1929 painting by René Magritte
The Treachery of Images () is a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. It is also known as This Is Not a Pipe, Ceci n'est pas une pipe and The Wind and the Song. It is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The painting shows an image of a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "" (, French for "This is not a pipe".)
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!
The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in "Les Mots et Les Images", "La Clé des Songes", "Ceci n'est pas une pipe (L'air et la chanson)", "The Tune and Also the Words", "Ceci n’est pas une pomme", and "Les Deux Mystères".
The painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message like the Alfred Korzybski's "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory", as well as Denis Diderot's "This is not a story".
On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in "La Révolution surréaliste" (The Surrealist Revolution) as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in "Les Nouvelles littéraires" of September 28, 1929. When Valéry wrote "Poetry is a survival", Breton and Éluard made fun of it and wrote "Poetry is a pipe", as a reference to Magritte's painting.
In the same edition of "La Révolution surréaliste", Magritte published "Les mots et les images" (his founding text which illustrated where words play with images), his answer to the survey on love, and "Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt", a painting tableau surrounded by photos of sixteen surrealists with their eyes closed, including Magritte himself.
References.
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