It is hardly noticeable at first glance, but upon closer inspection, viewers can see that the man’s left elbow faces the wrong way. Dressed in an overcoat and bowler hat – the bowler hat making constant appearances in Magritte’s work, as well as possibly alluding to his political leanings towards the Communist party – the man seems out of place in a casual setting. Although the sky above him is cloudy, sunlight is suggested by the slight shadows on the man’s left side. In The Son of Man, we see a man standing in front of a seaside landscape. He found it difficult to paint a self-portrait in the traditional fashion, so he leaned more towards the surrealist style, finding self-portraits to be a “problem of conscience.” Magritte was commissioned to paint a self-portrait in 1963, and so he began to work on The Son of Man. © CHARLY HERSCOVICI, BRUSSELS / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK The Son of Man: What is it and what does it mean? René Magritte, Son of Man, 1964 oil on canvas. It was during this period he experienced his greatest critical and commercial successes, with a number of retrospectives being dedicated to his work. In 1948, Magritte reverted to the surrealism style he had explored before WWII.
Magritte portrayed this crudeness through his pieces, and as he predicted, they were not well-received. It was named his “vache period” because in French vache means cow, or in this context, an excessively large woman or lazy person. Towards the end of the war, Magritte abandoned the impressionist style, marking the start of his “vache period.” In stark contrast to the cheerful, colorful paintings he had produced during the war, these artworks were angular, dark and provocative, inspired by Fauve in their execution. “The sense of chaos, of panic, which Surrealism hoped to foster so that everything might be called into question was achieved much more successfully by those idiots the Nazis… Against widespread pessimism, I now propose a search for joy and pleasure.” The outbreak of WWII inspired his Renoir period, where Magritte adopted a colorful style in opposition to the chaos and destruction of the war. While Paris gave him inspiration to complete works such as The Lovers and the Treachery of Images, he failed to make a lasting impact on the arts scene and moved back to Brussels in 1930. The critics’ reaction to his show influenced his move to Paris, where he met fellow surrealists Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Max Ernst. Magritte held his first solo exhibition in 1927, but was left desolate when art critics showed a strong dislike for his work. This painting portrays a jockey riding through a landscape that appears to be on a stage, with curtains on either side and wooden floorboards visible under the horse’s feet. While he was working as a draftsman in a wallpaper factory, he began to experiment with surrealism, producing his first surrealist work The Lost Jockey. Magritte and SurrealismĪlthough Magritte began his artistic career creating impressionist pieces, he truly excelled at creating witty, thought-provoking works in a surrealist style. Singulart will be exploring the theories behind the meaning of The Son of Man, as well as Magritte’s history with surrealism and his impact on popular culture. As one of the most recognizable paintings of the surrealist movement, the painting is both simplistic and ambiguous, with the meaning left to the interpretation of the viewer. It seems that Hitler was unable to hide his sociopathic tendencies in his art, even as a young man, long before the dictator’s true evil manifested itself.The Son of Man is a 1964 surrealist self-portrait by Belgian artist René Magritte. The critic, according to Spotts, first noted that the paintings were “quite good.” The critic went on to point out how the human subjects were depicted and stated that the artists “displayed disinterest in the human race.” In Spotts’ book, he points out that Hitler had a small talent toward artistic endeavors but lacked technique and failed to evoke passion in his paintings. He wrote about the results of this experiment in his 2003 book, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. Spotts asked the critic for a thorough and honest critique of the paintings.
In 2002, author Frederic Spotts showed an anonymous art critic several of Adolf Hitler’s paintings without telling the critic who the author was. A picture taken on Februshows the signature A Hitler on a watercolour entitled "Im Wald" (In the forest) Source: (Photo by DANIEL KARMANN AFP) (Photo credit should read DANIEL KARMANN/AFP/Getty Images)