THE PORTRAIT
RENÉ MAGRITTE, 1935
Dinner is served. Ham, a bottle of wine, an empty glass. Knife and fork lined up straight. Everything clean and polite, painted like a page from a cookbook. Except the ham is looking at you. One eye, dead center, wide open. You're in a staring contest with your lunch, and you're going to lose. So what does the eye mean? Careful. Magritte hated this question. He hated symbols. Hated being decoded. You weren't supposed to solve the mystery. You were supposed to stand there and let it bother you. People guess anyway. Maybe it's the animal getting one last look at whoever ordered it. Maybe it's your conscience, served cold. Maybe the title is the clue. Magritte called this The Portrait, not Still Life, and a portrait is supposed to look back. Pick one. He'd have hated it. Try another. He'd have hated that one too. He was very fair that way. But the painting did eventually give up one secret. Just not the one anybody was looking for. In 2013, MoMA put it under an X-ray and found another painting underneath. It was part of The Enchanted Pose, a canvas Magritte had painted in 1927: two identical nude women standing side by side in an empty room. He was broke. He cut the canvas into four pieces and painted something new on top of each one. The other pieces turned up beneath paintings in Stockholm, Norwich, and Brussels. The last one wasn't found until 2017. So beneath the ham, the wine, and that one unblinking eye, there's part of a naked woman who disappeared for over eighty years.