Magritte and Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe
The Treachery of Images
As a surrealist, Rene Magritte pushed the boundaries of art and our understanding of the world we live in. His art was visually striking, painted in a bold but realistic fashion, but it is the intellectual content of his work, such as The Treachery of Images (better known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe) that mark him out as one of the greats of his age.
Magritte was born in 1898 in to a poor but not poverty stricken family. However his Mother drowned herself when he was fourteen. Seeing his Mother’s body may of been a significant impact on his style of painting. After some years working in a wallpaper factory he began his life as a professional painter in 1926. However his first paintings were met with derision. Depressed, he moved from his native Belgium to Paris and stared to work with other surrealists. Shortly afterwards he started work on Ceci n’est pas une pipe”.
Surrealism is often misunderstood. Andre Breton had founded the movement not as an art movement but as a philosophical movement with a manifesto and a definition Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.. The movement was heavily influenced by Freud’s work on dreams as a method of understanding the subconscious. By painting or writing whatever is in the creator’s head, without self-editing or restriction it was thought that the true nature of mankind could be explored. An exploration that Magritte vigorously pursued with his statement Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
In late 1928 Magritte started on “The Treachery of Images”, completing it in early 1929. A large, realistic image of a smokers pipe is centrally positioned on a neutral background. Underneath is written Ceci n’est pas une pipe (”This is not a pipe”). At the simplest level this can be written off as surrealist nonsense but the true meaning of the work confronts our understanding of the world head on. The statement is correct, it is not a pipe but in fact a picture of a pipe. By including the caption in the painting it forces the viewer address how our brains can treat the image of an object as if it were that object and the fact that we do this automatically, without noticing. It raises questions about what else in our perception of the world is not true. The questions this artwork raise are still being explored by neuro-scientists and psychologist. Freud’s work on dreams may have been discredited but the surrealist attempt to explore our inner workings through art are as challenging today as they were in the 1920’s.
Magritte’s work mostly became famous during the 1960’s when a new generation of musicians and cultural gurus began to challenge society’s norms. Appearing on album covers and adorning art-students walls his art received the wide spread recognition it deserves. The true impact of his work can only be measured by his influence on other creators and their work from Jeff Beck to Matt Groening’s The Simpsons. Purpose has the greatest measure of the impact Magritte and his statement Ceci n’est pas une pipe has had is that is had been parodied so often.