Review of René Magritte's The Treachery of Images
By: Michael A. Arnold
Virginia Woolf once wrote that sometime in December 1910 human nature changed. It does not have to seem quite as mysterious as that, but something was happening around the beginning of the last century that had never happened before. New metro stations were ferrying people around the great cities of Europe and America quicker than ever before. Music was being recorded for the first time, and could be heard on radios for everyone to hear, and people were going to see moving pictures with sound – cinema, something entirely new. Science was also advancing in wider and deeper ways: psychologists under the influence of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were exploring the deepest recesses of the human mind, the clocks of the world were being synchronised, Einstein's Theory of Relativity explored the mechanics of the universe, and rocket scientists like Hermann Oberth would soon be trying to get humanity up among the stars — the modern world we now live in was being born.
People found this new world disorientating. So much was happening, and art responded with perhaps its most radical shift ever. A new generation of artists and writers would produce some of the most fresh and original works yet seen, looking at reinterpretations of what art is — and what the word 'art' even means. This new spirit of the age would be called 'Modernism', a term that it is actually extremely hard to define comprehensively, simply because there are so many new methods and modes of artistic and literary expressions that could fall under it. There are lists, pages long, of all the different artistic and literary movements that were founded between 1900 and 1930. It would frankly be pointless to list all of them here, but this shows just how radical and heady this period of time was.
Perhaps one of the more important artistic movements at this time was Surrealism. Surrealism is focused on a rejection of the rationalism that had been, to the Surrealists, really to blame for all the horrors and devastation caused by WW1. Instead of rationalism, Surrealism focused on a kind of dream–logic, or fantasies coming from the unconscious. There was also a focus on interpretation of the scientific discoveries being made at the time, and Salvador Dali's paintings are a good example of this. His famous image of the melting clocks are sometimes taken to be a reference to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, where time is relative, and bendable when there is a disruption in the Space/Time continuum — and these clocks are against a landscape that looks correct but somehow feels off, like how familiar landscapes feel in a dream.
The Treachery of Images by René Magritte, as seen above, is at first a perfectly ordinary image, of an object that people of the time would have probably seen every day of their lives. It is just an ordinary wood smoking pipe. Questions about where this painting fits into the Surrealist movement aside for a moment, the only thing about the painting that might be strange is that it has the words 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' under the image. This is from French to English 'This is not a pipe', which on the surface flatly contradicts the image — obviously the image is of a pipe, it could be few other things other than a pipe — and as an image of a pipe it has been drawn exceptionally well, and yet the piece itself is telling us that it is not one. Why? The viewer is being invited to question this.
Just talking about the piece itself as an image for a moment, where the words are words but it does not matter what they say, as noted earlier, Surrealism had a lot of uses for the scientific theories of the day, and then using them in an artistic way. A work of art, something concerned with symbols, will always relate to unconscious symbolism in some way. What any one person will associate with a pipe when they see this piece is obviously entirely subjective. And so, does it really matter if this image reminds someone of class and luxury, while it could remind another person of their smoking habit, and to another person be a symbol of unhealthy decadence? This alone is far too simple – there is perhaps more in this painting from the science of marketing. It looks very much like the style of advertisement that was popular at the time, and this is not a coincidence. Adverts are designed draw your eyes to them with the simplicity of their image and a simple phrase, and with it being everywhere: on the sides of busses, posted on the corners of streets, in newspapers, and in the windows of trains. They were made to be read and seen, and so experienced, very quickly and while on the move. The Treachery of Images is imitating this — it is a work that is attempting to be an advertisement for itself. It would be wrong to forget the commercialism in art; this is as true of art in the 1920s as it is today. As such, this piece is more than just a work of art, it is a product. The irony of a piece of art made with the intention of being sold, while imitating the main method of commercial stimulation (advertising), while also having a caption that seems to bring an almost sarcastic attention to this irony is what gives this piece its power.
But this still might not fully explain the caption. After all, why 'This is not a pipe' and not 'This is not an advert', or something like that? There is another influence from the contemporary sciences on this work: linguistics. In the writing of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, especially in Course and General Linguistics (1916) he theorises that the act of language production involves two distinct things on the part of the speaker, and the interrelation between these two things (called the 'Signifier' and the 'Signified') means that communication has been successful. When someone says a word, like for example 'apple', the sound of the word is what suggests the thing – the 'Signifier' is the sound, while the 'Signified' is the concept being referred to, a green piece of fruit.
For an example, a person trying to talk about an apple would use the word 'apple' if they knew the person they are talking to also speaks English, but the apple itself is not imbued with anything essential that means we humans must call it an apple; in other languages the same object is called different things. In French an apple is called a 'pomme', in German it is called an 'apfel', in Spanish it is a 'pomo', and there are many other words, or Signifiers, from every language that basically mean an apple. While the Signifiers are different, what is being Signified might not be. But at the same time, in a language like French or Spanish the word that refers to an apple could also refer to other things too – not specifically an apple like it does in English or German. In Spanish 'Pomo' is also a colloquialism for an apple tree, or at least it does in Spain itself anyway, and in French 'pomme' applies more generally to things like apples, so what is being Signified could also slightly different. This also happens with English words between two English speakers. When a British person hears the name 'UK' they might think of where they live, while someone in the Americas might think of a foreign country. The Signifier is the same, what is being Signified is not. Communication is only successful when the Signified and Signifers are in harmony between two people attempting to communicate.
With this in mind, the image of a pipe might not just mean a thing you put tobacco into and smoke, it can mean a commercial product, or a metaphor for a kind of lifestyle. This is potentially why the piece is as a whole like an advertisement. What matters is that it will mean different things to different people, and as such it is exactly what the caption says of it — it is not a pipe, but it is an image of a pipe — or a way to signify what the image of a pipe represents.
When asked about this painting later, Magritte himself said '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 subject, and the representation of that subject are two completely different things. It is a lot like Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language. The word 'apple' is not, itself, an apple, but merely something that represents the idea of an apple.
Thinking about this painting more abstractly. The painting is called The Treachery of Images, and this 'treachery' is represented with an image of a thing with a caption saying that what it appears to be is a lie — it is not what it appears to be, so it is a 'treachery'. Thinking of the pipe in this painting as just a representation of what a pipe symbolises might not be enough, and this is quite a radical shift from the art of just a century before, which was quite 'Realist'. Realist art would depict something as realistically as possible, and the main point if the piece would be exactly what it was showing. In, for example, The Birth of Venus, the point of that painting was to show a mythological birth, and that is what was depicted. However, the pipe in The Treachery of Images is not really the point of it. The image could have been anything and it still would have had the same effect, such as the image of a book with the caption reading 'Ceci n'est pas un livre' and perhaps nothing much would really change. The point is asking us to question if a work of art has either a totally subjective meaning or if it has concrete meaning that is to be interpreted, or if (potentially) both these are true at once.
There might be no one thing that this painting could potentially convey, but it perhaps better seen as a reflection of a small piece of the real world. Perhaps, this piece is really suggesting that something, like an ordinary smoking pipe, could take on a whole other kind of meaning when put the right context. In this sense, this painting opened the way for the 'pop art' of the 1960s, and people like Andy Warhol who painted tins of soup to be shown in places of high culture, like an art gallery. Moving beyond the The Treachery of Images for just a moment, this is something that was very important to Modernism as a whole, as mixture of 'low culture' and 'high culture'. This was exactly the reasoning behind Marcel Duchamp's Fountain in 1917, the piece that famously took an ordinary toilet urinal and put it in an art gallery with a fake name.
To return to The Treachery of Images, what Magritte is attempting with this piece is not just a statement about how we typically view art, and why we might be looking at art in a shallow way — it is also suggesting in a grander sense that things we might not consider to be worthy subjects are in fact perfectly worthy subjects for art. The ordinary can be just as beautiful and profound as the extra–ordinary, and if that is not true then — why not? What is the purpose of art if it does not take influence from the world that ordinary people live in? These are questions that we must continue to ask ourselves, because there might not even be any answers to them — or if there are, those answers are as subjective and numerous as there are people to think about them. Just as there are as many subjective reactions to something like the image of a well–drawn pipe. 