Magritte said that painting is the art of getting a reaction out of the viewer and letting the experience roll from there.

He once created an entire show specifically to offend Max Ernst and the rest of the Parisian surrealists; with much success. In the case of Legend of the Centuries that reaction might be "Why is one chair sitting on another chair?",  while flashing back to that Rick and Morty bit where chairs sit on humans and order pizza.

While the rest of fine art was having a contest to see who could come up with the most pointless title for their paintings (Orange and Red on Red, thank you Rothko, helpful, really), Magritte was experimenting with the kind of captions the hip kids from high school use with their selfies now.

The painting is named after Victor Hugo’s sprawling, 330-page epic poem which attempts to chart the evolution and history of humans. OK, if the stone chair is a little joke about how ancient chairs would look if Hugo had written about chairs instead of people, then it’s not exactly glowing praise: poor little contemporary chair looks like a cheap toy compared to epic chair of legend which probably never even existed. But it could lead you to a million trains of thought that you haven’t ridden since your “cool” uncle introduced you to pot when you were 14.

In that sense this work is more like a really expensive meme for your wall than a pretty picture of chairs: funny image + text = many feels. Part of Meme-gritte’s approach is that he doesn’t challenge the viewer’s perception of art. This is clearly a painting, if a weird one – it’s got perspective, representation, etc. Much the same way that a meme doesn’t challenge your perception of your computer screen. Magritte is more interested in making you chuckle, frown, and fall sharply into the void.

But then, he also put off a “slow suicide” (a metaphorical one but also, who knows…) because of he and his wife’s shared “disgust with being sincere.” Maybe it’s true that ancient humans were less terrible than modern ones, but that’s an obvious lesson beat your viewers on the head with. It’s better to just turn all the people into chairs and think about whether or not those waves in the background are surfable.