1. RenĂŠ Magritte, The Black Flag (1937) oil on canvas, at the National Galleries Scotland.
2. JG Ballard, News from the Sun (1981).
âThe Black Flagâ may refer to the German bombing of the small Spanish town of Guernica in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Magritte later wrote that the picture âgave a foretaste of the terror which would come from flying machines, and I am not proud of it.â In contrast to artists who praised technology, Magritte was showing that machines have their darker side.
From the Ballard Concordance, an alphabetical list of all the principal words used in his novels and non-fiction work, with their immediate contexts (10 words before and after) searchable by word. Here: âAirplaneâ used 8 times.