Bather 1925

René Magritte made this painting, Bather, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. He has used oil on canvas to render a lounging female nude in a pared-down aesthetic, typical of his surrealist style. I'm thinking about the time Magritte spent building up this image. How he might have carefully mapped out this scene in order to bring together these striking juxtapositions of form. He takes on traditional subject matter, the female nude, and reinvents it through the lens of surrealism. Magritte’s cool palette emphasizes the dreamlike stillness of the painting. The sphere and the cube feel solid, yet illusory. The same goes for the sea view in the window. Magritte has flattened out the planes, removing any sense of depth or perspective. All the individual elements – the figure, the sea, the geometric forms – appear as if on the surface. It's as if they’re floating together in the same imagined space, echoing backwards and forwards through art history.