Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
So said Sigmund Freud—or at least some people say he said it. But in the world of Freud’s followers, the Surrealists, nothing is ever quite what it seems, or what people say it is. Surely, you’ve seen La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images) by Surrealist master René François Ghislain Magritte (1898–1967)—the “most famous pipe in the world” which may or may not be a pipe at all. Just as surely, it’s worth another look.
Here, we share three insights that might help you see this familiar work in a new light.
It’s Not a Pipe (Or Is It?)
Visually, this is a very simple work of art. There are just two elements, both clearly rendered: a pipe, and a caption that reads Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). But how can we reconcile these two elements?
One plausible explanation is that it’s obviously a pipe and Magritte is just being contrary. This is the perspective behind the legal slang Magritte defense—a laughably self-defeating assertion. To cite one federal case: “A letter on attorney letterhead and signed by an attorney, containing a statement that no attorney was involved in its production, has a certain surreal quality. Cf. René Magritte, The Treachery of Images…”
Two sketches on letters written by surrealist Rene Magritte to poet Colinet. Photo by Tim Ireland/PA Images via Getty Images.
This isn’t just a lawyer’s over-literal reading. There’s ample precedent in the art historical canon. The Surrealists, and the Dadaists before them, sought to detonate the logic of language—in part to expose the underlying illogic of a society structured around written laws.
That’s how we get, for example, Francis Picabia’s incongruous technical drawings for the magazine 391 (1917–1924): a propeller labeled âne (donkey) or a saw sharpener labeled le papa (the daddy). And then there’s Magritte’s own track record of absurdist wordplay. His 1927 painting The Interpretation of Dreams mislabels several common household objects, while a 1928 composition depicts an empty picture frame leaning against a bare wall, its plaque reading paysage (landscape).
This fondness for negating apparent truths led Cubist master Albert Gleizes to remark that, for Dadaists and their successors, “Nothing exists.” But Magritte insisted that his most famous work wasn’t about nonsense or nihilism:
Ah, the famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So, if I had written on my picture, This is a pipe, I’d have been lying!
In this light, The Treachery of Images becomes a powerful meta-message, illustrating the sometimes-fraught relationship between the symbols we use and the objects they signify. This topic would become fertile ground for midcentury thinkers like George Box, who coined the proverb “All models are wrong,” and Alan Watts, who warned us against “eat[ing] the menu and not the dinner.”
One of Magritte’s many paintings revisiting the pipe motif on view at a press opening of the Magritte Museum in Belgium. Photo: John Thys/AFP via Getty Images.
So, it’s not a pipe, just an image of a pipe. But wait—says Michel Foucault—there’s more.
In his 1973 book This Is Not a Pipe, Foucault contends that the inscription acts as its own meta-message: “The sentence This is not a pipe is not a pipe.” After all, the word pipe conjures up the object just as the image does, but you can’t stuff it, either.
In other words, this very simple work of art gets complicated. As for reconciling its elements, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has housed the painting for the last half century, calls it simply an “impossibility.”
It Was Largely Ignored for Decades
Magritte painted The Treachery of Images when he was 30 years old and three years into a contract with Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels that enabled him to focus on his art full-time. Before that, he had worked in advertising, designing posters for rental cars and bouillon cubes in the popular Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles.
A postcard written by Paul Eluard to Rene Magritte is displayed at the Hotel Drouot, 2021. Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images.
Before the paint was even dry, the pipe caused a minor whirlwind in the Surrealist scene, garnering a mention in Salvador Dalí’s dispatches for La Publicitat and a winking reference in a treatise by André Breton and Paul Éluard.
But street cred doesn’t pay the bills. By the time the piece was put on public view—for just two weeks at the Palais de Beaux-Arts—Magritte’s contract had ended and he was back in the ad game. He had also, with some misgivings, joined the Communist Party.
In 1936, while designing pulpy film posters under the pseudonym Emair, Magritte landed a solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, for which he produced a smaller, English-language version of The Treachery of Images. The show was a flop. Nothing sold, and the critics were especially harsh:
Give [the surréalistes] an inch and they will run us out of breath…[Magritte’s] canvases are for the most part arid with respect to those qualities we call esthetic…[I]t proves possible to unpack a surréaliste’s whole bag of tricks without batting an eyelash…
During the 1940s, when Belgium was under the rule of the Wehrmacht, Magritte laid low. He wrote a friend, “I am not very keen to show ‘The Pipe,’ which might provide an excuse for having me shut up in an asylum.”
Such is the treachery of images in the darkest of times. In the postwar years, the artist made ends meet by forging Picassos and banknotes. It wasn’t until 1954 that The Treachery of Images saw the light of day again.
The original French-language version was included in Magritte’s Word vs. Image show at Sidney Janis in New York. This time, reviews were mixed: Arts Digest called the work “startling” and reproduced the pipe in print for the first time, while Artnews sniffed that Magritte’s “object lessons seem a bit naïve.” Either way, the show was all smoke and no fire, with only one piece selling.
Finally, in 1957—28 years after its creation—the painting found a buyer: the leading Surrealist patron William Copley. In 1978, Copley consigned the painting to auction, and LACMA snagged it for $115,000. At the time, that was a strong result, but in another generation, Magritte’s paintings would start selling in the tens of millions.
Whatever astronomical price The Treachery of Images might fetch today, its cultural impact is measureless. As biographer Alex Danchev puts it, Magritte’s pipe is now “part of the received wisdom of the age.”
This Motif Kept Reigniting Magritte’s Imagination.
While Magritte wanted us to ask, What is a pipe?, the size and scope of his oeuvre means we sometimes have to ask, Which pipe?
Magritte’s fascination with the tobacco pipe predates his experiments with word and image, and it persisted through all his artistic reinventions.
In 1920, fresh out of art school, Magritte painted a quasi-Cubist portrait of the poet Pierre Bourgeois smoking a pipe. Eight years later, pipes would become floating abstract forms in a lunar dreamscape reminiscent of Yves Tanguy.
A visitor views some of the most famous works by René Magritte at LACMA in Los Angeles. Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
The artist’s brief, manic période vache (nasty era, approximately) is exemplified by The Pope’s Crime (1948), a brashly gestural caricature of a man with an enormous green nose smoking three pipes at once. In Lady Beltham’s Messengers (1964), pipes once again abandon function for form and take to the moonlit sky.
In all, Magritte made over 50 paintings, drawings, and etchings of pipes. And even if we narrow our investigation to pipes that are explicitly not pipes, there’s still more than a handful to consider.
Earlier, we alluded to two versions of The Treachery of Images: the original 1929 composition and the 1935 English version he sent to New York. However, we haven’t mentioned the six other versions he painted between 1952 and 1964.
These are all slight variations on the same theme: a representation of a pipe and an inscription saying what it’s not. In a letter to a friend, Magritte explained that he painted the last of these “since it is desirable that such an item should be present in as many households as possible.”
And then there’s The Two Mysteries (1966), one of Magritte’s last works, which leaves us with one more layer of mystery. In this painting, there’s another painting: the now-familiar Treachery of Images, sitting on an easel. Suspended in midair, there’s another pipe, but this one is enlarged and simplified like a shadow turned solid.
Does that make it less of a pipe—or is it more of a pipe, having been freed from the frame within the frame? It’s a meta-meta-message that we’ll have to unpack another time.
Meanwhile, you can view The Treachery of Images—the original version—on the third floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA. That institution owns another of Magritte’s pipes, embedded in The Liberator (1947), but it’s not currently on public view.
