The treachery of images

painting by René Magritte

Golconda (French: Golconde) is an oil painting on canvas by BelgiansurrealistRené Magritte, painted in It is housed at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.

Rene magritte paintings golconda The Empty Mask , Read more about the painting in the Golconda painting analysis below. Tools Tools. Read Edit View history.

Description and analysis

The piece depicts a scene of red-roofed buildings and a mostly blue partly cloudy sky, with the air filled by dozens of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, generally facing the viewer. The men are positioned as if standing, and may be falling, rising, or stationary in mid-air; no movement or motion is implied.

They are equally spaced in a three-dimensional lattice, and receding back in rhombus grid layers.

Magritte lived in a similar suburban environment, and dressed in a similar fashion.

Rene magritte paintings images Description and analysis [ edit ]. Magritte also included him in the painting as one of the men. This leaves one to look at the men as a group. Additionally, it also plays on the realistic appearance of everyday objects or figures that are placed in unique ways, which questions their meaning.

The bowler hat was a common feature of much of his work, and appears in paintings such as The Son of Man.

Charly Herscovici, who was bequeathed on the artist's works, commented on Golconda:

Magritte was fascinated by the seductiveness of images. Ordinarily, you see a picture of something and you believe in it, you are seduced by it; you take its honesty for granted.

But Magritte knew that representations of things can lie.

Rene magritte paintings golconda images It appears that only the upper two stories and attics of the building are visible, which compose the lower half of the composition; the blue sky composes the upper half. It is the name of a collapsed city, also called Golconda, in Hyderabad, Telangana, in India. Drawing Toggle child menu Expand. The title has been described to mean a so-called source of great wealth or a rich mine.

These images of men aren't men, just pictures of them, so they don't have to follow any rules. This painting is fun, but it also makes us aware of the falsity of representation.^[1]

One interpretation is that Magritte is demonstrating the line between individuality and group association, and how it is blurred.^{[citation needed]} All of these men are dressed the same, have the same bodily features and are all floating/falling.

This leaves one to look at the men as a group. Whereas if one looks at each person, one can predict that they may be completely different from another figure.^{[citation needed]}

As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in the state of Telangana, India, near Hyderabad, which from the midth century until the end of the 17th was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a synonym for 'mine of wealth'."

Magritte included a likeness of Scutenaire in the painting – his face is used for the large man by the chimney of the house on the right of the picture.

See also

References

External links

• Interview with Charly Herscovici
• In Rushdie's book, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: "In the Menil Collection gallery in Houston, Texas, a shrewd curator named Christof Pantikrator suddenly understood for the first time the prophetic nature of Rene Magritte's masterwork, Golconda, ." Page –
• The painting also appears on the cover of Randy Katz and Gaetano Borriello's textbook Contemporary Logic Design 2nd Edition.
• The painting is referenced on the cover of Hirohiko Araki's manga Jojolion.