The word-and-image experiments

The pipe did not arrive out of nowhere. By 1929 Magritte had spent the better part of two years in Paris, working through a run of pictures that scholars now call his word-image paintings, all of them probing one stubborn little gap. The gap is this. When you think about a pipe, three completely different things get fused in your mind so fast you never notice the seam: there is the thing itself (a real pipe you could smoke), there is the picture of the thing (a painted or drawn pipe), and there is the wordfor the thing (the letters p-i-p-e, or the sound “pipe”). We treat all three as if they were the same. They are not. None of them is the others. A drawing of a pipe is not a pipe; the word “pipe” is not a pipe; and a picture of a pipe with the word underneath is not a pipe twice over.

Magritte made that gap the subject of a whole series. He would paint an object and then label it with the wrong word, or paint a word where the object should be, or set image and text side by side so they argued. The raw move, a word that fights the object it labels, was not invented here. The Dadaists had already mislabeled things to jam the machinery of sense: Francis Picabia, in his mechanical drawings for the journal 391 around 1917, drew a propeller and captioned it âne(“donkey”). What Magritte added was rigor and calm. He narrowed the prank into a single clean proposition about representation and painted it with a straight face. The captioned pipe is the cleanest and most ruthless of his word-image works, because it strips the experiment down to one object, one sentence, and a blank field, and then refuses to blink.

The clearest proof of what he was after sits in another document from the very same year. In 1929 Magritte published a short illustrated essay, Les mots et les images (“Words and Images”), in the Surrealist journal La Révolution surréaliste (“The Surrealist Revolution”). It is not a painting. It is a page of small diagrams and blunt propositions about exactly this gap, and one of its lines is the key to the whole pipe: an object never performs the same function as its name or its image. That is the captioned pipe in a sentence. The picture and the essay are twins, made in the same year by a man who had decided, very deliberately, to put the thing and the picture and the word in front of you at once and let them fail to line up.

Magritte was usually cool and unhelpful when people asked him to explain his pictures, but he did once explain this one, and it is worth quoting in full because it is the painting talking. The remark is recorded by the collector and writer Harry Torczyner, in his book Magritte: Ideas and Images (1977), and it runs:

“The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!”

That is the whole defense, and it is airtight. The painted pipe cannot be stuffed, cannot be smoked, because it is a representation (a stand-in, an image of a thing, not the thing). So the only honest caption is the one that denies it. To have written “This is a pipe” under a picture of a pipe would have been the lie. “This is not a pipe” is the truth. Magritte repeated the point in different words over the years; this wording is the one recorded by Torczyner. He was not playing a trick on the viewer. He was refusing to play the trick that every other picture of a pipe plays automatically: the silent, confident lie that says this is the thing, when it never is.