The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images 1928–29) is a series of paintings by René Magritte, the most noted of which is famous for its inscription Ceci n'est pas une pipe ( pronunciation (help·info)), French for this is not a pipe. The paintings are currently housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, California, and at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
The picture shows a pipe. Magritte painted below the ...
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The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images 1928–29) is a series of paintings by René Magritte, the most noted of which is famous for its inscription Ceci n'est pas une pipe ( pronunciation (help·info)), French for this is not a pipe. The paintings are currently housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, California, and at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
The picture shows a pipe. Magritte painted below the pipe: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe). The painting is not a pipe, but rather an image of a pipe. As Magritte himself commented: "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!"
Magritte extends the style and effect in his 1930 painting The Key to Dreams.
French literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox in his 1973 book, This Is Not a...
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