A photograph of a masked Christie’s attendant in a bowler hat standing just in front of the 1959 René Magritte painting “Le mois des vendanges” (The Time of the Harvest), that was taken on March 16 as the surrealist painting was going up for auction on March 23, has cut an uncanny image of the Covid-19 pandemic reality of our present world and a worthy candidate for the most accidentally perfect quarantine art.

If you were just presented with the photograph without any background information, you would think you are looking at a masked man in a Christie’s apron and a bowler hat standing inside a dark room, staring straight ahead, while an infinite number of unmasked figures in bowler hats peers sedately in through a window behind him. As the Christie’s attendant almost becomes part of the artwork, the image strikes you as reminiscent of the social distancing and separation we have all had to practice while in quarantine as we communicate with family and neighbors through windows or from distances away.

But in reality, this photograph wasn’t intended to be the representation of quarantine art that it inadvertently became. It is just what it is -- a promotional photo that was taken ahead of Christie’s “The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale" on March 23 where the painting which Christie’s describes as the Belgian surrealist artist’s most iconic, was set to go under the hammer in the auction house’s London store.

The 1959 Le mois des vendanges painting is considered one of René Magritte’s seminal works, featuring the mysterious bowler hat–clad figure that is the artist’s hallmark. It is one of the four largest works by Magritte still in private hands. The March 16 auction was the first time it came to the market since 1963, when the late Franco-Brazilian financier, Claude Hersaint, acquired it for the equivalent of £6,000 (approx. $8,000 or P380,000).

Of the disconcerting composition of the painting, René Magritte himself had described in his letters that it is “the one which best reminds us how strange reality can be if one has 'a sense of reality.'” In 2021, in the context of the masked attendant photograph reimagining of the surrealist painting, these words are even more unsettlingly fitting and prophetic. Who among us does not have “a sense of reality” that isn’t strange after everything that has transpired in the past year? We can mostly agree that ‘season of surrealism’ best describes the way we all feel since 2020.

Perhaps the painting will go on to be all-fulfilling and the sea of unmasked men under the blue sky outside the window is a foreshadowing of a soon-to-come post-pandemic reality without social distancing, masks, and quarantine!