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The man and woman in the painting seem so close and at the same time so distant. The white fabric on the faces of the lovers deprives the lovers of the various senses that are normally required during an embrace: sight, touch; smell, hearing and even taste are absent under those strange veils that shackle the faces of the two. This paradoxical distance lends beauty and mystery to Magritte’s work.

The artist has left the piece open to interpretation. Some see the painting as a reference to the artist’s adolescent suffering after his mother’s suicide, when her body was pulled out of the river, the drowned woman’s head was wrapped around the hem of her nightgown.

For others, Lovers with hidden faces tell us that love is blind. They see nothing around them: neither the true faces of their lovers, nor themselves.