The Lovers

René Magritte, 1928 · Gallery 517 · Floor 5

Look at them. They're kissing. Neither one's taking the cloth off. Both heads wrapped. Lips pressed through fabric. Hers hangs loose. His is pulled tight around the throat. Right over the collar and tie. Dressed for the occasion, apparently. And they're not stopping. Gray room. One brown wall. Painted neat and flat, like there's nothing odd going on. That's Magritte. The Belgian Surrealist who dressed like a bank clerk. Paints everything exactly how it looks. Then gets one thing wrong. Your brain's already gone: couple kissing. Got it. Then you notice the cloth. They're pressed right up against each other. Still can't get to each other. That's his big subject. Wanting what you can't reach. He painted lovers four times that year. Twice with the cloth. These two kiss. The other two just stand there, side by side. Like a wedding photo. Except nobody's got a face. So, there's a story that follows this painting around. When Magritte was thirteen, his mother drowned herself in the river Sambre. The story goes that he was there when they pulled her out. And her nightgown was wrapped around her face. His friend Louis Scutenaire wrote it down in 1947. And you hear that and think: well, there it is. The cloth. The hidden faces. Except somebody eventually checks. This guy David Sylvester, an art historian. Goes through the old newspapers and police records. Turns out they found her seventeen days after she disappeared. A kilometer downstream. Sylvester says the familiar story doesn't hold up. So what did the boy actually see? What did somebody tell him? Harder to say. And Magritte wasn't much help with people trying to explain his paintings. He said they concealed nothing. They evoked mystery. And mystery was unknowable. Which isn't quite the same as saying: here's a thing that happened to me, and here's a picture of it. His mother died in 1912. He painted this in 1928. You can see why people put the two together. That would explain it. But it doesn't mean it does.

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