The Lovers by René Magritte (Interpretation and Analysis)

The Lovers
Source: Arthive

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, I want to share a rather strange image of romantic love: The Lovers by René Magritte.

Magritte was a Surrealist artist who is well known for his bizarre and witty paintings. While he typically painted in a Realistic style, Magritte’s work challenges viewers by placing everyday objects in strange contexts. The contradictions in his art force viewers to examine their understanding of the world around them. Famously, Magritte noted that he wanted to “make the most everyday objects shriek aloud” in his work.

This desire to make the familiar unfamiliar can be seen in The Lovers. The painting depicts a close-up of a kissing couple. Bizarrely, cloth covers the heads of the two lovers, completely shrouding their faces. In many ways, The Lovers is a conventional scene; however, the hidden faces make the painting strange and disconcerting. Like many of Magritte’s paintings, The Lovers subverts the viewer’s expectations.

The idea of The Lovers must have been particularly interesting to Magritte because he painted four different versions of the piece. Two versions of the painting show the couple with covered faces while the other two leave the faces uncovered. However, it is the former two paintings that have garnered the most interest from art historians.

Formerly, scholars believed that the veiled faces were a reference to the suicide of Magritte’s mother. According to family legend, her dress was washed over her face after she drowned. According to some sources, young Magritte was on hand when her body was recovered from the river in this condition. However, most scholars now believe that the story is largely apocryphal.

 
Instead, it is now accepted that the painting represents a fascination with masks and concealed identity. As the Museum of Modern Art notes, Surrealists were interested in exploring what lay below the surface. The anonymity of the couple in the painting disconcerts the viewer and forces them to consider what the cloth conceals. In The Lovers, the mystery is in fact the point of the painting. Magritte himself noted, "My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, 'What does that mean?' It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable."