The Treachery of Images
A pipe, and beneath it the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” – this is not a pipe. Magritte is right: it is a picture of a pipe.
The clear, almost advertising-like style makes the paradox even sharper.
René Magritte painted The Treachery of Images in 1929. The Belgian artist was then living in a suburb of Paris and was in contact with the French Surrealists around André Breton. Before and alongside his painting he worked on commercial illustration and wallpaper designs, and this shows in his clear, simple style. The painting is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The picture shows a pipe, painted in profile against a pale, plain background. The pipe is large and distinct, with a dark, polished bowl and a light mouthpiece. Beneath it, in neat handwriting, are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, this is not a pipe. There is nothing else in the picture.
The composition resembles a page in a schoolbook or an advertising sign, where an image is explained by a caption. The order familiar from picture dictionaries is used here to create confusion. The pipe and the text belong together, yet they contradict each other.
The colours are muted and naturalistic. The pipe has a warm brown tone and a glossy highlight that gives it volume. The background is even and without detail. Magritte painted in oil on canvas with a smooth, almost impersonal surface in which the brushstrokes are invisible. The neutral style makes the viewer believe the image at first and then be tricked by the text.
The point is that a picture of a pipe is not a pipe. You cannot fill it or smoke it. Magritte wanted to show that words, images and objects are different things and that we easily confuse them. In the same year he published a series of drawings in a Surrealist journal exploring the relationship between word and image. The painting’s title, which suggests that images betray us, reinforces the idea.
The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote an entire book about the painting, entitled Ceci n’est pas une pipe, in which he analysed how Magritte severs the link between resembling something and asserting something. The work has since become a standard example in philosophy, semiotics and the theory of language.
Magritte himself returned to the motif several times, for instance in the painting The Two Mysteries of 1966, in which the pipe and the picture with its caption stand in a room. The Treachery of Images has inspired advertising, cartoons and countless variations. It shows that Surrealism was not only about dreams but also about making us doubt what we think we see. In 1930 Magritte returned to Brussels, where he lived for the rest of his life. He became one of the best-known Surrealists, but his style differed from that of Dalí, for example, in being calm, matter-of-fact and almost dry.