Magritte

Google tells me that today is the 110th birthday of Rene Magritte. I have one of his pictures on my bookcase downstairs. I happened across the original earlier this year at the National Gallery in Washington, and found it so intriguing that I bought the print. It's called "La Condition Humaine":


Is the tree really there? Is it possible to know? Of course, in keeping with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," the window isn't really there either -- it's just a picture of a window. The painting is beautiful and arresting from it's composition alone, but to have a painting pose fundamental epistemological questions is particularly intriguing. Magritte did another painting with the same title on a similar theme. This one's in a private collection: