The False Mirror

A single enormous eye fills this canvas, but instead of a normal iris you find a stretch of blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. René Magritte painted "The False Mirror" in 1929, placing a solid black pupil dead center like a dark sun hanging in daylight. The effect is calm and unsettling all at once, which is exactly what Magritte was after. As a leading voice in Surrealism, he built his career on taking familiar things and tilting them just enough to make your brain do a double take.

The title works like a puzzle you cannot quite solve. Most of us imagine the eye as an honest window onto the world, yet Magritte calls it a false mirror, hinting that what we see might be more invention than truth. Is the eye letting the sky in, or dreaming it up? The painting stays quiet on the matter, and people have been debating it for close to a hundred years.

One fun detail: the photographer Man Ray owned this work for a time and said it "sees as much as it itself is seen," a line that captures the strange back and forth between viewer and painting. It now hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where visitors tend to stop and stare, half expecting the eye to blink.