From a dealer’s wall to Foucault to LACMA

Here is the picture’s life as an object, its provenance (the documented chain of who has owned a work of art, in order, from the painter’s hand to wherever it sits now). It is a tidy chain. Magritte painted it in 1929, and in this period his work in Brussels was handled by the Galerie Le Centaure, the gallery that represented him. Around 1932 the painting passed to E. L. T. Mesens(Edouard Léon Théodore Mesens), a Belgian Surrealist who was both an artist and a dealer and a close associate of Magritte, and who assembled one of the important early Surrealist collections.

In 1957 it crossed the Atlantic, to the American painter and collector William Copley (1919–1996) and his wife Noma. Copley is a fine figure to have on a provenance line, because he was not a banker buying trophies; he was a working Surrealist painter himself, and an energetic, generous dealer-collector who did as much as anyone to carry European Surrealism into American art. Then, in 1978, the painting was sold at auction and bought by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, “purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection,” accession number 78.7. Figures sometimes cited for that 1978 sale come from secondary reports, not LACMA’s own record. It has hung at LACMA ever since.

A point worth pinning down, because Magritte muddied it himself. He liked this idea so much that he came back to the captioned pipe more than once across his life. There is a later version, a 1964 gouache (paint with a chalky, opaque finish) sometimes titled L’air et la chanson (“The Tune and Also the Words”), now at the Art Institute of Chicago, with the same line in it. And in 1966, near the end of his life, he painted Les deux mystères (“The Two Mysteries”), which cheekily shows the captioned-pipe picture itself, sitting on an easel, with a second, larger pipe floating beside it. So more than one Magritte pipe says “this is not a pipe.” The one that counts, the original and the canonical, the one this whole story is about, is the 1929 oil now at LACMA. That is the picture shown here. The 1964 gouache and the 1966 easel-painting are its later cousins, not it.

The picture’s deepest afterlife, though, is not about owners at all. It is about a philosopher. The Frenchman Michel Foucault (1926–1984), one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, was so taken with Magritte’s pipe that he wrote a short essay on it and borrowed its line for the title: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The essay first appeared in a journal in 1968 and was expanded into a small book in 1973; the English translation, by James Harkness, carries the plain title This Is Not a Pipe.Foucault used the pipe to take apart the old assumption that a picture both resembles its subject and silently asserts “this is that.” Magritte, he argued, had pried resemblance and assertion apart and left them lying on the table for everyone to see.

Partly through Foucault, and partly through sheer endless reproduction (the painting has been parodied, T-shirted, and quoted more than almost any image in modern art), the captioned pipe became a permanent fixture. It is now the stock emblem of a single idea that has long since escaped the painting: that a representation is not the reality it stands for, that the map is not the territory, that the picture of the thing is not the thing. A small brown pipe over a tidy line of schoolroom cursive, painted in Brussels in 1929 and hanging today in Los Angeles, turned out to be one of the most quietly consequential arguments ever made in paint. It said, plainly and truthfully, the one thing realistic pictures had spent five hundred years quietly not saying: this is not a pipe.