The Human Condition

René Magritte's paintings raise philosophical questions about the nature of representation and reality. Of course all art inherently concerns such questions, but few artists have been as overt in addressing them. A case in point is Magritte's La condition humaine (1933), a painting I have long found fascinating. What is the human condition that it purports to reveal?

René Magritte, La condition humaine, 1933

At first glance it is a reassuringly straightforward example of a familiar genre, the landscape, albeit a rather dull landscape. But the more we look, the more unsettling the painting becomes. The scene is enlivened its being viewed through a window, and further by what appears to be a 'joke': part of the landscape is obscured by a canvas on which is painted in meticulous and realistic detail that portion of the landscape it hides from direct view. Or does it? There is no way of telling what is really behind the canvas: there may be a cottage, or a family enjoying a picnic, or a flock of sheep.

Even supposing the canvas accurately represents what it obscures, it soon becomes clear that the whole is an impossibility. The canvas is an absurdity. It only works from one precise angle: imagine being able to shift our perspective slightly, and what this would do to the alignment of canvas and landscape. Furthermore, it only works at one precise moment in time—the exact second that the clouds form the arrangement we see. The absurdity, of course, is the idea that a painter could depict the clouds exactly as they would be arranged at some point in the future.

By teasing us with a realism that under closer examination becomes transparently artificial and impossible, Magritte explodes the whole notion of realism in art. There is always a gap between reality and representation, and no matter how hard we try we can never close that gap. The world as it is and the world as we see it are two different things; the human condition, Magritte's painting tells us, is that we are forever denied grasping the former.

There is a further way in which La condition humaine plays with the problem of reality and representation. When we look out onto the countryside we describe what we see as a landscape, and may also consider it beautiful; an artist may even want to paint this landscape. It becomes ordered in our minds, and possibly on a canvas too, as a landscape and possibly as something of beauty. But as Simon Schama, with reference to La condition humaine, argues in Landscape and Memory (1995): 'What lies beyond the windowpane of our apprehension... needs a design before we can properly discern its form.' (p. 12) Landscape and beauty are simply our projections of order and ideas, our way of making sense of what we see. Magritte's painting comments on the way we look at the world: we see it not as it is but artificially as if on a canvas. Landscapes and beauty exist in the mind, not in nature.