Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

The reference is to surrealist René Magritte‘s “The Son of Man”, a painting that combines Magritte’s focus on identity (often involving a figure much like his own) and his use of an apple as a thematic element:

This painting has been much parodied. Here’s a t-shirt design (“Storybook Surrealism”) by Brian Cook that incorporates the Disney Snow White’s poisoned apple:

A photograph of juggler Kellin Quinn of Circus Harmony, in an act based on Magritte:

And on the Deviant Art site, a sculpture by Nubob:

Now from Rhymes, let’s turn to Bizarro:

This refers to another famous painting by Magritte, “The Betrayal of Images”, with its discordancy between image and text:

This one too has been massively parodied, to the extent that Television Tropes & Idioms has an entry for “This is Not X”. Here’s one with a bilingual pun (depicting a marshmallow Peep):

Finally, back to Magritte himself, now combining the apple theme and the Not An X theme:

This entry was posted on July 19, 2012 at 5:57 am and is filed under Art/lit/music/film, Language play, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.