162

  • Le Fils de L'homme (The Son of Man)

  • 1964
  • René Magritte (Belgian 1898-1967)
  • Twenty-color lithograph on Velin paper, printed by Mourlot of Paris
  • 48.0 x 35.0 cm., 18-7/8 x 13-9/16" image
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase with assistance from the Augustana College Art Museum, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2010.24

Essay by Patricia Shea, Professor Emerita of Education

Whenever I see The Son of Man by René Magritte, I immediately think of the remake of the film: The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). For his personal amusement, a wealthy financier steals a painting by Claude Monet from a New York museum. At the end of the film, Crown connived the return of the painting to the museum by befuddling police and an insurance investigator with a decoy. During museum hours, a hundred or so men arrive at the museum dressed as Thomas Crown dressed, in the attire of Magritte's The Son of Man. During the film, that painting was also spotlighted adorning Crown's residence. Everyone was carrying briefcases; only Crown's contained the Monet. When he deposited the Monet back in the museum and walked away, he became invisible by blending into the hundred others dressed in the black topcoat and bowler hat.

How is it that an extravagantly wealthy man steals? How is it everyone can look the same and yet everyone is different? How is it that a self-portrait doesn't portray the face of the self? These are some contradictions that, in the film, Magritte's painting evokes. I suspect Magritte would have been pleased with the use of his painting in that film. As a Surrealist inspired by the unsettling images of Giorgio de Chirico (web gallery 159 & 160), Magritte similarly created seemingly realistic scenarios that somehow contradict rational reads. Contradictions, juxtapositions, ambiguities all deepen the exploration of mystery. "I have painted a thousand paintings but I have only created a hundred or so images. These thousand paintings only come from variants of those images which I have painted; it is a way to better define mystery, to better possess it," Magritte stated (Mundy 411-412).

Philosopher-theologian John O'Donohue invites us to celebrate the contradictions we find in ourselves. He says that they provide the rubbing stones that spark the fires of creative exploration of mystery and the inner landscape of the soul. Magritte's painting invites us to do that; to delve deeply and ask: Who is the real self? Is it what I see or what I don't see? Am I like everyone else? Am I different from everyone else? To each question, Mystery answers Yes!