The Human Condition by René Magritte, 1933. Oil on Canvas, 39 in × 32 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
This is one of a number of paintings by Magritte that focus on what lies behind the painting. Magritte said about the painting:
In front of a window seen from inside a room, I placed a painting representing exactly that portion of the landscape covered by the painting. Thus, the tree in the picture hid the tree behind it, outside the room. For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape.1
Which is how we see the world, namely, outside of us; although having only one representation of it within us. Similarly we sometimes remember a past event as being in the present. Time and space lose meaning and our daily experience becomes paramount.
Questions such as ‘What does this picture mean, what does it represent?’ are possible only if one is incapable of seeing a picture in all its truth, only if one automaically understands that a very precise image does not show precisely what it is. It’s like believing that the implied meaning (if there is one?) is worth more than the overt meaning. There is no implied meaning in my paintings, despite the confusion that attributes symbolic meaning to my painting.
How can anyone enjoy interpreting symbols? They are ‘substitutes’ that are only useful to a mind that is incapable of knowing the things themselves. A devotee of interpretation cannot see a bird; he only sees it as a symbol. Although this manner of knowing the ‘world’ may be useful in treating mental illness, it would be silly to confuse it with a mind that can be applied to any kind of thinking at all.2
Magritte was heavily influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, who proposed that humans can rationalize situations but can not comprehend the “things-in-themselves.” As it applies to Magritte’s work, he is simply creating a variation upon his over-arching philosophy: A painting of a scene is not the same as a scene. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
Magritte plays with this philosophy by exploiting the flatness of two-dimensional space in his painting by depicting three-dimensional space outside and a two-dimensional painting that have the same imagery. The title refers to the inherent grappling that all humans go through when viewing his mind-bending painting.