation to be consummated [….] through presenting everyday things or beings in an alternative way to how they appear every day, though it is not necessarily the pictures in which the alternatives are most surprising that induce the sort of awe felt in the presence of an eclipse" (David Sylvester, Magritte, The Silence of the World, New York, 1992, p. 318).

Fig. 1, The artist with his bowler hat, date unknown.  Photograph by Michael Cooper.

Fig. 2, René Magritte, Le Bouquet tout fait, 1956, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Fig. 3, René Magritte, Le Psychologue, 1947, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Fig. 4, The artist holding a rose, date unknown.  Photograph by Michael Cooper.