The Treachery of Images
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The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images 1928-29) is a painting by Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, famous for its inscription Ceci n'est pas une pipe (), French for this is not a pipe (the sentence can also be translated as this is not a blow job, as pipe is a slang word for fellation). It is currently housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, California and was previously housed at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The picture shows a pipe that looks as though it might come from a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe), which seems a contradiction but is actually true. The painting is not a pipe, but rather an image of a pipe. As Magritte himself commented: "Just try to stuff it with tobacco! If I were to have had written on my picture 'This is a pipe' I would have been lying."[verification needed]
Magritte extends the style and effect in his 1930 painting, The Key of Dreams.
In popular culture
- French literary critic and philosopher Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox in his 1973 book, This is not a Pipe (English edition, 1991).
- In Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, the painting is used as an introduction to the second chapter. McCloud points out that not only is the version that appears in his book not a pipe; it is several printed copies of a drawing of a painting of a pipe.
- Douglas Hofstadter also discusses this painting and other images like it in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, a treatise on formal systems and intelligence.
- In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Captain Jack Sparrow insists that his piece of cloth portraying a key is not, in fact, a key, but a drawing of a key.
- The painting is referenced several times in the online MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing.
- Rayman Raving Rabbids features a similar painting of a carrot, with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une Carotte".
- Threadless T-shirts have a shirt based on this image, replacing the tobacco pipe with a warp pipe from Nintendo's Mario series universe. http://www.threadless.com/product/543/This_is_not_a_Pipe
- In Boston Legal, Alan Shore talks about the painting with an artistic child.
- In the book The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier parodies this painting in an explanation of what does not make a brand. He does this by replacing the pipe with a Nike Swoosh and the text with "Ceci n'est pas une brand."
- In the weekly webcomic Something Happens by Thomas K. Dye, a cartoon appears which references the pipe. http://www.somethinghappens.net/d/20070725.html
- In the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, the cover image of a hat and the words Ceci est ma femme are based on this image.
- A MobyGames' essay on JFK Reloaded uses the painting to reference the reality of avatars in games. http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/jfk-reloaded/reviews/reviewerId,3413/