Golconda

René Magritte named this painting after an ancient Indian city legendary for its diamond mines and wealth. The scene shows dozens of identical men in bowler hats and dark overcoats floating (or falling, or rising) against a pale blue sky, arranged in a regular grid before Belgian townhouses.

The men appear simultaneously like raindrops and levitating figures, their conformity both comical and unsettling. Magritte frequently used the bowler-hatted businessman as a symbol of bourgeois anonymity, the uniform that erases individuality. Whether the figures are ascending, descending, or suspended remains deliberately ambiguous.

The painting resides at The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, one of the finest Surrealist collections in America.