Infinite Recess: perspective and play in Magritte’s La Condition Humaine

Abstract

The paintings of Rene Magritte, with their unsettling of common‐sense relationships among objects, images and words, have been compared by many critics to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The 1933 painting La Condition Humaine, for instance, depicts a painting that exactly covers a ‘real’ landscape outside a window – thus raising questions about the ‘location’ of perception and thought. But Magritte’s uncanny use of perspective, and his depictions of spaces that have ambiguous depth, suggest that an equally helpful interpretive framework to that of Wittgenstein may be that of psychoanalysis, particularly the object‐relations theory of D.W. Winnicot and the latter’s concept of ‘transitional phenomena’. La Condition Humaine, for example, exemplifies how, by both negating and affirming the opacity of the picture plane, perspective transforms the painting into a transitional object that is both ‘there’ and ‘not there’ simultaneously. Many of the painter’s works, his ‘window’ series in particular, suggest approaching Albertian perspective itself as a question of object‐relating, the simultaneous search for autonomy and ontological security through play. An understanding of how Magritte’s ambiguous spaces suggest both security as well as open‐ended possibility can help to link his work not only with the traditions of Renaissance perspective and its modernist critics, but also with the aesthetic of the sublime and its iconography of colossal, indifferent nature. Sublimity may be interpreted psychoanalytically as nostalgia for the scale of childhood experience – for the world viewed as an enormous room in which small objects assume monumental physical and symbolic proportions.