A Room Without a Man

“Man with a Newspaper” is a 1928 painting by René Magritte. It’s divided into 4 panels, all of which depict the same room. The only thing that sets them apart is the presence of the titular man with a newspaper in the first panel, and his absence from the subsequent three. The colors are dark and gloomy and everything is rendered in – as the gallery label calls it – a “disconcertingly deadpan style”. The image is sourced from a popular health manual, slightly transformed by the painter, generally retaining the comfortably mundane character one would expect from such a publication. But what is interesting about the painting is not the individual image but the peculiar whole formed by the repetitions.

René Magritte "Man with a Newspaper" 1928

The first thing to be pointed out is, of course, the disappearance of the man. He is there and then he is not. Or, we can see him, and then we cannot. (Notably, a 1936 reproduction of the work by Julien Levy was titled ‘Now You Don’t’.) But were we only presented with the first two panels, one inhabited and one empty, the mystery posed by the painting would be no more than a kind of Victorian detective horror story, A Curious Disappearance of Mr. XYZ.

What, however, directs our attention to an issue much more interesting than whatever had happened to our dear gentleman, is the rather inexplicable repetition of the empty room. Upon closer examination, even more curiously, they appear to be ever so slightly shifted in relation to each other. This is possibly due to a reference to stereoscopic images, or - as we might guess - because of the manual painterly method in which the image was reproduced, prone to generate inaccuracies – but more importantly points to a more perplexing question of identity – the empty rooms are not identical.

There are multiple ways of arriving at this conundrum, one could for example read the painting as two separate scenarios/timelines, top and bottom, wherein the first depicts a shift from an inhabited room to an empty one, and the second depicts a room that was empty from the very start.

No matter what way we look at it, the multiplication of the empty room inevitably brings to the surface the question of negation. The room is no longer an empty room. It is a room from which someone has disappeared. It is even evident in the language used to describe them: the room is not de facto empty, it has plenty of objects in it, but we nevertheless refer to it as the empty room, because of the potentiality of the presence which was negated. A contemporary and somewhat infamous example is a joke form the film Ninotchka excessively quoted by Zizek: a man in a restaurant asks for a coffee without cream, to which the waiter replies "Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?" Materially, it is exactly the same black coffee they are referring to, exactly the same substance, but yet they are different because of what was negated from them. It is the lack of milk that transforms the coffee and it is the lack of man that transforms the room. And I would argue that it is precisely that lack which accounts for the eerie character of the painting.

This casts an interesting light onto one of the core principles of surrealism - the superior reality, or surreality, put forth by Breton in the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto as "the future resolution of [...] dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality".

The merging of the orders of rational waking life and irrationality of dreams was achieved by a lot of Magritte's fellow surrealists by an addition into the waking reality of some fantastic dimension, or substitution of some of its parts with aberrations of the dreaming mind.

In other words, distortions caused by the unconscious would usually be of a positive kind, materially speaking, they would cause the appearance of something which was not previously there - a lobster on a phone handle, fluid forms floating and merging with furniture, bird heads on human bodies, gigantic sunflowers in a hotel corridor, and so on. Dreams and fantasies would step down and enter into rational reality, projecting onto it. And it could be argued that in Magritte's painting, a precisely opposite operation is carried out.

The rooms are not unusual by virtue of something extraordinary included in them – they are surreal because of the negation of what used to be in them – of the lack but also of a trace and a remainder of the man who was previously there.