Magritte_Atlantide


 * Rene Magritte’s L’Atlantide (The Reflection) 1927**

Commentary by Mark Auslander

For centuries, realist painters have used the image of a body of water reflecting a landscape as tangible evidence, certifying and legitimizing the very act of visual representation. The reflecting surface becomes a signifier of the authenticity of the artist’s act of witnessing. Just as nature truely reflects the reality of the sky, mountains, trees and buildings above, so too does the artist claim to offer a faithful rendition of the true nature of the world.

In this 1927 surrealist masterpiece, Magritte cleverly subverts this well established visual convention. He titles the painting “L’Atlantide," the French name for the mythical continent of Atlantis. The painting bears the alternate title, “The Reflection.” But unlike normal landscape paintings, instead of a lake or river we see only a bathtub in the foreground. The tub’s surface seems largely impervious to reflection, and the utterly black sky above emits now light. Instead of an upside down landscape within the watery surface, the artist has placed in the upper left of the painting an upside down architectural scene associated with the mythical kingdom of Atlantis.

The painting was surely inspired by the Pierre Benoit’s wildly popular novel, “L”Atlantide, pulished in 1919, and the famous 1921 silent film based on book In the book and film, the French heroes are captured in the North African desert and taken to the palace of Atlantis hidden inside a mountain. There, an ancient seductive Queen seeks to preserve fovever the corpses of her lovers by dipping them in a mysterioius metallic bath.

If you incline your head, you can make out a a classical stairway, leading up to a stone palace encased in mountain rock. The entire edifice funtions as a kind of theatrical curtain being pulled back, as if to emphasize the constructed artificiality of the entire scene. To the left in front of the bathub we see an object enigmatically covered in cloth, Like the closed door of the upside down palace and the looming darkness above, we see alluring glimpses of Mystery but cannot penetrate the secret precincts of representation itself. This beloved painting can thus be taken as emblematic of the central crisis of modernity itself, in which, in Marx’s famous words, “all that is solid melts into air.”