As Gagosian opens This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte in London, The Wick is taking a closer look at The Son of Man, René Magritte’s 1964 self-portrait and one of the most recognisable images in Surrealism. A man in a dark overcoat and bowler hat stands before a low wall, with the sea and a cloudy sky stretching behind him. A green apple hovers directly in front of his face, leaving only the edges of his eyes visible. A closer look and another oddity emerges: his left arm appears to bend backwards. Though the ingredients appear ordinary at first glance, their arrangement makes the image strange and unsettling.

The painting began with a request from Magritte’s friend and patron Harry Torczyner for a portrait of the artist. Magritte wrestled with the commission before arriving at a characteristically elusive solution: a self-portrait in which his own face is almost entirely hidden. The green apple only makes us more curious about what sits behind it, playing into Magritte’s fascination with the things we can see and what remains just slightly, but very frustratingly nontheless, out of reach. The bowler-hatted figure was already a recurring presence in his work and echoed Magritte’s own deliberately conventional way of dressing. The apple, another familiar motif, transforms the scene with a single surreal interruption.

Over sixty years later, The Son of Man has escaped far beyond the history of Surrealism into film, advertising and popular culture. Its long afterlife sits neatly alongside Gagosian’s new exhibition, which brings Magritte’s work together with more than forty artists across generations to consider how his visual ideas continue to circulate. A floating apple, a hidden face and a man in a bowler hat still have the power to make the familiar strange.

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