The Treachery of Images: Why It Is Not a Pipe
The Treachery of Images is a 1929 painting by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It shows a plain brown pipe with a line of careful handwriting beneath it: Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
This is not a pipe. And Magritte was right. It is a painting of a pipe.
Those five French words have started more arguments than almost any sentence in art. Here is what the painting means, why it is not being contradictory, and why it became the seed of modern conceptual art.
Why it really is not a pipe
The joke feels like nonsense at first. There is a pipe, and the caption denies it. But Magritte is telling the plain truth, and once you see it you cannot unsee it, which I think is the whole gift of the painting.
You cannot pick up this pipe. You cannot fill it with tobacco, or light it, or smoke it. It has no weight and no smell. It is not a pipe at all: it is a picture of a pipe, an arrangement of paint on canvas that your brain reads as an object.
Magritte said that if he had written this is a pipe, he would have been lying. The words are not a riddle. They are a correction.
The image is not the thing
That small correction opens a large idea. We spend our lives treating pictures, words and symbols as if they were the things they stand for. A photograph of a friend is not the friend. The word water is not wet. A map is not the country.
Magritte painted the simplest possible example, a pipe, precisely because it is so ordinary, and forced you to notice the gap you normally ignore, the gap between a representation and reality.
The full title, The Treachery of Images, is the point: images betray us by pretending to be what they only depict. The Surrealism here is philosophy disguised as a school exercise.
The philosopher who wrote a book about it
The painting fascinated one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The French philosopher Michel Foucault was so taken with it that he wrote an entire essay named after the caption, This Is Not a Pipe, teasing out how word and image quarrel inside the frame.
That is rare company for a small painting of a pipe. Foucault used it to think about how language and images make meaning and fail to, and his essay helped turn Magritte's quiet visual joke into a landmark of modern thought as much as of art.
The grandfather of conceptual art
By insisting that a picture is only ever a picture, Magritte handed later artists a whole way of working. Conceptual art, in which the idea matters more than the object, traces a direct line back to this pipe.
So does every image that plays with the label under it.
You have seen its children everywhere: the endless memes and parodies of the form this is not a something, printed under a picture of exactly that something.
Every one of them is quoting a Belgian painting from 1929, usually without knowing it. Few works have been copied so widely while being understood so rarely.
In Los Angeles, and the first pipe
The Treachery of Images is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1978, and it is not for sale. As one of the pillars of the museum's modern collection it is treated as beyond price.
Magritte made several versions and variations of the pipe over his life, but this large early one is the original that started it all.
The Treachery of Images, quick answers
What does The Treachery of Images mean? That an image is not the thing it shows. You cannot smoke the painted pipe, so it is not a pipe but a picture of one. Images pretend to be what they only depict.
Why does it say this is not a pipe? Because it is literally true. It is a painting, not a pipe. Magritte said writing this is a pipe would have been a lie.
Who painted it and when? Rene Magritte, the Belgian Surrealist, in 1929.
What is the French caption? Ceci n'est pas une pipe, which means this is not a pipe.
Where is The Treachery of Images? The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
If this painting pulled you in, you will love these too:
Inside Monet house at Giverny, room by room, including his own bedroom
The Ambassadors, detail by detail, the object at the bottom that only works from one side
Luncheon of the Boating Party, detail by detail, who everybody at that table actually was
The lesson hidden in a schoolboy's copybook
Notice how it is painted. The pipe is neat and slightly dull, the lettering is the careful cursive of a school copybook, the whole thing looks like a page from a French primer teaching a child the word for pipe.
That is deliberate. Magritte took the exact form we use to teach children that a picture and a word equal a thing, and used it to prove the opposite.
The most subversive idea in modern art arrived dressed as a spelling lesson.
You can see The Treachery of Images in person at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For more by the artist, browse the Metropolitan Museum collection.
Questions about the pipe
What do the words under the pipe say? They read, in French, Ceci n est pas une pipe, which means This is not a pipe.
Why is it not a pipe? Because it is only a picture of a pipe. You cannot fill it or smoke it, so the image is not the thing itself.
What is the point of the painting? It exposes the gap between images, words and reality, a puzzle that has fascinated artists and philosophers ever since.
Where is The Treachery of Images? It hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Who painted it? Rene Magritte, in 1929, one of the sharpest minds of Surrealism.