The Schoolmaster

This collage was inspired by the art work The Schoolmaster (1955) by René Magritte.

It’s nighttime. A figure viewed from the back, wearing a dark hat and jacket and crowned by a bright quarter moon, looks out over the sleeping houses. Magritte often dressed in this way – a very bourgeois and classic silhouette behind which hid an artist whose ideas were in fact anything but conventional. This enigmatically-titled painting was originally accompanied by a poem by his friend Marcel Lecomte: ‘He alone can tell us about the objects of the Universe in a way that surprises both us and them.’ The Schoolmaster could well be a metaphor for the artist Magritte teaching the mystery of the Universe.