The Treachery of Images
René Magritte
RENÉ MAGRITTE, 1929. OIL ON CANVAS.
Magritte does not tell us anything we don’t know. And yet in a single graphic, paired with a single line so obvious it goes without saying, he turns the world of art on its head. This is not a pipe, he proclaims in cursive lettering under a drawing that is unmistakably of a pipe. It is, this painting reminds us explicitly, a mere representation, it is a painting of a pipe and can never transcend its medium. It was a radical proposition to make, that artworks are signifiers and not to be mistaken for the actualities. For most of history, artworks were cherished, worshipped things depicting unbridled truth, and even as modernity crept up with Impressionism and the dawn of abstraction, paintings still were vessels of emotion, feeling and showed the world as it really was. This painting was a flag in the ground declaring revolution, marking a new age where surrealism would thrive and the painting would be freed from any requirements of truth or reality. All of a sudden, a painting needed to be nothing but a painting.