The Treachery of Images: This is Not a Pipe by Rene Magritte
“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.
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Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
I don't even have words for what a good pun that is. 
Zen and Heisenberg tell us:
Things are what they appear to be.
Until observed, when they change.
Then, things are new things.
And we've become something else.
My favorite work of art is by Max Ernst. Decades ago, it was on a wall, just around the door to the impressionist gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. I think it's oil on glass, about 4-by-8 inches. I wanted to take it down and put it in my pocket, it was so beautiful. The piece was placed in a small case, hanging on a wall at eye level. It was a view to another universe and I stared for an hour. To me, the thing is Borges' Zahir. I went back a few years ago, they've moved the piece into a big glass case with some disjointed sculptings, down a dead-end sideway on the third level. Not knowing its name, no one knew about it when I asked to see the piece. No problem, though, I found it and stared at the thing until my friends came for me.
Of course there is no picture. I ain't crazy! I don't want no trouble!
Mental walls can be breached so that new worlds can grow.
We might also find that the world is as much a window to art as art a window to the world, as Magritte did in his marvelous painting The Human Condition I, which is a print on my living room wall by the way.
As you may expect, Magritte is new to me.
Now here is the thing; I spent so many years playing "avant-garde' music, so many many pieces, most of which, of course, well never be heard again, and some of which have become sort of 'standard repertoire,' And everything in between. And playing at a very high level with very, very good musicians, all over the world....I gained the experience to at least feel confident in having a rather good professional opinion, above and beyond what I 'liked.'
But, here, and with so much surrealism, I rarely can get beyond the intellectual. I do accept that this is my short coming. I saw the same in a lot of music; music, of course, that few people know.
But with your involvement, your knowledge and your looking into things, that DOES tweak my interest to pursue another step.
I also have always had a problem with soup cans, especially with water lilies just a few steps away. That says something about me, and not soup cans.
I must be getting old...
Thank you again for a very thought-provoking art history lesson.. I am going the next step with Rene Magritte.
I'm deep in a book about Warhol by the late Arthur Danto, who was a professor of philosophy at Columbia. He takes up the question, which is central to my forthcoming essay, about the difference between Warhol's soup cans or Brillo boxes and the products you buy at the supermarket. IOW, what makes one art and the other not art, altho Warhol was sued by the man who designed the then Campbell soup label (himself a struggling Abstract Expressionist artist) for stealing his design. Play that one out in your mind...
It is true, is art what we see? Is what we 'see' in the world really what we think it is?
How difficult it is to truly see ourselves as we really are; not just how others see us, that is difficult enough. But how we really are.
So one question for myself is, why would I prefer to have a Rothko, or Kline, or a Hiroshige hanging in my home rather than....whatever else?
Why would I prefer to play John Cage's Credo In Us, or the Third Construction, or the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano rather than.. ?
Interesting.
As a young and super-angsty teenager first discovering fine art, this painting, in particular, had a profound effect on me. I remember staring at it regularly for long minutes, whereupon I pondered the question of what really is art, in it's essence - what is it's purpose, and what is illusion. Heavy thoughts for my young brain at the time.
And I've been making surrealist art ever since. I've always been drawn to surrealism - I love the macabre and absurd aspects of it. I especially love Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst (but so many more, of course). In a very real way, these paintings saved me at a dark time in my life. Art, I've found, can be a kind of salvation. I like to think it saved me from a life of crime. So far.
Thanks to Douglas Hofstadter. Magritte is featured in his Pulitzer winning first book Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), a book which is an amazing adventure for ones brain. He introduces René Magritte late in the book when he is discussing reference frames. I've read the book multiple times and go back to it fairly regularly on a quiet day.
I particularly like Mental Arithmetic which is how I see GEB.
And The Fair Captive which is downright bizarre:
My best to you CTyankee.
I mean, he was out of his ever-lovin' gourd, no question- but he did some amazing work.
has some Dali-like elements:
In the Third Sleep, 1944
Not just the guy with the apple for the head, the train coming out of the fireplace sticks in my head, too.
Someone current who does work that vaguely reminds me of Magritte is Rob Gonsalves-
some might argue his stuff is too trite or "cute", but I like the way he manipulates images, negative space, etc.
For a great essay by our independent scholar!!!!
Magritte was a gifted artist. He was original, audacious and had a deep and complex thought.
I live very close to the house where he grew up in Chatetet (about 3 or 4 miles or so).
Now, it is one of the museums dedicated to Magritte.
