René Magritte

The image of the bowler-hatted man is the single most iconic motif of Magritte’s œuvre. It first appeared in his painting of 1926 titled Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Sylvester, no. 124), in which the man is seen from the back, against a dark evening landscape. The idea of multiple renderings of the bowler-hatted man was first developed as early as 1927, in Le Sens de la nuit (fig. 1), and culminated in the celebrated oil version of Golconde of 1953 (fig. 2). Used in a number of paintings and gouaches throughout the artist’s career, the bowler-hatted man appears in various guises. He is sometimes depicted from the back, sometimes from the front, his face obscured by an object placed in front of it (fig. 3), as a dark contour faintly visible against the night sky, or fossilised into a block of stone. Often he is no more than a silhouette, providing a frame in which another subject is depicted. What is common to all of them is the fact that the man remains impersonal, an individual transformed into a universal object. As Suzi Gablik described him: ‘Magritte’s bowler-hatted man is more like a figure in a book than a human being, but a figure with all the inessential elements left out…  passive 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’ (S. Gablik, Magritte, London, 1991, p. 162).


David Sylvester offered his interpretation of this image: ‘It is possible that they are coming down like rain or that they are ascending or that they are going up and down in invisible lifts. I tend to see them as if they were on a parade ground in the air. On other parade grounds, the ranks of men shoulder to shoulder have a reassuring solidarity. Here, where their spacing isolates them, making each one vulnerable, they are as apart as they are alike. Because the dis­tances between them are both uniform and unnaturally wide, it seems unlikely that they would have moved into those positions, seems that they must have been moved (Magritte was addicted to chess). They are stuck there like repetitions of an orna­mental device. In fact, they are parts of a pattern like a wallpaper pattern, infinitely repeatable and extendable. They are a sample of an infinity of identically helpless beings’ (D. Sylvester, ‘Golconde by René Magritte’, in The Menil Collection, A selection from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era (exhibition catalogue), The Menil Collection, Houston, 1987, pp. 216-219).


Magritte himself explained how he arrived at this image: ‘When I was a child and shopping in the city with my parents, the streets were so crowded and claustrophobic that I wondered what would happen if everything were reorganised so that each person had exactly the right amount of living space - a fair share for everyone. There seemed so much room in the air, or across water (all that space taken up by sea, and not lived on!) that it was ludicrous for us all to be cramped into such a relatively tiny area. If you imagine what it would be like to have a world where everyone was neatly arranged with equal space, it would look pretty much like Golconde’ (quoted in ibid.).


The theme of solid objects suspended in space is a recurrent one in Magritte’s art. In no other work, however, has this idea been transformed into such a powerful image as in Golconde. By multiplying the bowler-hatted man across the composition, Magritte emphasises his anonymity and lack of individuality, creating a truly Kafkaesque world. ‘This crucial anonymity is denied by the sort of attempts made to identify the men as civil servants or small-town lawyers or whatever - worst of all, as clones of Magritte himself. The common supposition that any bowler-hatted man painted by Magritte is something of a portrait of the artist gets things the wrong way round. Magritte painted numerous bowler-hatted men - most of them in his last twenty years-without giving one of them features unmistakably his own-this in spite of the fact that several paintings of his demonstrate that he had no inhibitions about clearly portraying his own face when he wanted to. But as Magritte's figure of the bowler-hatted man increased in fame, a tendency arose for photographers to per­suade the artist to pose as a bowler-hatted man - privately his hat was usually a trilby - and it is, of course, the case that nowadays our image of an artist is usually based on what magazine photographs have made of him. So the equation of Ma­gritte with the bowler-hatted man derives not from his own paintings but from other people's photographs (fig. 4) (ibid.).


As was often the case with Magritte’s works, the title was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. David Sylvester explained its meaning: ‘Golconda is a ruined city in southeast India, which from the mid­fourteenth century till the end of the seventeenth was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “a synonym for 'mine of wealth.’”


Fig. 1, René Magritte, Le Sens de la nuit, 1927, oil on canvas, The Menil Collection, Houston


Fig. 2, René Magritte, Golconde, 1953, oil on canvas, The Menil Collection, Houston


Fig. 3, René Magritte, Le Fils de l’homme, 1964, oil on canvas, Private Collection


Fig. 4, René Magritte, 1965 


This work has been requested for the exhibition of gouaches by René Magritte, to be held at the Fondation Dina Vierny, Musée Maillol in Paris from March to June 2006.