The Treachery of Images

René Magritte, 1929

A Belgian guy paints a pipe. Look at the pipe. It's really well painted. The kind you'd see in a catalog, right above "Makes a great gift for Dad." Then underneath it, he writes: Ceci n'est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. Foucault wrote a book about it. Undergrads cite it at parties. It's been called one of the most important artworks of the twentieth century. Magritte would have found all of that very silly. He thought the answer was obvious. First, that pipe. The reason it's painted like a catalog illustration is that Magritte used to do catalog illustrations. Before he was Magritte, he worked in advertising. Wallpaper, cigar posters. For years. This is just what he knew how to paint. Now see how careful the script is? Like a kid doing his handwriting homework? That's because it's copied from French primary-school reading books. Picture on top, sentence below. Voici un chien. Here is a dog. Voici une pipe. Here is a pipe. Magritte grew up on those books. He took the exact layout and blew it up. So what you're looking at is an ad. And a children's book. Two formats that have been confidently telling you what stuff is for your entire life. And this one is correcting itself. Magritte's explanation, when a reporter finally pinned him down: "Could you stuff my pipe? No. It's a representation, is it not? So if I had written 'This IS a pipe,' I'd have been lying." That's the whole painting. He smoked a pipe. He painted a pipe. He pointed out, for the record, that the painting is not, in fact, a pipe. You can't smoke it. It's a rectangle of pigment. That's all he meant. Everyone else built a philosophy department around it. Magritte was in a three-piece suit, in his dining room in Brussels, commuting from his bedroom to his easel. While the world fought over what he meant, he just kept going. Little joke. Little joke. Little joke.

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