The musings of the solitary walker 1926

René Magritte made this painting with oil on canvas. The color palette is restrained, heavy on greys and greens. It's all soft tones, which are blended carefully, as if the paint has been thinned almost to nothing before it's applied to the canvas. Look how the paint handling seems to smooth everything out, like a dream that makes the world feel slightly off-kilter. There's a flatness to the image, even though there's an attempt to represent three-dimensional space. It's in this slippage between dimensions that the work really comes alive. There’s a particularly strange section in the lower left, where the flatly painted woman's body just floats unnaturally against the dark background. Magritte’s earlier surrealist works felt more revolutionary, but his later paintings have a certain, strange beauty. You might compare this to the earlier works of Giorgio de Chirico. There's that same mood of quiet alienation. In the end, art thrives on not giving us easy answers. Magritte knew this and it's why his work still lingers with us today.