Artwork Page for The Human Condition

Details / Information for The Human Condition

The Human Condition

1945

René Magritte

(Belgian, 1898–1967)
Culture
Belgium, 20th century
Medium
watercolor, crayon over graphite, ink and gouache
Measurements
Sheet: 42.2 x 32.2 cm (16 5/8 x 12 11/16 in.)
Credit Line
Bequest of Lockwood Thompson 1992.274
Copyright
© C. Herscovici / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
This artwork is known to be under copyright.
Location
Not on view
Print
?

Did You Know?

During World War II, when this drawing was made, René Magritte focused on beauty in contrast to the chaos of the time and favored calm scenes and light colors in his work.

Description

This drawing belongs to a series in which René Magritte depicted an easel before a window. Each features a canvas that exactly replicates the landscape beyond it, inviting questions about the boundaries between art and reality. Magritte juxtaposed a highly realistic style and unexpected imagery to evoke the subconscious and question the experience of time and space. Of his Human Condition series, he wrote that he wanted to place the viewer “inside the room in the picture and, at the same time, conceptually outside in the real landscape.”
Watercolor overlaid with crayon depicting an easel placed in front of a window, the canvas on it lining up with the view outside of a beach with a mountain to the right. The painting lines up exactly with this view save for the fine lines defining the edges of it, the white right edge of the canvas visible. On the canvas, a white sphere has been painted on the yellow-orange sand of the beach.

The Human Condition

1945

René Magritte

(Belgian, 1898–1967)
Belgium, 20th century

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