I watched The Thomas Crown Affair on Saturday, a recommendation from one of my PhD supervisors. Ignoring its outdated gender stereotypes (it was released in 1999) it is an interesting look at the art world, with themes covering authorship and value, but also about looking and seeing.

My PhD, working title ‘The Uncertainty of Landscape’, will be looking at the concept of landscape as palimpsest, so this work by Rene Magritte, ‘The Son of Man’ has a lot of resonance with my research theme. The picture features throughout the film – as the original, as a copy, as a poster and in the denouement. This quote, attributed to Rene Magritte, sums up the work and the theme nicely:

“At least it hides the face partly well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

(Source: Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_of_Man)