The Treachery Of Images
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The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images) is a painting by Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, famous for its inscription Ceci n'est pas une pipe (pronunciation (help·info)) or this is not a pipe. It is currently housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, California and was previously housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The picture shows a pipe that looks as though it might come from a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe; it is an image of a pipe. As Magritte himself commented: "Just try to stuff it with tobacco! If I were to have had written on my picture 'This is a pipe' I would have been lying."
Another interpretation of the piece is that even if there were a pipe attached to a canvas, the statement could still be true. Seen on a different (but equally true) scale the "pipe" would appear as a configuration of molecules, which happen to normally convey themselves as a pipe to us.
In one sense, the "pipe" is more truly a pipe than any other: it is the pipe in general, not the pipe with this stem or that, or with a chip in it etc.
The effect of the painting could make the viewer re-evaluate their casual interpretation of their environment. Certainly, it disturbs the habitual trust we place in names and their (inadequate) ability to describe an thing / person / concept.
French literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox in his 1973 book, This is not a Pipe (English edition, 1991).
Douglas Hofstadter also discusses this painting and other images like it in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, a treatise on formal systems and intelligence.
Magritte extends the style and effect of La Trahison des Images in The Key of Dreams, 1930.
