The Eternally Obvious by René Magritte, 1948. Oil on canvas in five gold frames, laid on board.
Magritte actually painted the whole woman, then cut up the canvas into the pieces shown. Their arrangement allows the viewer to fill in the missing parts. Magritte’s interest in this time was with apertures - that is the spaces between the pieces we can see.
To perceive a complete nude woman is to experience her as being behind five different rectangular apertures. An alternate construal is that of five paintings of segments of her body hanging in front of a wall. Anything which destroys the organization of aperture interrupts our ability to perceive a whole woman. Filling in and completion become more difficult, even impossible. If we move out of alignment or occlude (with two fingers, for example) any two noncontiguous frameworks, we can no longer organize an aperture and therefore cannot see a complete woman.1
The conflict in the mind between seeing the whole woman, or that parts; the woman obscured, or the woman revealed; the flatness of the painting or three dimensional figures creates what Dalí calls “a mental crisis” in the viewer.2 This type of conflict was paramount in Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method and can be seen in numerous Magritte paintings from this time period.
Fred Halper, “Construals: Perceptual Occlusion in the work of René Magritte,” in “Einstein meets Magritte: An interdisciplinary reflection on science, nature, human action and society,” Klavier (Brussels: Academic Publishers, 1999), 212. ↩
Salvador Dalí, “The Rotting Donkey,” translated by Yvonne Shafir, Oui: The Paranoiac Critical Revolution (Boston: Exact Change, 2004), 115. ↩
