The Present

Ëåîíàðä Çèíîâüåâ
The Present?
I thought it said “the President”!
It felt like Magritte
was a forward thinker.

Wait, what?
A bird wearing a coat?
The whole premise of this painting
is absurd!
Or is it based
on a true life photograph?
I would love to hear him explain
this one.

…the human eye just doesn’t “look” right… absolutely void of any emotion. Stagnant, and for such a visually intimidating and dominantly physical bird to be stuffed with a vacuum of emptiness… Are those supposed to be eggs? Reminds me of Star Trek planets… oh, well… it def. don’t do it for me, for sure.

Bifurcated gold balls:
who’d have guessed?

1936. An alteration had to be made to the artist’s work, as he explained: “One night, I woke up in a room with a sleeping bird, and I thought I was an egg in the cage… and I was shocked by this connection between – a cage and an egg. Then I was shocked by this link between objects – the cage and the egg, so I tried to express this dance by portraying them as unrelated objects.”

In case you remember what happened in Europe in 1939, and while bearing in mind that the artist belonged to the Surrealist Movement, the painting speaks for itself – and in the context of those circumstances.

E sempre bravo!