The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (La trahison des images [Ceci n'est pas une pipe])

© C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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misleading, irony, french, pipe, simple, surreal, writing, brown, black, tan
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The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (La trahison des images [Ceci n'est pas une pipe])

Belgium, 1929
Paintings; scrolls
Oil on canvas
23 3/4 × 31 15/16 × 1 in.
Purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection (78.7)
Modern Art
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

La Trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) (The Treachery of images [This is not a pipe]) is one of Rene Magritte's Surrealist masterpieces and an icon of modern art....
La Trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) (The Treachery of images [This is not a pipe]) is one of Rene Magritte's Surrealist masterpieces and an icon of modern art. Heavily influenced by Freudian psychology, Surrealism represented a reaction against the "Rationalism" that some believed led Europe into the horrors of World War I. It attempted to join the realm of dreams and fantasy to the everyday world. Magritte's word-image paintings are treatises on the impossibility of reconciling words, images, and objects. La Trahison des images challenges the linguistic convention of identifying an image of something as the thing itself. At first, Magritte's point appears simplistic, almost to the point of provocation: A painting of a pipe is not the pipe itself. In fact, this work is highly paradoxical. Its realistic style and caption format recall advertising, a field in which Magritte had worked. Advertisements, however, elicit recognition without hesitation or equivocation; this painting causes the viewer to ponder its conflicting messages. Magritte's use of text in his word-image paintings influenced a younger generation of conceptually oriented artists, including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Edward Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.
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