Child Wearing a Red Scarf

The Treachery of Images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), painted in 1929, is Magritte's most famous work. It depicts a meticulously rendered pipe below which is written: Ceci n'est pas une pipe - This is not a pipe. The statement is perfectly true: you cannot fill the painted pipe with tobacco or smoke it. The painting and the thing are different, and resemblance is more treacherous than common sense acknowledges. Created during Magritte's Paris period, its directness distinguishes it from the dreamlike complexities of Dali and Ernst. Magritte's genius was to make philosophy visible: to show that complex ideas about language, representation, and reality could be conveyed by the simplest possible means. It inaugurated a series of word-image works exploring the gap between things and their representations.

The Treachery of Images became the founding text of postmodern art theory and the most referenced artwork in discussions of representation and meaning. Its influence on conceptual art, semiotics, and Foucault's philosophy extends far beyond the visual arts.

This painting is the most elegant statement of art's central problem: the gap between representation and reality. Magritte's pipe - which is not a pipe - is the hinge on which all postmodern thought turns.