Golconda (painting)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Golconde
René Magritte, 1953
Oil on canvas
81 × 100 cm, 31.9 × 39.37 in
The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas

Golconda (in French, Golconde) is an oil painting on canvas by Belgian surrealist René Magritte, painted in 1953. It is currently housed at the Menil collection in Houston, Texas.

The piece depicts a scene of identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be falling like rain or floating like helium-balloons (though there is no actual indication of motion), against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky. It is humorous, but with an obvious criticism of the conventional effacing of individuality.

Magritte himself lived in a similar suburban environment, and dressed in a similar fashion. The bowler hat was a common feature of much of his work, and appears in paintings like The Son of Man.

Charly Herscovici, who was bequeathed copyright on the artist's works, commented on Golconda:

“

Magritte was fascinated by the seductiveness of images. Ordinarily, you see a picture of something and you believe in it, you are seduced by it; you take its honesty for granted. But Magritte knew that representations of things can lie. These images of men aren't men, just pictures of them, so they don't have to follow any rules. This painting is fun, but it also makes us aware of the falsity of representation.^[1]

”

As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconde was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in southeast India, which from the midfourteenth century till the end of the seventeenth was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a synonym for 'mine of wealth'."

Magritte included a likeness of Scutenaire in the painting - his face is used for the large man by the chimney of the house on the right of the picture.

[edit] In popular culture

Rufus Wainwright's 2002 "Across the Universe" video, directed by Len Wiseman and starring Dakota Fanning, looks like Golconda.
Belgian director Koen Mortier's 2006 television commercial "Angels" for Dutch insurance company RVS featuring Bonnie Beecher singing Jeff Alexander's "Come Wander With Me" also looks like Golconda^[2].