In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that the pure aestheticist ought to play no part in the ideal

society and that, on the contrary, he should be banished from it entirely.1 He justi es his reasoning
on the grounds that the uniquely aesthetic concerns of their poetry, music and painting are at
variance with the unequivocally rational concerns of reason, deeming by way of consequence that
such art forms are incapable of exercising any sort of philosophical role and, therefore, intellectually
meritless. Although eventually contracted so as to exclude literature, the platonic notion that the
non-liberal arts are somehow inherently incompatible with intellectual activity is one that largely
persisted through the Middle Ages: whilst writers were often regarded as being engaged in more
cerebral pursuits, painters and sculptors were seldom seen as little more than talented artisans.
Indeed, the preconception that painting, in particular, constituted an exclusively aesthetic enterprise
divorced from any and all philosophical preoccupation remained prevalent throughout much of the
seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, with the exception of a few solitary outliers
such as, for example, Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656) or Vermeer’s The Music Lesson (1665). All
of this was to change, however, amidst the tumult of an early twentieth century that saw the rise to
prominence of a number of aesthetic-intellectual movements in painting (Cubism, Dada,
Surrealism), as well as the advent of one particular artist whose sworn objective it was to unite
these hitherto mutually exclusive spheres on the surface of the canvas: René Magritte.
Born in Lessines, a small municipality in French-speaking Belgium, in 1898, Magritte took
interest in what he termed the ‘mystery’ of painting from an early age and experimented with
numerous styles before nally settling on the surrealist aesthetic that was later to become so
characteristic of his work. Curiously, once this technique had been decided upon, it evolved very
little over the course of his career — pallid colours, harsh lighting, texturisation, dislocation and
disproportion are just a selection of Magritte’s perennial stylistic tropes. A logical explanation for this
formal stasis may be sought in Magritte’s own conception of the artistic practice: he considered his
paintings not as mere visual ends in and of themselves but, rather, as visual media through which to
convey thoughts, communicate ideas, raise questions and investigate problems. What reason was
there, then, to develop a new style of painting so long as the current one ful lled the function that
was required of it? Indeed, Magritte repeatedly shunned the title of ‘painter’ precisely because of the
obsessive xation with formal innovation that the word implied, preferring instead to be called a
thinker who expressed himself by way of images.2 It is perhaps this distinction, moreover, that best
elucidates the inextricable duality imbedded in his artwork: just as Magritte the thinker cannot be
uncoupled from Magritte the painter, neither can the intellectual content of his paintings be divorced
from its aesthetic packaging, and vice-versa. Far from mutual exclusivity, Magritte believed that the
aesthetic and the intellectual were so interdependent that the one could not possibly exist without
the other and thus, that the act of painting and the act of thinking were not two separate activities
but, rather, one and the same: ‘L’art de peindre est un art de penser’.3
With these introductory remarks in mind, this essay will adopt a two-pronged approach in its
exploration of Magritte’s aesthetic-intellectual dualism. Firstly, we will analyse Magritte’s belief that
painting is above all a cognitive process, as well as how this conviction manifests itself in the way
that he paints, after which we will examine how Magritte uses his paintings as discursive spaces in
which to broach complex intellectual questions whilst also obliging the viewer — by means of his

1Plato, Republic, trans. by John Llewelyn Davies & David James Vaughan (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997),
Books III & X.

2James Harkness, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in This is not a Pipe, Michel Foucault (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983), p. 2

3 René Magritte, Ecrits Complets, ed. by André Blavier (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 273
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 aesthetic practice — to cogitate on these matters, too. In so doing, we will hopefully have gained a
better understanding as to why Magritte’s elusive paintings continue to be the subject of such
spirited intrigue for both aestheticians and philosophers alike.

In the unabridged version of the quotation cited above, Magritte declares: ‘L’art de peindre est un art
de penser, dont l’existence souligne l’importance du rôle tenu dans la vie pour les yeux du corps
humain; le sens de la vue étant en effet le seul qui soit intéressé par un tableau’ (Ecrits Complets,
p. 273). There may be no doubt, then, as to the tripartite relationship that Magritte saw as existing
between the eye, the mind and the act of painting — as far as he was concerned, the link between
all three was direct, natural and incontrovertible. In order to fully comprehend the dynamic of their
relationship, however, we must rst de ne two key terms: la ressemblance and le mystère.
In Magritte’s terminology, la ressemblance does not signify a stable, objective state of
likeness between objects, nor between an object and its depiction but, rather, a spontaneous,
subjective action carried out by the mind. This follows from Magritte’s belief that la pensée — that is,
the mind — is composed of all that which the eye perceives: ‘Thought is what it sees […]. It
becomes what the world offers it’ (Letter to Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, p. 57).4 Therefore, la
ressemblance constitutes a sudden, impromptu act whereby la pensée ‘re-sembles’ — or, in other
words, reconstitutes perceived semblances between — the worldly elements of which it is made,
combining these newly related objects into a certain amalgamation or other so as to evoke what
Magritte termed the ‘mystère’ of the world. Just how he managed to elicit this mystère by means of
an unorthodox aesthetic style will be discussed in the second half of this essay, but for now we may
remark that exposing le mystère constituted the prime ambition of Magritte’s work and it arose any
time that the objects of reality were ‘re-sembled’ by la pensée in such a manner as to unmask their
inherent strangeness, because as Magritte once clari ed in a letter to a companion: ‘Il n’y a pas en
effet des êtres mystérieux et des êtres non-mystérieux. Tous les êtres sont mystérieux’.5
Such, then, are the primary cognitive processes that underlie Magritte’s artistic practice. Yet,
we have thus far said nothing of how the former are so closely related to the latter. With such an
objective in mind, we must rst turn our attention to an understanding of the way in which Magritte
thought. Unlike the poet (who, he believed, thinks in words) and the philosopher (who, he believed,
thinks in ideas), Magritte once remarked in an interview that: ‘Je pense — comme quelques rares
peintres, Chirico, Max Ernst, par exemple — avec des gures visibles’ (Ecrits Complets, p. 632).
That is to say, in Magritte’s case, the amalgamation of objects that results from an incidence of la
ressemblance was not a verbal one, nor a conceptional one, but a pictorial one, and it is for this
reason that many critics, such as A. M. Hammacher and A. R. Greeley, for example, have referred
to his cognitive activity as ‘visual thinking’.
Now, according to Magritte, it was precisely these mental images — the products of la
ressemblance — that ought not just to inspire paintings but, rather, to constitute them, since only
during these eeting moments of ‘la présence imprévisible de l’esprit’ (i.e. la ressemblance) was the

4 This is a concept that would seem to be echoed in Magritte’s 1929 painting, Le faux miroir, where the viewer is
presented with an enormous eye, the iris of which is lled with a luminous, cloud-swept skyscape, as though it were
re ecting that at which it is looking. Notably, however, the retina — the part of the eye that serves as a window to the
interior — appears by comparison a black, circular void, as if the mind had excised and stolen away that portion of the
image in order to store it in its memory bank.

5René Magritte, ‘Lettre à Hornick du 11 mai 1959’, in Les Mots et les images: Choix d’écrits, ed. by Éric Clemens
(Brussels: Labor, 1994), p. 135
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 mind capable of synthesising the relevant objects in just the right way so as to unveil their mystère.6
Hence, the implications of visual thinking become clear: there was no need for what Henri
Rousseau termed ‘illustrative translation’ when it came to Magritte’s artistic practice because the
image had already been ‘painted’, as it were, by the mental act of la ressemblance. As he once
confessed: ‘Je ne peux pas peindre avant d’avoir le tableau entièrement fait dans ma tête’ (Ecrits
Complets, p. 544). Consequently, one cannot describe Magritte’s enterprise as painting so much as
one can call it giving precise physical form to an image that already existed in its entirety — albeit in
the form of a ‘visual thought’ — inside of his head. Indeed, as his close friend, Louis Scutenaire,
concurs: ‘Quand il s’agit de Magritte, il ne s’agit pas tant de peindre que de rendre visibles des
pensées-images’.7
There is no better example of how this intimate bond between thinking and painting is
re ected in Magritte’s work than his 1939 painting: La durée poignardée. In it, the viewer is
presented with an apparently unfurnished dining room, save for a marble mantlepiece out of which
protrudes a locomotive. Now, as is well known, Magritte loathed psychoanalytical interpretations of
his artwork and, accordingly, forbade that they be reduced to mere illustrations of mental
associations. Nevertheless, one cannot but notice the conspicuous intellectual activity that would
appear to underlie the composition of the image and that would seem to refute Magritte’s claim that
the two focal subjects — a replace and a locomotive — share no associative relation whatsoever.8
For instance, the smoke that rises from the locomotive’s chimney is swept backward and
disappears up into the ue of the replace, just as it would do were there a re in the hearth, and its
sooty black exterior recalls not only the coal briquettes that would burn in the replace, but also
those which are presently burning inside the locomotive itself.9 However, not only are these mental
processes evident in the painting, but their presence is in fact reinforced by their aesthetic
presentation. For example, the colours used are exclusively soft, pallid ones, which allows the
central contrast of black and white — respectively, the locomotive and the mantlepiece — to
dominate the painting, thereby further emphasising their incongruous and yet existent relationship
as dictated by la pensée. In addition, the light source — which comes from the top right-hand corner
of the image and is of course laden with all kinds of revelational symbolism — seems to focus
directly on the aperture from which emerges the locomotive, as if to purposely centre the viewer’s
attention on what appears to be the very instant of la ressemblance itself: the moment when a
locomotive suddenly materialises in the hollow of a mantlepiece, just as did an umbrella and a
sewing machine on the Comte de Lautréamont’s dissecting table.
In light of the analysis conducted in this rst part of the essay, it stands quite evident that
René Magritte did indeed equate the art of painting to an art of thinking, both acts being in his mind
not only inseparable the one from the other, but concomitant, interdependent and mutually
contingent, too. Although we have hereinabove demonstrated how this is so, it was perhaps the
artist himself who articulated it most succinctly. When asked in an interview how one could best

6Magritte also referred to these instances of epiphanic clarity as ‘pensée inspirée’, likening them to the ‘Eurêka!’ of
Archimedes.

7René Magritte: Entretien, online video recording, Youtube, 9 April 2013, available at: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=61ZaCUutHnQ > [Accessed 27/02/2017]

8 A. M. Hammacher, René Magritte, trans. by James Brockway (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), p. 24

9There are, of course, many other discernable associations in the paining. Some are obvious: both objects share many
constituent parts such as, for example, a chimney and a hearth. Some are less so: the clock on the mantlepiece may well
be an associate of the ubiquitous train station clock and the oak ooring a descendant of the typically oak furniture found
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describe his paintings, Magritte humbly replied: ‘Ce sont simplement des pensées qui deviennent
visibles’ (Ecrits Complets, p. 544).

Transitioning away at present from Magritte’s belief in the literal equivalence of painting to thinking,
and vice-versa, we will henceforth turn our attention to the second concern of this essay: the way in
which he uses his paintings as a means to engage in intellectual discourse — that is, to express his
thoughts and ideas, to raise questions and to pose philosophical problems — as well as how these
aims are achieved primarily by virtue of his aesthetic practice.
It is certainly no secret that Magritte was well-versed in the principles of philosophy — his
personal library included a number of works by authors such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and
Hegel — and it is a testament to his erudition that many renowned thinkers — Barthes, Foucault,
Derrida and others — have taken pains to fathom his work.10 As Hammacher opines

René Magritte was no doubt disappointed that, aside from a small circle of kindred
spirits among the surrealists, the world needed over a quarter of a century to
discover that his work has both philosophical and poetic content which
corresponds to certain intellectual trends of the twentieth century (p. 7)

One of the most frequent aesthetic tropes that Magritte employs in addressing the philosophical
dilemmata that arose from such intellectual trends is the frame.11 Whether it be a window, a door, a
mirror, the walls of a room or a canvas, frames and framing devices are ubiquitous in Magritte’s
paintings and serve as a ‘frame-work’, as it were, for his visual investigations of conceptual
problems. Perhaps the most well-known of these ‘frame-paintings’ is the 1933 oil-on-canvas
artwork, La condition humaine, which broaches questions relating to reality, representation,
metaphysics and the practice of painting itself. In it, the viewer is presented with a window that
overlooks a bucolic landscape, directly in front of which stands a canvas that — presumably —
depicts precisely that portion of the landscape which it obscures. We may, therefore, immediately
identify at least two frames: the window — already an established symbol of the relationship
between reality and representation in painting and literature — and the canvas — which, according
to André Breton, is itself a type of window.12 As a result of the dialogue between these two frames,
the distinction between reality and illusion becomes somewhat nebulous: does the image on the
canvas truly portray that which it hides? If so, does it represent it accurately? And does the
concealed segment of landscape exist independent of that representation? There is no sure way to
know, but given the uidity of the transfer between the real landscape and the painted one, we
would be inclined to reply in the af rmative to all three questions. In doing so, however, we are
mistaken, for we have been fooled by Magritte’s trademark veristic style into situating ourselves
within the narrative of the painting itself — that is to say, inside the diegetic world of La condition
humaine — and have failed to notice the existence of a third frame: the extradiegetic canvas. Thus,
as soon as we have realised our error and reassumed our rightful, external viewpoint, not only must
our provisionally af rmative response become a de nitively negative one, but the very questions

in contemporary, upper-class passenger trains — aboard which Magritte would certainly have travelled

10 Patricia Allmer, René Magritte: Beyond Painting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 2

According to Allmer, it is likely that Magritte rst observed this technique in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, who also
11

made frequent use of frames (p. 149).

12 André Breton, Le surréalisme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 3

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 themselves collapse inward and become absurd, for we know that both portions of landscape are in
fact painted and that, in reality, there exists nothing behind the diegetic canvas save for the white
linen of the canvas at which we ourselves are presently looking.
Such perspectivist overtones — implied by Magritte’s sleight of brush and use of multiple,
interwoven frame-narratives — promptly lead the viewer to question the truth, reliability and stability
of their own perception of reality in a manner that harks back to Plato’s Theory of Forms.13 We are
left to wonder: if there are already three matryoshka-like layers of reality at work here, who is to say
that there are not many more still beyond the boundaries of my own? As Borges remarks:

Why does it disturb us that a map be included in a map and the thousand and one
nights in the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote
be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have
found the reason: such auto-metadiegesis suggests that if the characters of a
ctional work can also be its readers or spectators, then we, the readers or
spectators, may be ctitious characters, too.14

Not only can the very same observation be made with regard to the effect of framing devices in La
condition humaine but, moreover, it is in fact visually con rmed by the accumulation of frames within
other frames therein — the diegetic canvas > the window > the extradiegetic canvas > an in nite
number of possible frames that may encompass our own narrative — each one proffering disparate
but undeniably interrelated subsets of reality in an endless multiplication that recalls the mise en
abyme of paintings such as La clef des champs (1936) and Représentation (1962). Furthermore,
and as noted by Allmer (p. 152), the thick, red curtains — themselves yet another frame which
encase the window and, therefore, the diegetic canvas — cast an air of theatricality over the whole
image, bringing to mind Jaques’ famous existential lament: ‘All the world’s a stage / And all the men
and women merely players’.15 Certainly, the impressions that underlie his grievance would seem to
fall very much along the same lines as does Magritte’s pictorial argument, for by reason of the
artist’s complex interlacing of intra-, extra-, inter- and metadiegetic framing devices, as well as his
proving to us (at our own expense) of the ease with which one may unknowingly pass between the
multiple strata of reality that they enclose, La condition humaine would seem to deny the existence
of any conclusive distinction between actuality and illusion, insisting instead that the truth value of
every and all perceived realities is never anything more than a product of the way in which the latter
are framed.
Now, this is not to say, of course, that Magritte’s aesthetic practice limited itself solely to the
use of framing devices, nor that his philosophical investigations were restricted to the dichotomy
between reality and illusion, for in truth these are but two samples drawn from a vast array of formal
techniques and intellectual subject matter. In fact, arguably the most recurrent philosophical theme
in his paintings is not the one just discussed but, rather, that of an enquiry into the nature, essence
and behaviour of objects, as well as the manner in which we conceive of them. It is in dealing with

13 It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that one of the many variants of this painting features an easel
standing in the mouth of a cavern whilst a nearby re casts shadows on the walls — a rather explicit visual allusion to the
Allegory of the Cave.

14Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’, in Critical Essays on Cervantes, ed. by Ruth El Saffar
(Massachusetts: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986), pp. 51-53 (p. 53)

15 William Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
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this particular question that Magritte typically employs his full arsenal of aesthetic stratagems, and
nowhere are the latter better exempli ed than in the 1952 painting: Les valeurs personnelles.
In this painting, the viewer is presented with what would otherwise be an ordinary bedroom
scene were it not for an assortment of ve hypertrophied household objects — a comb, a drinking
glass, a shaving brush, a matchstick and a bar of soap — that occupy various positions about it.16
Now, as previously stated, Magritte’s art strove above all else to restore to the everyday objects of
reality the mystère which, in his opinion, had in many cases become imperceptible to the common
mind because of what he termed a ‘fonctionnement mécanique des yeux’ (Choix d’écrits, p. 88).
With a view to unteaching this tendency toward automated perception, Magritte’s images sought
always to shock and to upset, and one of the ways in which he achieved this was through the
dislocation of familiar objects — le dépaysement — from their habitual frames of reference, thereby
obliging the viewer to reappraise those objects in and of themselves and, inevitably, to recognise
their inherent mysteriousness. We may consider, in this regard, our bar of soap: no longer an
invisible resident of the washbasin but a salient intruder on the Persian carpet, we are forced to take
notice of the uncannily uent curvature and invariably featureless complexion that lend its form an
almost hypergeometric perfection in contrast to the straight lines, right angles and granular textures
to which we are so accustomed — epitomised in this case by the wooden bedroom furnishings. As
a result, what we had previously believed to be a familiar household object is exposed as being
otherworldly, alien and, by extension, menacing.17 But the aesthetic contrivances do not end there,
for the jolt provoked by such decontextualisation is further compounded by the disproportioning and
near-anthropomorphisation of the ve focal objects — a technique for which, according to
Hammacher, Magritte is indebted to the dimensional discordancy of Max Ernst’s collages (p. 38) —
proving that a simple reversal of scale is suf cient to render something as unimposing as a ne-
tooth comb suddenly intimidating and hostile. Finally, as though all of this were not yet enough, and
as noted by Richard Calvocoressi, the quintessentially surrealist sucker punch that we have been
dealt is made all the more jarring by the pallid colours, hyperreal texturisation and banal, literal style
of the painting.18
Having thus analysed a mere handful of the many formal techniques to which he makes
recourse in his artwork, it is manifest that not only does Magritte use his paintings as a means to
ask questions and to carry out philosophical investigations but that, in fact, it is precisely by way of
his aesthetic practice that he does so. The intellectual and the aesthetic are hence bound up the
one with the other to such an extent in Magritte’s artwork that they have become utterly inextricable.
As the artist himself once clari ed: ‘Il s’agit pour moi de donner quelque chose à penser et peut-être
d’une certaine manière aussi, mais ce que je donne à penser par la peinture ne peut pas se dire
avec des mots’ (Ecrits Complets, p. 632)

In conclusion, then, it would certainly seem that, in the case of René Magritte, the art of painting
really did constitute an art of thinking — whether that conviction be interpreted as a literal
equivalence between the two processes, as a responsibility on the part of the artist to engage in
intellectual discourse or as a concomitant obligation on the part of the viewer to take part in that

Editions, 1996), Act II, Scene VII, v. 148-149, p. 62

16Note that we shall purposely avoid discussion of the bedroom’s cloud-swept walls as we have already given an
account of how such framing devices operate in Magritte’s paintings in the preceding paragraph.

17 It would not seem to be a fortuity, in this respect, that it bears close formal resemblance to an archetypal U.F.O.

18 Richard Calvocoressi, Magritte (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1984), p. 6

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dialogue. Through an analysis of the manner in which his mind operated, we have discovered that
Magritte’s artistic practice cannot be described as painting so much as it can the embodiment of
pensées-images, and that it was these indissoluble syntheses of intellectual and aesthetic
substance that he wished to express in his artwork. In addition, we have come to learn that it is
precisely by means of his idiosyncratic aesthetic practice — tactical lighting, frames, dislocation,
disproportion, texturisation, insipid colour tones and hyper-verism — as well as the shock value that
it affords, that he investigates life’s perennial philosophical problems, poses the unfathomable
questions of existence to his viewer and attempts to upend the latter’s habitual modes of thought
and behaviour. When it comes to Magritte, therefore, there is no dichotomy between the aesthetic
and the intellectual, nor even is there a binary. There is, in truth, but a unary: the intellectual is the
aesthetic, the aesthetic is the intellectual and, thus, the art of painting is an art of thinking and the
art of thinking is one of painting. As his dear friend, Louis Scutenaire, rejoiced upon the artist’s
untimely death in 1967: ‘Grace à Magritte, la peinture abandonne son emploi d’amuseuse de l’œil,
d’excitant et d’exutoire sentimental, pour commencer à aider l’homme à se trouver et à trouver le
monde’.19 Whatever the case may be, there is one thing that cannot be refuted: René Magritte was
a revolutionary painter who lived in a revolutionary age, and he proved Socrates — as well as
history, for that matter — very, very wrong indeed

19 Louis Scutenaire, Avec Magritte (Brussels: Editions Lebeer Hossmann, 1977), p. 9

.

 Bibliograph

Allmer, Patricia. 2009. René Magritte: Beyond Painting (Manchester: Manchester University Press

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1986. ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’, in Critical Essays on Cervantes, ed. by
Ruth El Saffar (Massachusetts: G. K. & Co.), pp.51-53

Breton, André. 2002. Le surréalisme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard

Calvocoressi, Richard. 1984. Magritte (Oxford: Phaidon Press)

Foucault, Michel. 1983. This is not a Pipe, trans. by James Harkness (Berkeley: University of
California Press

Greeley, Robin Adèle. 1980. Image, Text and the Female Body: René Magritte and the Surrealist
Publications (Massachusetts: MIT Press)

Hammacher, A. M. 1986. René Magritte, trans. by James Brockway (London: Thames & Hudson

Magritte, René. 1994. Les Mots et les images: Choix d’écrits, ed. by Éric Clemens (Brussels:
Labor

—— 2001. Ecrits Complets, ed. by André Blavier (Paris: Flammarion

Plato. 1997. Republic, trans. by John Llewelyn Davies & David James Vaughan (Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Editions

René Magritte: Entretien, online video recording, Youtube, 9 April 2013, available at:
< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ZaCUutHnQ > [Accessed 27/02/2017]

Scutenaire, Louis. 1977. Avec Magritte (Brussels: Editions Lebeer Hossmann

Shakespeare, William. 1996. ‘As You Like It’, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions), pp. 611-64
)