The Treachery of Images: This is Not a Pipe by Rene Magritte [View all]

[CTyankee]

“Art is life under new management...”
--Simon Schama

La Trahison des Images. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. 1929. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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Is Magritte’s subversion of the normal what we experience every day in our daily lives? Are we confronted in the most ordinary circumstances with mysteries, either in our common language or our every day things? It is the conundrum I “think” that Rene Magritte poses with his prodigious artistic output from the 1920s until his death in 1967. This is an early work, recalling advertising which is what the artist did when he was starting out in his career.

Surrealism was a reaction to the Rationalism that was blamed for leading to the conflagration of World War I and coincided with the rising influence of Freudian psychology on the way people interpreted life. The Surrealists sought to join dreams and fantasy and play them out in art and literary themes. Magritte is a Surrealist you can treasure, if, like me, you cannot bear the pomposity and relentless self promotion of Salvador Dali (whose art eludes some of us or that we just cannot like). Magritte’s tidy persona underplays and understates, then his punch lands on you...

The artist is telling us that what we see or think we see may not be the reality of what is there. He wants to set up paradox in our minds. Of course, we know it is not a real pipe. Magritte himself declared he “couldn’t smoke it.” We are in Plato’s cave looking at the play of shadows on the wall...or, perhaps, through the looking-glass like Alice.

All is fine and good but then Magritte turns around and offers us this

This is a Piece of Cheese. 1936/37. The Menil Collection. Houston.
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Aha! Gotcha! This was a set up all along!

The slice of brie is in a picture frame (or on a cheese tray?) which is within a glass serving dome, on a little pedestal resting on a white surface, several degrees of separation from our presumed view...it does not even depart from its grounded reality and exist in space like the pipe does. But of course, neither object is what it is made to represent.

Magritte claimed there was no meaning “behind the picture," or outside of the image in his art. British art critic David Sylvester has concluded that "Magritte wanted his pictures to be looked at, not looked into, wanted their mystery to be confronted, not interpreted, seeing it as the revelation of a mystery latent in all things...”

His precious banality becomes our handsome artifact of another era. But his work, viewed in terms of its historical significance, is a harbinger of upcoming trends in art for its emphasis on concept over execution. Without Magritte we most certainly would not have Warhol, Lichtenstein or Johns or any of what became Pop Art. So Magritte becomes invaluable. He seems to be there with his sneaky humor and persistent tension always lurking on our reality, or what we think is our reality.

Magritte always wants to play with our head: the treachery of the commonplace in the midst of bowler-hatted men in ordinary dark overcoats and sensible shoes primly carrying an umbrella. And sometimes there are many of them, crowded together, looking at us just outside of our open window or simply raining down on the town or, ominously, as assassins at a crime scene. Or just a suit and hat empty of any wearer. You never know, he says, what you’ll find as you go about your most ordinary day. You could end up with a large green apple on your face.