I can still remember this painting being presented to me during art history lessons at my high school. With the little bit of French I had learned, I could decipher what it said: this is not a pipe. But this text was clearly under a painting of a pipe, wasn't it? Why did the painter (René Magritte) deny that he had painted a pipe? The riddle never left me, and to this day I love Magritte and his simple way of questioning things.
Magritte was born in Lessen (Belgium) in 1898 and trained at the Academie in Brussels. He was a painter and is now seen as an important surrealist, a movement in art that we know from Salvador Dalí (with his characteristic moustache and melted clocks) and others.
The name of the painting with the pipe is La trahison des images, which means ‘the betrayal of the image’. With this fact, and the accompanying text, we can tie a number of threads together: the pipe is not a real pipe at all, but a representation of a pipe. In reality, it is a painting: simply a canvas coated with oil paint. Magritte used it to question our capacity for imagination: the pipe only exists because we associate it with the real object. So what is on the canvas is not really a pipe.