The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte, 1928-29. This painting by Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte has become a bit of an iconic image in modern art. The French phrase is translated as ‘This is not a pipe’: what does Magritte this mean? If you were showed this image without the writing and I asked you what it was, you would probably say ‘It’s a pipe, you idiot’. But is it a actually pipe? … Magritte is asking us to rethink our reality and realise that this is only an image of a pipe, hence The Treachery of Images.
