La Condition Humaine, Rene Magritte, 1933
Dear friend,
The other day I was at the National Gallery of Art and I saw this painting for the first time – or perhaps it was just the first time I paid attention to it. It’s apparently one of four that Magritte made with the same title, all showing similar themes of a canvas in front of nature. Admittedly I didn’t really care for the look of it (there were plenty of other paintings that I liked better) but it stood out to me because it felt so instantly, undeniably, impossibly about instagram, or social media, or any of the other ways we try to photograph and document our lives.
It’s probably too easy and simple to say “there’s nothing new under the sun” even if it is true, but something about the whole combination of elements felt prescient: the beautiful view of nature, the perfect replica of it on the canvas, the canvas blocking the view so that it becomes the new object of adoration in lieu of the actual scene. Seeing it, I thought of a night just a few days prior when I’d climbed a hill in the neighborhood across the street and seen a sunset so spectacular it made my heart ache. I wanted to soak the purity of the orange and pink and twilight purple straight into my bones. But I also felt the itch to photograph it. My fingers actually twitched a little, already rehearsing the familiar motions of unlocking my phone screen. Even knowing a camera couldn’t capture the density of the beauty, I wanted to do what I could to keep the sky with me. I resisted ultimately because I didn’t want to slide a phone between me and the horizon, but it was hard to accept the idea that there was nothing more to do with beauty than to let it pass in front of me, while I witnessed it.
It feels so deeply human to me to block one’s own window with an attempt to replicate what’s outside it. To want to hold on to the precise beauty of the moment – the shape of the clouds, the light on the leaves, the way it makes you feel to see it. To want to make a piece of nature’s beauty that you get to keep forever. Instagram made it easy, but perhaps we have always tried to hold on to what we find beautiful, and in the process, stop seeing it. La condition humaine.
So, a very tidy analysis. Though as it turns out, of course, the painting is actually more about what’s real and what’s false, and how we let our interpretation of that get in the way of really seeing. Or at least, that’s the sense that I get. Magritte wrote a somewhat inscrutable letter about it that I could only partially follow. We’re led to assume the painter of the in-picture canvas has captured a perfect likeness of the world outside the window – the lone tree, the dark hedges, the dirt path, the grass – because the landscape blends so seamlessly at the edges. But because we can’t see what’s behind, we actually can’t know what the painter sees, and if the canvas is telling truth or fiction. The painter has interpreted the scene out the window, and we in turn are interpreting his interpretation, which is of course mediated by Magritte, who put the thing on canvas.
Magritte knows our minds want to build a story about the painting based on what details he’s given us; we want to say what is real and what is false. But the joke is hidden in plain sight – after all, it’s a painting of a painting. All of it is false, all fabrication, and none of it is somehow more or less fake than the rest of it. As the National Gallery of Art suggests, perhaps this is actually the human condition he was alluding to in the title: the endless desire to analyze, to the detriment of witnessing things as they are.
And so of course, Magritte has the last laugh. I saw the painting and thought it was an eerily prescient social commentary. Yet in thinking about what the painting means – about what’s real or false, what’s really going on, “what it’s all about” – I let interpretation get the best of me. As it turns out, I didn’t really see the painting. It was just a painting. All fabrication. But very true.
749 words, Day 1/10
Ana Olson 