René Magritte

Great Art Explained • Season 4 • Episode 7

About this episode

In The Lovers II, by Magritte, he takes the cinematic cliché but disrupts our voyeuristic pleasure by covering the faces in cloth. A moment of connection becomes one of isolation, of sexual frustration. An intimate moment becomes something dark and effortlessly disturbing. Something hidden and anonymous. Rene Magritte denied that his traumatic childhood was connected in any way with his art, but in this episode, I look at the possibility that his past affected him more than he admitted.