The Son of Man by Magritte: Meaning of the Apple
The Son of Man is a 1964 painting by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte. It shows a man in a bowler hat and a dark coat, standing before a low wall and the sea, his face blocked by a floating green apple.
It is a self portrait, and its whole point is that you cannot see the face.
It is one of the most recognized images in the world, yet it hangs in a private collection where almost nobody can see it in person. Here is what it means, why Magritte hid the face behind an apple, and where the painting actually is.
The apple that hides the face
A respectable man in a bowler hat, the uniform of the ordinary city gentleman, stands facing us. Where his face should be floats a bright green apple, hovering in front of his eyes. You can just make out the edge of one eye peering past it.
Magritte painted this everyman in the bowler hat again and again, and here it is himself. The apple does not sit on his face; it hangs in the air, impossibly, an object placed exactly where the most important thing, the face, ought to be.
The painting is built entirely around that block, around the one thing it refuses to show you.
What The Son of Man means
Magritte, unusually, explained this one, and his words are the key. Everything we see hides another thing, he said, and we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in what is hidden and what the visible does not show us.
That tension, he said, is the whole feeling of the picture. You strain to see the face behind the apple, and you never will. It is about the gap between what is in front of us and what is concealed, about how the surface of a person, the hat, the coat, the pose, hides the real person underneath.
The Surrealism here is not a dream monster; it is one ordinary apple in the wrong place, and to my mind it is more disquieting for being so plain.
Why an apple, and why that title
The apple is loaded on purpose. It is the fruit of the Garden of Eden, of knowledge and temptation and the fall of man, and the title, The Son of Man, is a name for Christ.
Magritte, who filled his work with quiet religious and philosophical puzzles, chose an everyday businessman and gave him a biblical title and the forbidden fruit, then let you argue about what that means.
He did not force a reading. The bowler hatted man is modern and anonymous; the apple and the title are ancient and heavy. Putting them together, without explanation, is the joke and the depth at once. Magritte trusted the strangeness to do the work.
Where the painting actually is
Here is what surprises people: you cannot go and see The Son of Man. Despite being printed on a million posters, mugs and phone cases, the original is in a private collection and is very rarely shown in public.
It is not in any museum you can buy a ticket to.
Most people have only ever seen it in reproduction, or in the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Affair, which used the image as a running visual joke, with men in bowler hats and apples filling a museum.
The most familiar face in modern art is a face you will almost certainly never stand in front of.
The Son of Man, quick answers
What does The Son of Man mean? That everything we see hides something else. Magritte blocks the man's face with an apple to stage the tension between the visible and the hidden.
Why is there an apple over the face? To hide the one thing you most want to see. The apple also carries echoes of Eden, knowledge and temptation, against the biblical title.
Is it a self portrait? Yes. The bowler hatted man is Magritte's recurring everyman, and here he stands in for the artist himself.
Who painted it and when? Rene Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist, in 1964.
Where is The Son of Man? In a private collection. It is rarely exhibited and cannot be seen in a public museum.
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The face he spent a life hiding
Magritte returned to the hidden face for years, in painting after painting, cloths draped over heads, backs turned, objects blocking eyes.
The Son of Man is the most famous of them, made three years before he died in 1967. He was a quiet man who wore a bowler hat and lived in an ordinary suburban house with his wife, painting outrages in his dining room.
The most private of painters made his self portrait a face nobody can see, and then hid the painting itself away in a collection nobody can visit.
You can see The Son of Man in person at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. For more by the artist, browse the Metropolitan Museum collection.
Questions behind the apple
Who is the man in the bowler hat? A faceless everyman in a suit and bowler hat, a figure Magritte used again and again. A green apple floats in front of his face and hides it.
What does the painting mean? Magritte said we always want to see what is hidden behind the visible. The apple both blocks the face and makes us long to see it, and that tension is the point.
Where is The Son of Man? It is held in a private collection and is rarely shown in public, which is part of its mystique.
Is it a Surrealist painting? Yes. It is a classic work of Surrealism, painted in 1964.
Who painted it? The Belgian artist Rene Magritte, who made it as a kind of veiled self portrait.