A picture that turns into a sentence
The first thing in the painting is the plainest thing in the world: a pipe. A single brown tobacco pipe, bowl on the right, stem on the left, painted with the cool, even competence of an illustration in a catalogue. Underneath it, in a tidy, almost schoolroom hand, runs a line, and the line says: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” That is French for “This is not a pipe.” A picture of a pipe, captioned, in careful cursive, with the words this is not a pipe.
The instinct is to call it a joke, or a riddle, or some clever Surrealist nonsense. It is none of those. The sentence is literally true. The thing hanging on the wall of the museum in Los Angeles really is not a pipe. You cannot pick it up. You cannot fill it with tobacco. You cannot light it or smoke it. It is paint arranged on canvas in the shape of a pipe, which is to say it is an image of a pipe. And an image of a pipe is not a pipe, any more than a photograph of your mother is your mother, or the word “water” is something you can drink. Magritte has written a true sentence under a picture, and it only feels like a contradiction because we are so used to looking through a painted pipe to an imagined real one that we forget we are looking at paint.
The painter is René Magritte (1898–1967), a Belgian artist who, by 1929, had settled into the deadpan style that would define his Surrealism. Surrealism was the art movement, launched in Paris in 1924, that set out to unsettle ordinary reality, often by dredging up dream-logic and the unconscious mind. Most Surrealists did this with melting, fantastical, hallucinatory images. Magritte did the opposite. He painted ordinary objects with the bland clarity of a department-store ad, and then arranged them into a situation that quietly short-circuits the eye. The Treachery of Images is the purest thing he ever made in that vein, because there is no fantasy in it at all, just a pipe, a blank background, and a true sentence that feels like a lie.
The work travels under several names. Its formal title is The Treachery of Images, in French La trahison des images. The line painted across the bottom, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, is so famous that people often use it as the title too. The proper title is The Treachery of Images; the painted line is its most famous caption, and the two are different things. Magritte returned to this captioned pipe more than once across his career, so several pictures carry that line. The original and canonical one is the 1929 oil now in Los Angeles, and that distinction matters once the other versions come up.
Everything in this painting depends on one move that has to be felt before it can be thought about: the gap between a thing and the picture of a thing. The picture holds that gap open with both hands. The plain fact that started it is this: a true sentence, written under a picture, and the truth of it is the whole point.