La Parade 1940

Here is a painting by René Magritte, who concocted this world using oil paint. Magritte has set up a meeting between a tree and a stage curtain. I wonder what it felt like for him to be so coolly inventive. Did he start with the tree or the curtain? I get the feeling he wanted to take these very different things and put them in the same zone. Both have a columnar form and some kind of verticality. I feel like the surface of the bark is so specific but the curtain has a very generic drape. What do we make of the meeting of real and unreal here? And how is this different from when painters like Courbet painted the real world? Magritte’s paintings feel uncanny because they are a product of the imagination that is then materialized in paint.