The Treachery of Images is a 1929 painting by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It shows a plain pipe above a line of French handwriting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," which means "This is not a pipe." Magritte meant it literally: the object is a picture of a pipe, and no one can fill it or smoke it.
Magritte said as much himself, in a conversation published in Harry Torczyner's book on him. "Ah, the famous pipe," he remembered. "How people reproached me for it!" His defense was short: "So, if I had written on my picture, This is a pipe, I'd have been lying!"
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Magritte's answer is hard to argue with, and it covers only half of what is on the canvas.
The other half is the sentence. It sits under the pipe in neat cursive, and it opens with a word built to point: "this." If the word points at the drawing, Magritte is right and the sentence is true. Nothing in the painting says that it does. It could as easily point at the sentence itself, or at the whole canvas, and a sentence is no more a pipe than a picture is.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault built a whole essay on that gap, convinced that the painter had cut the word loose from everything it might point at.
What did Foucault make of the word "this"?
Foucault started from the word itself. "This" has nothing fixed to point at: the drawn pipe, the canvas and the sentence it begins are all candidates, and nothing in the painting chooses among them.
Then he asked where the contradiction that viewers feel is supposed to live. A contradiction, he observed, can exist only between two statements. A picture makes no statement, so there is nothing in it to contradict.
The strangeness comes from our habit of reading a caption as a comment on the image above it. I find that more convincing than the usual reading, in which the sentence simply contradicts the picture.
Magritte answered with a point of his own. In a 1966 letter to Foucault he wrote that only thought is capable of resemblance, by reproducing what the world offers it, which puts the resemblance in the mind of the viewer and leaves the canvas out of it.
That same year he painted a second picture on the theme, Les Deux Mystères. A pipe is drawn on a blackboard that stands on an easel, with the same sentence written beneath it, and a larger pipe floats in the air above.
Foucault wrote about both paintings. His essay appeared in 1968 and came out as a book, This Is Not a Pipe, in 1973, almost forty years after Magritte had argued the same point in print.
What You'll Discover
What Magritte was arguing in 1929.
Where the painting went before Los Angeles.
Who borrowed the idea afterward.