Hidden Figures

Greetings, all – here is the fourth chapter of the book. Sending love and blessings…

‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is? Matthew 16:13

Belgian surrealist René Magritte created one of his best-known works in 1964. The painting is of a single figure, facing the viewer head-on. He is dressed in the grey overcoat, red tie and bowler hat of a bureaucrat’s business day. So far so humdrum, except that we can’t see his face. It is obscured by a single green apple, floating in mid-air in front of him. Magritte said of the painting,

‘You have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.’

Magritte was extremely popular in the 1960s, and by a circuitous route, his apple became one of the most recognised symbols of recent history. Paul McCartney was a fan, and bought a related work, also featuring a prominent green apple. The painting gave rise to both the name and the symbol of the Beatles’ record label. This in turn inspired Steve Jobs to name Apple Computers, the company that would go on to be the biggest in history. The image deeply impacted its culture – but what of its title?

The painting is called ‘The Son of Man’ – an intriguing allusion to the identity of Jesus. The two strongest themes of the work – the evident ordinariness of the figure and the frustrating hiddenness of his face – both resonate strongly with the biblical uses of this title. We will look shortly at the Old Testament’s usage of the phrase, but it bears noting that the 107 instances all describe an ordinary person – much as the workaday business clothes chosen by Magritte imply the unspectacular.