René Magritte

A huge, isolated eye stares out at the viewer. Its left, inner corner has a vivid, viscous quality. The anatomical detailing of this area and its surface sheen contrast with the matte, dead-black of the eye’s pupil, which floats, unmoored, against a limpid, cloud-filled sky of cerulean blue. Although the areas surrounding the eye’s iris are carefully shaded and modeled, giving the illusion of a play of light on three-dimensional form, the sky displays no trace of convexity; its puffy clouds are beautifully rendered, but not its blue expanse. As a result, the sky appears as though seen through a circular window rather than mirrored in the spherical, liquid surface of an eye.

The eye was a subject that fascinated many Surrealist poets and visual artists, given its threshold position between inner, subjective self and the external world. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray once owned The False Mirror, which he memorably described as a painting that “sees as much as it itself is seen.” His words capture the work’s unsettling character: it places the viewer on the spot, caught between looking through and being watched by an eye that proves to be empty. It opens onto a void that, for all its radiant, cumulus-cloud-filled beauty, seems to deny the possibility of human existence.

Le Faux Miroir presents an enormous lashless eye with a luminous cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris and an opaque, dead-black disc for a pupil. The allusive title, provided by the Belgian Surrealist writer Paul Nougé, seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective. Magritte’s single eye functions on multiple enigmatic levels: the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it, thus seeing and being seen simultaneously. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who owned the work from 1933 to 1936, recognized this compelling duality when he memorably described Le Faux Miroir as a painting that “sees as much as it itself is seen.”

This work is included in the Provenance Research Project, which investigates the ownership history of works in MoMA's collection.

1928 – June 1930, René Magritte, Brussels
June 1930 – 1933, E. L. T. (Edouard Léon Théodore) Mesens, Brussels, purchased from the artist
1933 – 1936, Man Ray, acquired from E. L. T. Mesens
1936, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased from Man Ray

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