The Son of Man

Arguably René Magritte’s most iconic painting, The Son of Man (1964) portrays a man wearing a suit and a bowler hat, standing behind a floating green apple. The story behind the composition began one year prior, when Magritte’s friend and advisor Harry Torczyner commissioned the Surrealist to paint a self-portrait. Magritte found this assignment challenging, describing the task as a “problem of conscience” in letters to Torczyner. As a compromise, the artist obscured his face with a symbolic piece of fruit. “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see,” Magritte explained. “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 Surrealist painting contains other mysteries as well: The man’s left arm is bent backwards at the elbow, his third button is undone, and his torso seems endless. While the perplexing canvas is held in a …