Golconda is an oil painting created by Réne Magritte in 1953. Magritte was a surrealist artist of the 1900s. During the time period of the painting, the 1950s, things were rapidly changing; world War II had just ended, soldiers began coming home, women returned to their jobs as “housewives” and left or were forced out of their factory jobs. The economy was booming from wartime production. There was a large switch from blue-collar jobs to white-collar work because of new businesses. Americans began living in suburbs and a sense of uniformity was evident. Magritte’s Golconda features many instances of symmetry and similarities. The men in the painting are freestanding and arranged in symmetric lines horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. The…show more content… The men wearing the exact same outfits and being arranged systematically implies that they are carbon-copies of each other and that men in the 1950s had become indistinguishable. Their tradition businessman dress represents how the tradition style returned in this time period. Women mostly stopped working in factories and men returned as the primary provider of the family. The countless number of workers in the painting is conveying how so many people were employed in the 1950’s because of the economic boom. The uniformity within the housing is a reference to people living in the suburbs in the 1950s. All the houses looked in the same in the suburbs and neighbors would have the same items, like new televisions and cars. The overall meaning of Magritte’s painting can be deduced from all of these signs of uniformity. The meaning of the painting is that the extreme conformity in the 1950’s negatively took away from the individuality of a person. The faces of the workers cannot be seen. Usually facial features define people and make the unique, so by the removal of the features, the workers are all one in the same. They live cookie-cutter lives and Margritte comments that this was a serious issue of the
