Golconda

Golconda, painted in 1953, is one of René Magritte's most celebrated and immediately recognizable images, a deadpan vision of the surreal that hides its strangeness beneath a veneer of order. Dozens of nearly identical men in dark overcoats and bowler hats float in the air above a row of red-roofed bourgeois buildings, arranged in an even, repeating grid against a partly cloudy sky. They are utterly still and expressionless, neither rising nor falling with any urgency, as though gravity has simply ceased to apply to them. Whether they are ascending, descending, or simply suspended is left completely unresolved.\n\nThe painting takes its title from Golconda, the ruined city in India once famed as a source of extraordinary diamonds, a reference chosen by Magritte's poet friend Louis Scutenaire to suggest fabulous, improbable wealth raining from the sky. The bowler-hatted figure was a recurring presence in Magritte's work — a symbol of the anonymous, conformist modern man — and by multiplying him into an infinite pattern, the artist amplifies the tension between the uncanny and the mundane. The work is oil on canvas, measuring approximately 80 by 100 centimeters, and is held in the permanent collection of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, where it is one of the most visited paintings in the museum.