1. The Son of Man
One of the world’s most immediately recognizable paintings is surprisingly young, concerning art. Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s painting The Son of Man was only completed in 1964. Despite its somewhat recent provenance, the oil on canvas painting of a man in a bowler hat with his face obscured by a green apple is immediately recognizable. The art is one of the landmarks of the surrealist style.
Of the painting’s cryptic subject matter Magritte said, “At least it hides the face partly well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”
The famous American illustrator Norman Rockwell paid homage to Magritte’s famous painting in his own Mr. Apple which featured a man whose head had been entirely replaced by an apple. Even though Rockwell was considered a prolific and recognizable artist of the 20th century, he was never well-received by the art world due to the everyday and commonplace nature of his typical subject matter.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“15 Facts About Famous Art” Sean Hutchison, Mental Floss. September 2014.
“Michelangelo” BBC Staff. n.d.
“Leonardo’s Last Supper” Khan Academy. 2014.
Carrier, David (2006). Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public
“10 Things You Might Not Know About The Son of Man” Kristy Puchko, Mental Floss. April 2015.
Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper. A Journal of His Work. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997.
“Why Most People Don’t Get Grant Wood” Dennis Kardon, Hyperallergic. April 2018.
“Pablo Picasso’s Sex Life Revealed a Lot About His Attitude Toward Women” Lassie Smith, Ranker. n.d.
“Vincent van Gogh 1853 – 1890” Staff author, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Met. 2010
“Piet Mondrian” Staff author, The Art Story. n.d.
“The Life of Edvard Munch” Staff author, The Munch Museet. n.d.
