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Polkadot Cereal 1 

Polkadot Cereal

Ms. Sobrero

English3AP

September 19, 2011

Size Difference

As I was browsing Google like one would browse a textbook, I found this intensely

curious painting done by Rene Margritte of a room containing a handful of oversized household

item placed in various locations throughout the cube-like complex. I thought to myself, “What

the eff?” This painting struck me harder than a jousting knight (metaphorically speaking of 

course), because it was so incredibly different. I mean just about everyone has seen Andy

Warhol’s rendition of Marilyn Monroe or Eschers’s brain cramping painting of the twisting

staircases, but here was a painting that deserved that glory and fame. I did a bit more research on

this painting and found that the title of this peculiar painting was “Les Valeurs personnelles”

which translates from French into personal values.

Les Valeurs personnelles was painted in 1952, during the postwar era in which the notion

of science and human nature was questioned highly. I believe that it was this uncertainty that

drove the creation of this painting. Like how after the war, things we thought we were certain of,

such as the good science can bring to mankind as a whole, became a matter of question and

ambiguity, so were the everyday object’s physical size. The object’s size may seem like a trivial

characteristic to the identity of the object, however both color and shape doesn’t affect the

effectiveness of the object as much as the size would (a blue comb and a red comb is still a

comb. Same with shape, a circular comb and a square comb still works fine, as long as it is still a

comb.) So essentially, changing the size of the object is effectively twisting the identity of the

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Polkadot Cereal 2 

object, since the object is identified by its efficiency. So a theme of this highly curious painting

would have to be uncertainty.

Les Valeurs personnelles depicts a cube-like room with a cloudy sky plastered as its

wallpaper. In the room there is a colossal bar of pink soap sitting idly on a greenish brown rug, a

mammoth clear goblet that reflects bits of light to give it a nice glare, a monolithic leopard print

comb placed in an upright postion on a surprisingly normal bed leaning against the wall under a

spot of water damage, a mighty pink matchstick lying on the rug, and an enormous painter’s

brush gathering dust on top of a normal closet. The weird thing about the comb, besides its size,

is that it leaves nearly no wrinkles on the bed it’s on, suggesting that it doesn’t weigh as much as

it looks. This also brings up the interesting question “is it the objects that are enormous or the

room that is miniature?”