The Only Honest Painting in the Building

There is a painting at LACMA of a pipe. A good pipe. Brown, curved, catalog perfect, the kind of thing you would clock in a tobacconist’s window around 1929 and understand instantly. Underneath it, in tidy schoolteacher cursive, a sentence in French. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe.

René Magritte called it La trahison des images, the treachery of images, and people have been calling it a trick for almost a hundred years. The joke painting. The gotcha. The one that makes you feel briefly stupid in a museum, which is a feeling museums are very good at producing. He painted it between 1928 and 1929 in Brussels, oil on canvas, about two feet by two and a half, so smaller than you picture it. It hangs on the second floor of the Ahmanson Building surrounded by Miró and Léger and a Picasso or two, and out of all of them, it is the only painting in the room telling the truth.

Nobody says that part out loud. We treat the sentence as the prank when it is actually the only honest label in the building.

Museums run on suspended disbelief and then get weirdly condescending when yours kicks in at the wrong moment. Look at what everything else on that wall is up to. The portrait swears it is a duchess, when it is oil and linen arranged to summon a woman who has been dead three centuries. The landscape swears it is a field at dusk, except you cannot walk into it, because there is no field, there is a flat rectangle of pigment doing an impression of depth. Every image in the room is pretending to be the thing it depicts, and we sign the agreement the second we walk through the door, because looking at art requires it. You cannot enjoy the duchess if you keep muttering that she is not a duchess.

Magritte painted the one object on the wall that refuses. It says, in cursive a child could read, I am not the thing. And we have decided, for a hundred years, that the painting telling the truth is the sneaky one. We call the confession the treachery. The title even tells you where it lives. The treachery of images. Not this image. All of them. He is not confessing his own sin, he is informing on the entire genre while standing inside it. The one painting that turned state’s witness. We let every silent liar in the room walk and pin the crime on the guy who admitted it.

So far this is a philosophy seminar, and Magritte would hate that, because he hated when people made his work too clever. The interesting part is not the seminar version. It is what happened once the warning got out of the frame.

Start with the small crack. The painting that tells you an image is not a unique, singular, real thing is itself not a unique, singular, real thing, because Magritte painted the pipe more than once. There is the famous one at LACMA and there are others, the same betrayal committed again at slightly different sizes. The great anti-copy statement in modern art comes in multiples. The picture that says pictures are not the thing is a picture he was perfectly happy to make several of, which is both the most honest move a painting could make and the funniest.

The multiples are the small crack. Now the part that swallows the whole essay.

The painting that exists to warn you the image is not the real thing has become one of the most reproduced images on the planet. It is a tote bag, a fridge magnet, a dorm poster. And you can walk into the LACMA gift shop today, in the same building, a staircase away from the actual panel, and buy a journal with this pipe on the cover. Eighty unlined pages. Made in Southern California. A notebook whose front is a picture of a painting of a pipe underneath a sentence swearing it is not a pipe, sold to you for the low price of doing the exact thing the painting was warning you about.

Honestly, the gift shop is where the whole thing clicks into place. He made an object that says do not mistake the image for the real, and we loved it so much we turned it into ten thousand more images, none of which are the painting, all of which are pictures of the painting, sold to people who will hang the picture on the wall and feel, correctly, that they own a piece of Magritte while owning nothing but a further copy of a warning about copies.

The pipe was never the treachery. The pipe sat there being honest the entire time. We are the treachery. We cannot run into a direct confession without immediately converting it to merch. He told us the image would betray us, and then the image of him telling us betrayed him too, and it did it in the shape of a mug.

The rude part is that he is right all the way down. The tote bag is not a pipe. The mug is not a pipe. Every object we have made from this painting is one more thing that is emphatically not the thing it shows, so the world is now flooded with proof of his point, arriving daily on canvas totes, and not one of us reads it that way. We read it as a cute pipe. We read the confession as decor.

It is not a pipe. It was never a pipe. It is a painting that walked into a room built for lying and told the truth in cursive, and we loved it so much we made it lie for us anyway.