SFMOMA, Part 16: Floor 2, section 1900 to Now.
On Floor 2, in the 1900 to Now galleries, there is a bedroom where the walls are made of sky and the comb is bigger than the bed.
That is the whole painting, and it is enough. Personal Values is a room — a bed, a mirrored armoire, a couple of rugs, the ordinary furniture of a life — and scattered through it are objects that have lost all sense of proportion. A comb towers over the bed like a monument. A shaving brush stands as tall as a column. A match, a bar of soap, a wine goblet: each one swollen to a size that makes it useless. The walls, where walls should be, are clouds. Blue sky with white clouds, floor to ceiling, the way a child's drawing does the sky. You are inside and outside at the same time. The room is a room and it is also the weather.
The first thing your brain does is try to fix it. Maybe the furniture is small. Maybe the objects are far away. Maybe you are looking through the wrong end of something. None of these work, and that failure is the painting. Magritte has removed the one thing you need to make sense of a room — reliable scale — and left everything else exactly where it should be. The bed is a bed. The armoire is an armoire. Only the sizes are lying.
René Magritte painted Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values) in 1952, in oil on canvas, 31-1/2 × 39-3/8 inches — 80 × 100 cm. SFMOMA acquired it in 1998 through a purchase made possible by a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis. It is one of the cornerstones of the museum's modern collection, and it was the centerpiece of SFMOMA's 2018 worldwide-exclusive exhibition of Magritte's late paintings.
The easy reading is that this is a dream. Oversized objects, sky for walls, the logic of sleep — it has all the furniture of a dream, and Magritte is filed under Surrealism, and the file seems to fit. But Magritte hated that reading, and he said so for forty years. His paintings are not dreams. They are problems. Each one takes something you think you understand — a room, a comb, the sky — and rearranges the terms until you realize you never understood it at all. The mystery, he insisted, is not in the strangeness. It is in the real.
1952: Hypertrophy
The 1950s were Magritte's "hypertrophy" period — his word, or at least the word the art historians use for what he was doing. Hypertrophy: the jarring alteration of scale among familiar objects to create an unnerving effect. Personal Values is the best-known expression of the idea, but it was not alone. The Listening Room (1952) fills an entire room with a single green apple. The Tomb of the Wrestlers (1960) does it with a rose. In each case a small, everyday object is enlarged to a grotesque size, packed into an interior from floor to ceiling, and left there to be dealt with.
What makes Personal Values the strongest of the series is that it does not do it once. It does it five times. The comb, the shaving brush, the goblet, the match, the soap — each one is wrong-sized, each one wrong in a different way, and the room has to absorb all of them at once. A single oversized object is a joke or a symbol. Five of them is a system failure. The painting is not showing you a strange thing. It is showing you a world where the agreement about size has been canceled.
And the agreement about size is one of the deepest agreements we have. A child learns it before language: the cup is smaller than the table, the table is smaller than the room, the room is smaller than the sky. Magritte understood that scale is not a visual property. It is a social contract. Break it, and you do not get whimsy. You get vertigo.
The objects
Look at what he chose, because the choices are the argument. These are not random objects. They are the instruments of the self: the comb and the shaving brush (grooming, the face you present), the soap (washing, the body underneath), the match (fire, the small domestic magic), the goblet (drinking, the evening ritual). The French title — Les valeurs personnelles — means "personal values," and also, more literally, "personal effects": the things you own, the things that are yours. This is a still life of identity, except the identity has outgrown its container.
The comb is the one that gets you. It rises over the bed like a headboard designed by a megalomaniac, its teeth fine and exact — Magritte painted it with the same deadpan precision he brought to everything, which is what makes it unbearable. A sloppy giant comb would be a cartoon. This one is rendered like a product photograph, every tooth in place, and the care is the horror. Someone took the time to get this exactly right.
The shaving brush stands on the armoire like a trophy. The goblet on the floor is the height of a small child. The match leans against nothing. The bar of soap sits on the rug like a monument to cleanliness. None of them can be used. That is the point the title is making: these are your personal values, your personal effects, the objects by which you maintain yourself — and they have become too large to handle. The self-care kit has staged a revolt.
The sky
Then there are the walls. Magritte opens the flat planes of the room to a cloud-filled sky — blue, bright, the daytime sky of a Belgian summer — and the effect is not freedom. It is exposure. A bedroom with sky for walls is a bedroom with no privacy. The most interior space, the room where you sleep and undress and are unobserved, has been given the most exterior surface. You cannot be alone in this room because the sky is watching.
This is the Magritte move that separates him from every other surrealist. Dalí gives you the dreamscape — melting, burning, obviously unreal. Magritte gives you the real with one term changed, painted in a style so flat and exact that it reads as documentation. The sky is not a fantasy here. It is wallpaper. The painting insists, with a straight face, that this is what the room looks like. Your discomfort is your problem.
He painted it slowly, which matters. His dealer in the 1950s, Alexander Iolas, assumed Personal Values had been done quickly — the style is so clean it looks effortless. Magritte corrected him in a series of letters: it took at least two months. He considered every detail, revised and revised, until it reached what he called "a state of grace." Two months for a painting that looks like it was painted in an afternoon. The labor is invisible and the invisibility is the labor. A dream would be fast. A problem takes two months.
1898–1952: The Belgian
René Magritte was born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, and he lived the least sensational life of any major surrealist, which may be why his paintings are the most unsettling. No exile, no scandal, no lobster telephones. He married Georgette Berger in 1922 and stayed married to her. He lived in Brussels. He painted in a small studio. The wildness is all in the work, which is the correct place for it.
He had his experiments — the late 1940s "vache" period, bright Fauvist parodies like Seasickness (1948), all loose brushwork and loud color. Then the 1950s, and the return to the exacting style: the flat light, the invisible brushwork, the compositions built like logic puzzles. Personal Values is the mature method at full power. Nothing is hidden. Everything is wrong.
The bowler-hatted men came later in the decade and became the brand — fifty versions between 1926 and 1966, the alter ego, The Son of Man (1964), the whole iconography. But the hypertrophy paintings are the deeper work, I think. The bowler hat is a symbol. The comb is a thing. Magritte's whole project was the difference between those two.
The painting, again
So back to Floor 2, back to the bedroom. Knowing all of this, the painting does not get stranger. It gets clearer, which is worse.
The room is yours. That is the thing the title will not let you dodge. Personal Values, personal effects — the objects are the ones on your own dresser, in your own bathroom. Magritte has taken the kit by which you assemble yourself every morning and scaled it past usability. The comb you run through your hair is now architecture. The brush you lather is now furniture. The self, maintained daily by these small instruments, has been confronted with the instruments at a scale where maintenance is impossible. You cannot groom yourself with a monument.
And the sky is still there, behind everything, blue and calm and completely indifferent. The painting's final joke — if it is a joke — is that the walls were never the problem. Open them to the sky and the room is still wrong. The wrongness was never in the enclosure. It was in the things.
Stand in front of it and let your brain keep trying to fix the scale. It will not succeed. That sustained failure, that two-months-of-labor refusal to resolve, is what Magritte called the mystery in the real. It is not in the clouds. It is in the comb. 🌁
Timeline — René Magritte / Personal Values
1898 — René Magritte born November 21, Lessines, Belgium
1922 — marries Georgette Berger
1927–1930 — Paris years; joins the Surrealists, then breaks with Breton
1948 — "vache" period: Fauvist parodies, bright colors, loose brushwork
1950s — return to the exacting style; the "hypertrophy" works: altered scale, familiar objects
1952 — paints Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values), oil on canvas; takes at least two months; writes to dealer Alexander Iolas about reaching "a state of grace"
1952 — also paints The Listening Room: a room filled by a single green apple
1960 — The Tomb of the Wrestlers: the hypertrophy idea pushed to its limit
1967 — dies August 15, Brussels
1998 — SFMOMA acquires Personal Values through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis
2018 — centerpiece of SFMOMA's worldwide-exclusive Magritte: The Fifth Season exhibition
Today — Personal Values on view, Floor 2, 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection, 151 Third Street — the comb still towering over the bed