Photograph by Blake Wisz
Untitled (pizza), n.d.
Digital photograph
Caption by Diana, after René Magritte's The Treachery of Images, 1929
Photograph by Blake Wisz
Untitled (pizza), n.d.
Digital photograph
Caption by Diana, after René Magritte's The Treachery of Images, 1929
Odds are you landed here through the ‘Let Me Finish My Own Sentence’ issue of the mini magazine SATURDAYS With Diana, where I posted this photo of a mouthwatering, completely real-looking pizza — captioned “This is not a pizza.”
That photo, and the caption under it, is a nod to one of the most famous paintings in modern art: René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images.
Here I want to explain why I chose that reference. To do that, I first need to tell you a little about the painting itself, about the man who made it, and about how it’s been read, argued over, and eventually turned into an icon over the years. I should say upfront: I’m not an art historian. I’m simply following my own curiosity here, the way I often do on Diana’s Cabinet, and looking at what people who know this material far better than I do have written about it.
What the Painting Actually Shows
The Treachery of Images (in French, La Trahison des images) is an oil painting Magritte finished in 1929, when he was thirty years old.1 It shows a single wooden tobacco pipe, painted with the flat, glossy precision of a product advertisement, floating against a plain tan background. Underneath it, in neat, handwritten cursive, Magritte wrote: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” This is not a pipe.2 Since 1978, it has hung in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where it is described in the museum’s own collection notes as “a treatise on the impossibility of reconciling word, image, and object,” a work that “challenges the convention of identifying an image of an object as the thing itself.”3
That’s the official reading. But it doesn’t quite answer the obvious objection: it IS a pipe. Anyone with eyes can see that. So why would Magritte insist otherwise?
In Magritte’s Own Words
Magritte was asked this question so often that he eventually gave a clear, on-the-record answer. In a 1947 interview with the Belgian journalist Louis Quiévreux, he put it like this:
“It’s quite simple. Who would dare to say that the PICTURE of a pipe is a pipe? Who could smoke the pipe in my picture? No one. So IT IS NOT A PIPE.”4
In another, just as often quoted interview, he added a slightly more irritated note to the same idea:
“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!”5
Read slowly, it’s a very simple, almost stubbornly literal point. The canvas isn’t made of wood. It doesn’t smell like tobacco. You can’t fill it, light it, or smoke it. It is paint, arranged so it looks like a pipe — and looking like something is not the same as being it. Magritte wasn’t trying to confuse anyone for fun. He was pointing at something we do constantly and almost never notice: we treat images, photographs, and words as if they were the thing they represent, instead of a representation of it.
1. Wikipedia, “The Treachery of Images.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
2. Britannica, “The Treachery of Images.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Treachery-of-Images
3. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, collection record for “The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe).” https://collections.lacma.org/object/31931
4. René Magritte, quoted in Britannica, “The Treachery of Images” (originally from a 1947 interview with Louis Quiévreux). https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Treachery-of-Images
5. René Magritte, quoted in Sartle, “The Treachery of Images [René Magritte].” https://www.sartle.com/artwork/the-treachery-of-images-rene-magritte
Watch: the story behind the painting
How Historians Have Read It
Magritte was part of the Surrealist movement, a group of artists active in Paris and Brussels between the two World Wars.6 Many of them had lost faith in “rational” thinking after the horrors of the First World War — cold logic and industrial progress, after all, had also produced the machine guns and poison gas that killed millions of young men. So the Surrealists went looking for a different kind of truth, one that lived in dreams, the unconscious mind, and the moments where things simply refuse to add up the way they’re supposed to.7 Magritte’s pipe fits neatly into that project: a quiet demonstration that even the most ordinary image can’t be trusted to be what it claims to be.
The painting’s reputation didn’t arrive all at once, though. Late in 1929, the same year it was painted, the poet André Breton and his colleague Paul Éluard were mocking another writer’s flowery description of poetry when they joked, “Poetry is a pipe” — a direct, inside reference to Magritte’s painting.8 So among the Surrealists themselves, it became a small legend almost immediately.
The wider art world took much longer to catch on. The real turning point didn’t come until 1965, with a major Magritte exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York — his very first trip to America.9 It landed right as Pop Art was taking off, and critics suddenly started seeing Magritte as a spiritual forerunner of that movement, even though he himself wanted little to do with it. Three years later, the French philosopher Michel Foucault gave the painting a completely different kind of weight: he wrote an essay describing it as an “unraveled calligram” — normally a calligram is a drawing made out of words, but Magritte did the opposite, deliberately pulling image and text apart.10 What had been dismissed for decades as an annoying, oversimplified trick was, within a few years, being treated as a genuine philosophical statement.
A Man Who Painted at the Dinner Table
Here’s a detail I find genuinely charming: Magritte did not live like the wild, tortured-artist type. He worked at his own dining room table, in a suit and tie, and there’s a well-documented story that whenever his wife Georgette announced dinner was ready, he simply had to pack up his brushes and easel so the family could eat.11 One of the most argued-about paintings of the twentieth century was made at a table that, twenty minutes later, held spaghetti.
Georgette, for her part, was far more than a footnote. They met as teenagers, were separated by the First World War, ran into each other again years later by pure chance, and married in 1922; she remained his lifelong companion and appears in many of his paintings.12 Magritte’s childhood, though, was not so gentle: his mother struggled with mental illness and died by suicide when he was still a young teenager.13 Some biographers connect this loss to a recurring image in his later work — faces that are either hidden or wrapped in cloth. Others are more cautious about that link, since Magritte himself never confirmed it.13 Either way, behind the calm, suit-and-tie exterior was a man who had lived through real loss, and later, two world wars.
6. Britannica, “Surrealism.” https://www.britannica.com/art/Surrealism
7. Britannica, “Surrealism.” https://www.britannica.com/art/Surrealism
8. Wikipedia, “The Treachery of Images.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
9. Lalique North America, “Magritte.” https://us.lalique.com/pages/lalique-artists/rene-magritte
10. Cath Pound, “Magritte and the Subversive Power of His Pipe,” BBC Culture, republished at Michel-Foucault.com (2018). https://michel-foucault.com/2018/06/14/bbc-culture-magritte-and-the-subversive-power-of-his-pipe/
11. DailyArt Magazine, “René and Georgette Magritte: A Love Story.” https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/rene-and-georgette-magritte-a-love-story/
12. DailyArt Magazine, “René and Georgette Magritte: A Love Story.” https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/rene-and-georgette-magritte-a-love-story/
13. Art History School, “Rene Magritte - the surrealist artist who painted bowler hats.” https://arthistoryschool.com/portfolio-item/rene-magritte/
“One of the most argued-about paintings of the twentieth century was made at a table that, twenty minutes later, held spaghetti.”
Back to the Pizza
So what does any of this have to do with a photo of a pizza?
In ‘Tumminia, Sicilian Pizza and the Longing for Something Real,’ I wrote about how a visit to the pizzeria used to be an almost inspiring experience. You were welcomed warmly, given time to actually go through the menu, so you could look forward to the pizza you were about to have, and over a comforting glass of wine, you could get swept away by the Italian canzoni playing in the background. All of that put you in the mood to drift off, in your mind, to a vacation you once took in Italy — or, if you’d never been, to fantasize about a romantic stay there someday. In that sense, the pizzeria was a representation of Italy — a small piece of it, conceptually rendered. Just like the pipe in Magritte’s painting isn’t “the real thing” either, but a representation of one.
My blog post, though, is about how today’s pizzeria is no longer a representation of a piece of Italy — it’s become a representation of that representation. Because the pizzeria that once welcomed you so warmly, a few decades ago, has since been replaced by a heavily commercialized version of that same concept. You barely get time to look at the menu anymore, the only time anyone really pays attention to you is when it means padding your bill, and heaven help you if you don’t order dessert or coffee — out you go.
With this new, commercialized version, today’s pizzeria has become a representation of the earlier pizzeria, which was already a representation itself — and as a representation of a representation, it’s been hollowed out even further, drifting even farther from what was once “real,” what was once “authentic.”
That’s how I landed on the idea of catching your attention, as a reader, with a mouthwatering, completely real-looking photo of a pizza captioned “this is not a pizza.” Magritte would have said: “This is not a pizza, it’s a picture of a pizza.” I’m saying something else: I’m using the pizza as a representation of the pizzeria itself, now that it’s become so heavily commercialized that the spell is broken for me — I can no longer believe in its representation of the Italian dream.
(By the way, at the bottom of my blog post you’ll find a simple recipe for an authentic Sicilian pizza. Go take a look, if you feel like it.)
Over to You
Did you think of Magritte right away when you saw my pizza captioned “this is not a pizza,” or was The Treachery of Images new to you?
Does this piece — or any other work by Magritte — speak to you?
I’m curious! And maybe you’ve got something else interesting to add. You’re more than welcome to.
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