¶ … Le Viol (rape) by surrealist painter Rene Magritte. The painting was done in 1934 and it was clearly meant to shock the viewer as it is a repulsive representation of a woman's face. However, instead of eyes she has breasts, instead of a mouth she has pubic hair that one assumes is covering a vagina, and instead of a nose Magritte has placed a human belly button in that spot. There are many possible suggestions that an alert observer could present in terms of what the artist had in mind when he created this piece (it was first a drawing and later Magritte produced an oil on canvas painting from the drawing). One idea that has value is that Magritte was not-so-subtly protesting against rape. He presented a woman's face as her anatomy, as though perhaps it would be her destiny to have her breasts and her vagina be a focal point for men who may wish to violate her (or a woman).

The point of the dramatic artwork is that the face made up of body parts and hence it appears to be blind, dumb (unable to speak), and basically just a sexual object with hair. Susan Guar explains that the artist may have been subscribing to the position of one of William Faulkner's "…fictional surrogates, a man who celebrates the feminine ideal as 'a virgin with no legs to leave me, no arms to hold me, no head to talk to me'" (Gubar, 1987, p. 722). Faulkner went on to describe that person with "no head to talk to me" as "merely [an] articulated genital organ" (Gubar, 722).

It is frightening, hideously chauvinistic...

It "fetishizes female sexuality," Gubar explains. The painting doesn't even really have a vagina (only pubic hair) and moreover, Magritte has basically destroyed a woman's face, and Magritte is said to have offered this explanation: "In this painting, a woman's face is made up of the essential features of her body" (http://onesurrealistaday.com).
About Rene Magritte and Modern Art

Rene Magritte was born on November 21, 1898, in Belgium and passed away on August 15, 1967 in Belgium. He is quoted praising "…that pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial," and his painting of Le Viol certainly puts the way men sometimes view women on trial (Gale Biography In Context). Magritte had been drawing and painting since the age of 12, and when he was 14 years of age he suffered an emotional blow when his mother drowned herself.

He attended the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels between the years 1916 and 1918, and along with a number of other young talented artists he co-published the review, Au Volant! (Gale, p. 1). By the age of 22 he was using an abstract idiom that was based on "Cubo-Futurist principles," according to the Gale biography. He served briefly in the military, married Georgette Berger, and earned a living working in a wallpaper factory and designing posters.

Magritte had a revelation in the early 1920s after seeing a reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico's painting The Song of Love;…