A reflection on Rene Magritte’s The Eternally Obvious and the female nude

Rene Magritte’s The Eternally Obvious, created in 1930, is currently displayed in the Menil Collection. It depicts the frontal nude of a woman, cut into five isolated paintings that serve to create the entire full-length portrait. The way the piece is mounted onto an acrylic sheet is meant to give the piece an almost life-size view of a woman, and that we as the viewer can stand in front of her almost as if she exists in the space of the real world. By deconstructing the nude, Magritte creates a nonconsensual three-way relationship between him, as the artist, us, the viewer as the unwilling voyeur, and the subject as the person being preyed on.