René Magritte Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values), 1952

Although he is often grouped with Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy, Magritte took a somewhat different approach to painting. Rather than creating fantasy imagery, he evoked the strangeness and ambiguity latent in reality. “I don’t paint visions,” he once said. “To the best of my capability, by painterly means, I describe objects — and the mutual relationship of objects — in such a way that none of our habitual concepts or feelings is necessarily linked with them.”

Here, the artist presents a room filled with familiar things, but he gives human proportions to these formerly unassuming props of everyday life, creating a sense of disorientation and incongruity. Inside and out are inverted by his rendering of a skyscape on the interior walls of the room. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, the normal, strange; Magritte creates a paradoxical world that is, in his own words, “a defiance of common sense.”

When he first saw this painting, Magritte’s dealer, Alexander Iolas, was violently upset by it. Tellingly, the artist replied, “In my picture, the comb (and the other objects as well) has specifically lost its ‘social character,’ it has become an object of useless luxury, which may, as you say, leave the spectator feeling helpless or even make him ill. Well, this is proof of the effectiveness of the picture.”

Artwork Info

Artwork title: Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values)
Artist name: René Magritte
Date created: 1952
Classification: painting
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 31 1/2 × 39 3/8 in. (80.0 × 100.1 cm)

Date acquired: 1998
Credit: Collection SFMOMA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis
Copyright: © Charly Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Permanent URL: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.562
Artwork status: Not on view at this time.

Magritte’s room of illusions

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NARRATOR:

Curators Gary Garrels and Sarah Roberts discuss René Magritte’s painting, Personal Values.

GARRELS:

He originally painted it to go to his gallery in New York, and his dealer rejected it, saying it made him feel depressed, made him feel ill, made him feel sick. And Magritte said, “Well, that’s what a good painting should do.” And we’ve become so accustomed to it that you sometimes have to step back and look at it in a fresh way, and realize that the walls have been erased and you’re in a room perhaps hovering way up in the sky. I mean, we’ve gotten used now to plane travel and we look out the window and see a sky like this, you know, on a regular basis. But in 1952, this would’ve been a very unsettling perspective.

The comb is propped up against that sky, so it implies that there is something solid there. So is it a wallpaper? Is it a painting, a mural inside a room? So that illusion of suspension begins to be thrown into doubt. And of course, then the issue of scale. You’ve got a huge goblet, a very small bed, an enormous comb. All the relationships are off kilter.

SARAH ROBERTS:

When I stand and look at this painting for a while, I always come down to that match. There’s this shocking pink, chalky-looking match with this kind of lurid yellow tip on it, lying in the middle of this gorgeously painted room around it. The match could go off at any minute and all—[chuckles]. You know, the room might go up in flames; you never know.

GARRELS:

The more time you spend with it, the more complicated, mysterious and unsettling it really does become.

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NARRATOR:

This is René Magritte’s painting Personal Values from 1952. The painting, 32 inches high by 40 inches wide, shows a bedroom with the front wall taken away, as if in a dollhouse. Two things are immediately striking. First, the walls are painted as a pale blue sky with fluffy white clouds. Secondly, all the objects in the room are painted at different scales. The bedroom furniture—a bed at the left side, a mirrored armoire at the right, and two Persian rugs on the floor—are sized according to the room’s dimensions. But everything else is oversized. Beginning on the left side of the painting, a giant tortoise-shell comb is balanced vertically on the bed. It is so tall, it almost reaches the molded ceiling. On the rug below the bed lies a pink, oversized wooden match, nearly half as long as the bed. The yellow match tip points to the right, to the center of the painting, where a green goblet stands like a sentinel. The goblet is twice the height of the bed but smaller than the comb. To the right of the goblet is the armoire, with mirrored glass doors showing the reflection of a window with white curtains. On top of the armoire, a bristled shaving brush spills out over the edge. Below the armoire, filling the lower right corner of the painting is a gigantic bar of soap, oval-shaped and brown in color. Its reflection is seen in the mirrored glass of the armoire behind it. Every element is painted with a photographic realism.

René Magritte Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values), 1952

Artwork Info

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