The False Mirror

An enormous single eye fills the canvas, but its iris is a blue sky scattered with soft white clouds, the pupil a black disc at the center. Rene Magritte makes the False Mirror a riddle about seeing - is the eye a window through which we glimpse the world, or a mirror reflecting it back, or merely a surface onto which the sky is painted? Now in the Museum of Modern Art, it is among his most iconic images - the organ of vision turned inside out, perception itself made strange, the boundary between inner and outer dissolved.