THE FALSE MIRROR
RENÉ MAGRITTE, 1929
You came here to look at it, and it's looking at you. One enormous eye, and where the iris should be, sky. Blue, daylight, clouds drifting through. And dead center, the pupil, a flat black circle. No glint in it. Painted eyes always get a little spark, the reflection of the room they're looking at. This one gives nothing back. So which way does it go? Are you looking through the eye, at the sky on the other side? Or into it, at what it sees? Magritte called it The False Mirror, which answers nothing. That was the idea. Man Ray owned this one for a while in the thirties, before it ended up here. And in the fifties, when a television network needed a logo, the story goes somebody had this painting in mind. The CBS eye. It's been staring out of TV sets ever since. Magritte shrugged. What he made and what they made, he figured, were two different things. One sells. One watches.