Perceptuo-Cognitive Analysis of Magritte’s Iconic Painting La Condition Humaine (1933)

Abstract

Abstract René Magritte once said “… the function of art is to make poetry visible, to render thought visible”. The poetry emerged on his canvases by meticulous, aesthetically engaging depiction of objects and scenes replete with surprise and apparent perceptual self-contradiction. His 1933 masterpiece, La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition), is one of his most philosophical works. We see a room with a painting on an easel that appears to paradoxically reveal exactly what it occludes: a pastoral scene outside the room. Magritte had a sophisticated understanding of perception as representation in the brain, and he discussed this theme explicitly. This article examines in detail visual cues in La Condition Humaine that elicit an alternation between salient yet mutually exclusive percepts, transparency vs opacity, of the same object. The conflicting percepts are experienced as surreal, drawing us into the heart of the problem: the nature of representation (in art and in the brain), a meditation on the localization of thought, while beckoning us to ponder the nature of reality and the ‘mystery of the ordinary’. The painting also illustrates the power of subtle painterly gesture, i.e., when small details act as ‘perceptual amplifiers’, inducing a strong effect on both our perceptual and cognitive understanding of scene elements across a large region of visual space. Finally, examination of how the competing percepts are established, and the emergence of some perceptuo-cognitive features provide clues about the visual system’s scene processing hierarchy.