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 An object is not so attached to Everything tends to make one think that
its name that we cannot find Sometimes, the name of an object there is little connection between an Any form whatsoever can replace
another that suits it better can take the place of an image object and that which represents it the image of an object

The words which serve to designate two

There are some objects A word can take the place different objects do not show what may An object never has the same function
which need no name of an object in reality distinguish those objects from one another as its name or its image

Now, the visible outlines of objects

A word sometimes An image can take the place In a picture, words have the in reality touch one another
serves only to designate itself of a word in a proposition same substance as images as if they formed a mosaic

An object encounters its image, an object

encounters its name. It may be that the image An object makes one suppose that One sees images and words Vague images have a meaning as necessary
and the name of the object encounter each other there are other objects behind it differently in a painting and perfect as precise images
 Ma g r i t t e
T h e Tr e a c h e r y o f I m a g e s
 Ma g r i t t e
This exhibition is being held under the joint high patronage of
German Federal President Joachim Gauck and His Majesty The King of the Belgians.

T h e Tr e a c h e r y o f I m a g e s

Edited by Didier Ot t inger

PRESTEL
Munich · London · New York
This catalogue has been published to coincide
with the exhibition
Acknowledgements We would particularly like to thank
the chairpersons, directors, curators
We express our profound gratitude
to the private institutions who
and staff of the public institutions participated in this exhibition:
Magritte. La trahison des images/The Treachery of Images who have so generously loaned Ageas Belgique, Brussels
We would like to express our
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, exceptional works: Brachot Gallery, Brussels
profound gratitude to Charly
21 September 2016 to 23 January 2017 Simon Studer Art, Geneva
Herscovici, chairman of the
Australia Sotheby’s, Paris
Fondation Magritte, without whose
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
complicity and unstinting support Art Gallery of New South Wales,
10 February to 5 June 2017
this exhibition would not have been Sydney
possible. National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne
Back of f lyleaf   We extend our sincerest thanks to
La Lampe philosophique [The Philosopher’s Lamp], 1936 the Musée Magritte and its director,
Belgium
(detail), repr. p. 24 Michel Draguet, for the many loans
Musées royaux des beaux-arts de
of major works that have so greatly
Front cover  Belgique, Brussels
contributed to this exhibition.
La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels
[The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)], 1929, repr. p.  67 Our heartfelt thanks go also to the Université catholique de Louvain,
collectors who have so generously Louvain-la-Neuve
Back cover accepted to part with works for the
Ceci continue de ne pas être une pipe duration of this exhibition: France
[This continues to not be a pipe], 1952, repr. p. 198
Centre Pompidou, Musée national
Flyleafs  Australia d’art moderne, Paris
“Les mots et les images” [Words and Images], 1929 Kerry Stokes Collection Centre Pompidou, Bibliothèque
(details), repr. p. 19 Kandinsky, Paris
Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Belgium Paris
Collection Charly Herscovici

Germany
Switzerland Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-
Collection Diane SA
Westfalen, Düsseldorf
and also to all the lenders who wish
to remain anonymous. Switzerland
Kunstmuseum Bern

United Kingdom
Norfolk Museums Service
Tate, London

United States
Dallas Museum of Art
The Menil Collection, Houston
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
 11 28 114 178
Preface La Ligne de vie I The painter-king From the image-screen
Philipp Demandt (1938 lecture) Barbara Cassin to the art of the problem
René Magritte Michel Draguet

15 142
53 189
Ut pictura philosophia. Magritte and his curtains
Portrait of Magritte Words, shadows, f lames, curtains, fragments Correspondence
as a philosopher Victor I. Stoichita
Magritte and the founding myths of painting
Didier Ottinger
Didier Ottinger
160
199
Beauty is a formal problem
56 List of works
Jacqueline Lichtenstein and documents exhibited
From arbitrary signs to elective affinities
Painting against the imaginary bounds
of the imagination
Klaus Speidel

94
Seeing is believing
René Magritte and the invention
of art
Jan Blanc

* Works included in the catalogue but not on

display in the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou,
Paris, are indicated with a red asterisk.
 La Clairvoyance
[Clairvoyance], 1936
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm
Private collection

51
Manuscript of “Les mots et les images”,*
five sheets, 1929
Ballpoint and Indian ink on paper,
27.2 × 20.8 cm each
Private collection

54 55
 == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
F rom arbit rar y
sign s to elect ive
Painting against
the imaginary
af f init ies
bounds of the
imagination
“I have often talked over this matter, both
K laus Speidel
with Cratylus and others, and cannot con-
vince myself that there is any principle of
correctness in names other than conven-
tion and agreement; any name which you give, in my opinion, is the right one, and
if you change that and give another, the new name is as correct as the old – we fre-
quently change the names of our slaves and the newly-imposed name is as good as the
old.”  — Hermogenes in Plato, Cratylus 1
I m a ge s a nd wor d s: t he or y a nd p a i nt i n g
Image and text; icon and symbol; painting and poetry; the fine arts and literature;
draughtsman and writer; visible and legible; looking and reading; art history and literary
theory; Goscinny and Uderzo … We could fill entire notebooks with expressions, people,
modes of apprehension, professions and dichotomies associated with the conflict between
text and image. No frontier between modes of representation and reception seems as uni-
versal as this one. Directly linked to our learning and socialisation (an infant can already
recognise a photograph of its mother among other images, but it takes months for it to
begin to talk and years to learn to read 2), the difference appears to be so fundamental, so
ineluctable that transversal phenomena fascinate us. Hieroglyphs and ideograms, meta-
phors and allegories, ekphrasis and talking painting, words in images and images in text
are just some of the subjects that have continually occupied specialists and artists. Yet in
everyday life, cohabitation and exchanges function perfectly: in Pompeii and today we
usually instantly understand “Beware of the dog!” signs fig. p. 61, as well as posters, written
and drawn manuals, pictograms and emoticons, indicators on our smartphones remind-
ing us of events and transcribing the states of mind of our fellow humans beings. Only
artists occasionally put a spanner in the works by attempting to show us that the obvious-
ness of the signs surrounding us is in fact an illusion.
René Magritte is one of those who did this the most systematically and it was one of
his works that drew the general public’s attention to the apparent paradoxes of direct
confrontation between words and images. The work in question is of course L’Usage de
la parole I [The Use of Speech I], later retitled La Trahison des images [The Treachery of
Images] (1929), the picture bearing the famous inscription “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” [This
56
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
is not a pipe] repr. p. 67. 3 It made such an impact that some specialists have even made it
the key to interpreting Magritte’s entire oeuvre. Yet research has confirmed what the pic-
ture leads us to suspect, that La Trahison des images is merely the tip of the iceberg. It is
the first successful conclusion of Magritte’s pictorial and theoretical experimentation in
the 1920s – since 1927 he had been producing what have often been called “word-images”. 4
La Clef des songes [The Interpretation of Dreams] fig. p. 60 is generally regarded as the first
word-image painting.
Magritte produced numerous variations of both La Clef des songes and La Trahison des
images repr. pp. 81, 84; see also fig. p. 61 . Although the latter picture has been frequently used by
pop culture and has generated innumerable commentaries, there have been few remarks
on its change of title. Yet the transition from L’Usage de la parole to La Trahison des images
shifts the picture’s critical centre of gravity from words towards images. It thus shows
the constitutive ambivalence of a work whose supposed “message” has been too hastily
reduced to the idea that an image of an object is not the object. The first title suggests that
it is our language that poses a problem and is thus compatible with the standard interpret-
ation, because it can suggest that we are too rapidly enclined to say “Ah, a pipe” when we
see an image like Magritte’s, when of course it is merely an image of a pipe. The second
Cave canem [Beware of the Dog],
title, on the other hand, clearly calls images into question. This to-and-fro, as well as the
mosaic in the Casa del Poeta Tragico,
dual critique of our use of images and speech, also manifests itself in the painter’s the- Pompeii
oretical writings. In forms in which the children’s picture book encounters the semiotics
treatise and the maxim rubs shoulders with modern linguistics, Magritte provides his own
answers to questions that have preoccupied philosophers since Plato.
R ené M a g r it t e ’s m a x i m s
In 1929, as he was painting La Trahison des images, Magritte published a series of illustrated
propositions on representation, the world, words and images see the manuscripts repr. pp. 54–55
and the review pp. 18–19 that cannot be disregarded when considering the word-image relation-
ship in his work. Although the text (first published in the last number of La Révolution
surréaliste 5) takes an apparently clear and simple stand, on closer examination it poses
numerous problems and questions. In later lectures and publications, Magritte regularly
returned to the theories he sets out in it. In this illustrated mini-treatise, he stresses the
interchangeable nature of modes of representation, saying that “an image can take the
place of a word in a proposition” and that “sometimes the name of an object takes the
place of an object.” This interchangeability presupposes a common ground, which is of
course that of representation. 6 Words and images both are ways of referring to objects,
beings and established facts. As the illustrations accompanying his observations make
us understand, it is merely the context that decides whether the image replaces the word
or the opposite. If words prevail, the image is the intruder and vice versa.
One should say straightaway that Magritte’s propositions are not all distinctly innovative.
When he says that “a word can take the place of an object in reality” and illustrates this
with an image of a woman saying “the sun”, he seems to be doing little more than reiter-
ating a relatively primitive theory of language, already postulated by Saint Augustine and
which Ludwig Wittgenstein criticises in Philosophical Investigations.
When one correlates the artist’s principles and pictorial creations, one realises further-
more that the operational effectiveness in art is no guarantee of the theoretical interest
of a principle and vice versa. A principle at work in a remarkable painting can seem very
R ené M a g r it te
dull when spelled out in words and a rather original maxim can correspond to more L’Air et la Chanson, greeting card for
unimagina­tive pictures. the review Rhétorique, 1965
57
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
Another aspect is interesting: whereas Magritte tends to level the differences between
words and images by suggesting hybridisation, image theory has traditionally sought
to understand what distinguishes the functioning of iconic and verbal representation. 7
Theorists ask themselves how the word “bird” represents birds and how a drawing of a
pipe refers to a pipe in order to understand the difference between their modes of refer-
ence. 8 We need to briefly return to these questionings to understand the originality of
Magritte’s project.
T he a rbit r a r i ne s s of wor d s:
P l at o, S au s s u r e , M a g r it t e?
Since at least Plato’s Cratylus, the distinction between words and images has usually been
associated with another, more fundamental distinction: that between natural signs and
arbitrary signs. Images are generally considered to be natural signs, whereas words are
arbitrary signs. Natural signs do not represent their objects in virtue of a convention –
an implicit or explicit agreement on a sign’s use in a community – but because of a more
profound link: resemblance, causality or, possibly, contiguity. It is because the percep-
tion of a silhouette of a man in an image resembles that of a man that speakers of differ-
ent languages understand the image, whereas not everyone understands the word “man”
or “Mann”, “hombre”, “uomo”, etc. It is because fire causes smoke that smoke is a natural
sign of fire. Before eventually coming to signify it, smoke has a direct, “thinglike” link to
fire, “cognitively accessible independently of the semiotic relationship that exploits it”.  9
In other words, one can see, feel or hear a resemblance between two things or see that one
is the cause of the other without knowing that one of them represents the other: although
infants probably do not yet possess the concept of image, they can still recognise their
mother in a photograph. 10 The particularity of the natural sign is that the “thinglike link”
serves as the basis for representation. It is not by choice or convention that a naturalistic
image of an apple depicts an apple rather than a car, but because in our eyes it resembles
the former more than the latter.
One of the consequences of the resemblance link between image and object is that “there
are no foreign pictures in the sense that there are foreign languages.” 11 If foreign lan-
guages exist, this is because the relationship between most words and what they signify
is arbitrary and therefore has to be learnt: “We could say more simply: the linguistic sign is
arbitrary,” 12 as Ferdinand de Saussure, founder of modern linguistics, has it. Clarifying
his use of the term “arbitrary”, he adds: “It should not imply that the choice of the signi-
fier is left entirely to the speaker […]. I mean that it is unmotivated, that is to say, arbi­trary
in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified in reality.” 13
True, onomatopoeias (bang, splash, tick-tock, etc.) are natural signs of verbal language –
the sound we produce when we say them generally resembles those produced by the des-
ignated object or event – but like Hermogenes in Cratylus, most linguists consider that
they are the exception not the rule. 14 The mere existence of different languages seems
in itself an overwhelming argument for the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. 15 This is
the context in which we should consider Magritte’s opening remark in “Les mots et les
images” [Words and Images], that “an object is not so attached to its name that we cannot
find another that suits it better.” But we still have to figure out how to interpret it.
58
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
I n s e a r c h of t he a rbit r a r y
The temptation for present-day viewers to associate Magritte’s thinking and some of
his pictures with the questionings of language theory is great. I myself began taking an
interest in his work when I happened to discover La Clef des songes (1927) at the Pinakothek
in Munich, at a time when I was working on philosophy of language questions. It is very
probably the first picture in the “image-word” 16 series and many theorists interpret it as
R ené M a g r it te
an illustration of the idea of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. According to Suzi
“Les mots et les images”,
Gablik, the picture thus emphasises that “words do not render objects but remain foreign La Révolution surréaliste, no. 12,
and indifferent to them.” 17 This interpretation has often been extended to René Magritte’s 15 December 1929, pp. 32–33 (detail)
entire oeuvre – or at least to all his word-image works. Thus Todd Alden maintains that
“Magritte creates an arbitrary language in which a pipe is not always a pipe and a cigar
is not always a cigar.” 18
It is particularly La Clef des songes (1927) which can, according to the linguist Jean David,
serve as an illustration of Saussure’s idea of the arbitrariness of the sign. It has often
been thought that the first maxim of “Les mots et les images” fig. right confirms this inter-
pretation because in the picture, Magritte is showing that one can replace one name
with another. But the idea that a name could suit an object better than another in fact
runs against the idea that associations between names and objects are arbitrary. Is the
maxim imprecise? This is what Jean David thinks when he regrets that Magritte “gives
in to the temptation to provoke that weakens the affirmation of the arbitrariness of the
sign”. 19 Even if this interpretation is benign, it might erase a fundamental difference
between the convictions of the linguist and those of the painter. Can we give the maxim
a meaning if we presuppose that Magritte said exactly what he meant to say?
In the illustration accompanying the text, Magritte renames a leaf “the cannon”. This
shows that the associations that interest him are not at all conventional, yet does not
immediately convince us of his theory’s pertinence. It is in effect difficult to say in what
sense “cannon” could suit the drawn object better than “leaf ”. To elucidate whether there
is an interesting way of understanding the idea that certain inhabitual word-image asso-
ciations are right – or even more so than the ordinary combinations – we should consider
a picture that the maxim has often been used to interpret. Perhaps this painting can help
us clarify the meaning of the text.
L a C l ef d e s s on ge s . A pic t u r e t o b e r e ad
At first sight, one could think that La Clef des songes, like La Trahison des images, is about
denomination, the word-image relationship and their respective links to the world. Before
learning to speak, we learn to name. We thereby acquire a new power: we can call things
and people (by their name) and therefore ask for them. To know the name of something
is to have a hold over it. But often this hold is only very partial and illusory. According
to Michel Butor, this is what Magritte is suggesting in the 1930 version of La Clef des
songes fig. p. 61, which associates a bowler hat and the word “snow”: “The image of the black
hat denounces everything that separates real snow, which I can see and touch, from all
the representations that can be associated with it, from the stereotype that habitually
comes to mind when I say the word ‘snow’.” 20 In one of his most famous poems, Rainer
Maria Rilke also reflects on the illusion of understanding and the destructive nature of
naming:
59
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I am so afraid of people’s words. They describe so
distinctly everything:
And this they call dog and that they call house,
here the start and there the end.
I worry about their mockery with words,
they know everything, what will be, what was;
no mountain is still miraculous;
and their house and yard lead right up to God.
I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
La Clef des songes
[The Interpretation of Dreams], 1927 But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
Oil on canvas, 38 × 55 cm
That’s how you kill.” 21
Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich
To prevent us from killing things by speaking only “for the immediate needs of life”.
Magritte seems to be doing something similar in La Clef des songes. But his painting
does more – or rather something else – than reject existing denominations. It offers
alternatives.
Let us begin again at the beginning, with the first word-image, La Clef des songes of 1927 fig.
left. It has a particularity in common with a 1935 version in English, which is absent from
the 1930 version: one image/word couple is fundamentally distinct from the rest. I am not
sure if I would have been so intrigued by the picture without it. In the bottom right com-
partment, unlike all the others, which show us unusual associations, we see an image of a
sponge with the caption “the sponge”. The compartment is “the odd one out” because the
image/word relationship corresponds to the norm (in the 1935 version it is the ordinariness
of the image of a valise with the caption “the valise” that surprises us). What is its role? To
my mind, it puts into question the comprehension suggested by the first three compart-
ments. First, because we cannot figure out the picture without understanding that it con-
tains a temporal programme that each viewer-reader spontaneously activates. A painting is
rarely apprehended in an instant and what we see after is influenced by what we saw first.
The presence of words creates a particularly clear temporal structure: La Clef des songes
is read from left to right and from top to bottom. We see a bag entitled “the sky” – we are
surprised – then a pocket knife entitled “the bird” – we wonder whether there is a system –
then a leaf, beneath which we read “the table”. At which point we think we understand:
the principle is that there isn’t one. All these associations are false. Conditioned by our
culture, we might regard it, for example, as a joke, or possibly an illustration of the arbi­
trariness of signs. Like the 1930 La Clef des songes, in which the words and images in the
six compartments are “out of synch”, it is an admittedly surprising picture. We carry on
regardless, absent-mindedly but diligently looking at the last compartment, in which an
image of a sponge is linked to the word “sponge”. We have the same reaction as Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who, expecting a surprise on the way home is surprised, precisely because
there is no surprise. 22 With only a few dissociations, Magritte has “tricked” us into being
surprised by the most normal of associations. We realise this feat. But we do not stop there
because the organisation of the ensemble (its symmetry, the identical treatment of the
objects and words in the four compartments) suggests that there is a unifying principle
and that it is up to us to find it. The picture challenges us to discover the rule governing
this apparent disfunctioning and to realise the conceptual integration that alone can jus-
tify its formal rigour, because “a picture is a constructed object. It has to be well construc-
ted; it is a condition of life: precision, logic, economy, probity; the mind does not content
itself with vague approximation […].” 23
60
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E le c t ive a f f i n it ie s  2 4
A way of integrating the “sponge” compartment into the whole consists in presupposing
that it is “false”, as false as the other compartments seemed to be. One can thus think
that the compartment is false because the image of a sponge is not the sponge. So La Clef
des songes already contains the central idea of La Trahison des images, painted two years
later, so much so that the latter work could almost be a Clef des songes pour les nuls [The
Interpretation of Dreams for Dummies], for those who did not look – that is to say, reflect –
properly before.
But the picture shows us more than what is not a sponge: there is that which is not the
sky, that which is not a bird and that which is not a table. And in each case (This is the sky,
this is the bird, this is the table), the picture leaves the task of rejection to us (No, it’s a bag!
No, it’s a pocket knife! No, it’s a leaf!), because Magritte associates the image of an object
with the name of another. More than denying, as La Trahison des images does, the picture
poses in another way the question of knowing whether the associations that it proposes
are arbitrary or can be justified. If the sponge compartment can be “false” in its way, can
the others be “true” in theirs?
The bird-pocket knife compartment particularly lends itself to this game because the form La Clef des songes
of the knife does indeed seem to resemble a bird – and in two distinct ways: sitting like the [The Interpretation of Dreams], 1930
Oil on canvas, 81 × 60 cm
eagle in La Présence d’esprit [Presence of Mind] (1961) and flying with spread wings like Private collection
the bird in La Clairvoyance [Clairvoyance] (1935, repr. p. 51). The latter is a metapainting in
which Magritte seems to be very literally illustrating his desire (or ability) to see beyond the
immediate appearance of objects, to penetrate them, even foresee their future. 25
Once we have made the connection between bird and knife, we realise that although it is
definitely not obvious, there is nothing arbitrary about it. The actual existence of a hum-
mingbird knife confirms the pertinence of the association. Magritte’s choice has to be a
conscious one. Yet this resemblance would probably not have occurred to us without La
Clef des songes. It is in this sense that Magritte’s pictures are games, but serious ones: if we
play them, they teach us a real lesson (about things). 26
They can thus enable us to free ourselves from our purely utilitarian relationship to
objects, which smothers their poetic potentialities and elective affinities:
“The habit of speaking for the immediate needs of life imposes a limited
meaning on words that denote objects. It seems that ordinary language
sets imaginary boundaries to imagination.
But one can create new relationships between words and objects and spe-
cify qualities of language and objects of which we are generally unaware
in the course of daily life.” 27
If Magritte is fascinated by relationships we are normally unconscious of, it is precisely
because they are not arbitrary. He did not clarify this until ten years later, in his famous
lecture at the Koninklijk Museum van Schoone Kunsten in Antwerp in 1938, in which he
describes the shock “caused precisely by the affinity of two objects”, while stressing that
he first sought the shock “caused by the encounter of objects foreign to one another”. 28
According to Magritte, each thing has “an element peculiar and rigorously predestined
to it”, and bringing them together has a formidable effect. Even if Magritte gives the
date of this discovery as “one night in 1936”, another of his remarks suggests that he may
have already been in possession of the “poetic secret” when he painted La Clef des songes,
because the knowledge he is talking about is intuitive and profound: “During the course
of my searching I became certain that I always knew in advance that element to be dis-
covered, that one and only thing obscurely linked to each object, but that that know-
ledge lay buried in the back of my mind.” 29 Is it not probable that this buried knowledge
61
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was already manifesting itself when he chose the associations of objects for his 1927
picture?
Magritte was thus making the picture the place where objects from the world can encounter
one another. To do so, he used verbal and visual representations. One can therefore say
that La Clef des songes illustrates not only the first maxim of “Les mots et les images”,
according to which certain names suit objects better than others, but also that “an
image can take the place of a word in a proposition” and that “sometimes the name of
an object can take the place of an image.” Finding a more suitable name for an object
would therefore be to give it the name of another, which produces unexpected and poetic
connections.
It is important to note that this procedure and Magritte’s reflections on elective affinities
are very different from his preoccupations with the signs our explorations started from.
It is our vision of the world that the painter is seeking to transform: “through the arrange-
ment of objects borrowed from reality” his painting must give “the real world from which
those objects have been borrowed an overwhelming poetic meaning by a natural process
of exchange”. 30 This is where the fundamental difference between the artist’s thinking
and semiotics, the philosophy of language and linguistics appears the most clearly: it is
not only iconic and liguistic signs and their more or less arbitrary or natural connections to
objects in the world that interest him. It is the relationship between objects. As a painter,
it is in painting that he experiments with their connections, doing so by establishing rela-
tionships between images or by assemblages of words and images.
Having understood that the discovery of resonances between objects is central to Magritte
and that it is a particularly essential element of La Clef des songes, we can consider the con-
nections he establishes between other objects represented in the picture and in his other
works. Having freed ourselves from the dictatorship of this common sense, which is so use-
ful but “sets imaginary boundaries to imagination”, we are free to play.
A s t yle i n t he s er v ic e of pr e s enc e
Magritte’s pictorial style plays an essential role in facilitating the “natural process of
exchange” between images and the world.
This style, which later became his trademark, was the fruit of his experimentations in the
1920s. Its purpose was to enable a free to and fro between painting and the world in the
viewer’s eyes and mind. When Magritte writes, “In my view, this detached way of repre­
senting things is characteristic of a universal style in which the manias and minor pref-
erences of the individual no longer play any part,” 31 it is a dig at expressionisms of all
kinds, but also at painters who choose style a priori, as he criticises the Cubists for doing.
When, in an interview, Magritte says that “I always try to make paint unnoticeable, the
least visible possible,” 32 he is strikingly stating a position in which the painterliness of
painting, which would become the prerogative of modernism, has no place. In Magritte’s
view, “there is nothing new worth noticing in the ‘matter’ indispensable for painting (oil,
glue, pigments, etc.) when they are used by a painter. One should even pay no attention to
them at all.” 33 The presence of a personal style as well as the pictoriality of painting may
actually distance the objects depicted to the extent that they no longer have any import-
ance, serve merely as a pretext or disappear for the benefit of “medium” or “expression”.
But this is precisely what Magritte wants to avoid. As he explains in “La ligne de vie”,
he developed his impersonal personal style when he saw that one of his pictures from the
1920s in which he had painted a rose “in the breast of a nude young woman” did not pro-
duce the “disturbing effect” he was expecting. Magritte understood that it was pictorial
62
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abstraction that was the culprit because it prevented the represented from appearing
as being present. In painting there is nothing shocking about a rose instead of heart and
there is nothing surprising about saying that an abstract form resembling a pipe is not a
pipe. Such a picture does not topple any certainties. The represented can appear because
the artists’s hand and materials withdraw. Thus Michel Foucault could not have written
the following phrase if Magritte had drawn his pipe in a Cubist style: “No matter that it
is the material deposit, on a sheet of paper or a blackboard, of a little graphite or a thin
dust of chalk. It does not ‘aim’ like an arrow or a pointer toward a particular pipe in the R ené M a g r it te
distance or elsewhere. It is a pipe.” 34 The intriguing effect of Magritte’s works depends “Les mots et les images”,
La Révolution surréaliste, no. 12,
directly on his style. Without it, there are no surprises and no seeming paradoxes. 15 December 1929, pp. 32–33 (detail)
The problem that Magritte poses himself is not that of knowing how to exemplify the
canvas’s flatness or the painting’s pictoriality, but that of knowing how to change our
conception of the real world through the art of painting. “I would like,” he said after a
thirty-year career, “my pictures to no longer be necessary for one to think about what they
show.” 35 To achieve this, he extracts objects from their habitual context, isolates them
and reinserts them into unusual situations. His aim is to free us from our unilateral and
essentially functionalist relationship to things, in which a rose is a rose is a rose. Based on
Wittgenstein’s remark that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holi-
day,” 36 one could say that, for Magritte, the pleasure of painting begins when objects and
language go on holiday, possibly together. It is by decontextualising and disorientating
both that he helps us to develop the “sense of possibility”, which Robert Musil says is much
rarer than the “sense of reality”: “Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or
that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might,
could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well,
it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined
outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach
no more importance to what is than to what is not.” 37 All in all, Magritte’s painting is a
school of thinking and imagining – which could well explain the schoolbook handwrit-
ing and the recurrent presence of the blackboard and chalk.
T he c onvent ion a l i m a ge .
F r om R ené M a g r it t e t o Ne l s on G o o d m a n
No such investigation would be complete without considering the second maxim that
links Magritte directly to the age-old word-image debates: “Everything tends to make one
think that there is little connection between an object and that which represents it.” This
affirmation, which seems to deny that the image is a natural sign (linked, for example,
by resemblance to its object), is effectively contrary to the vision that has reigned since
Plato and which most present-day image theorists maintain in one form or another.
Paradoxically, the image that Magritte conceived to illustrate this maxim seems intent
on dissuading us: the two drawings of a country house are absolutely identical. He does
not even bother to draw a frame around one of the two drawings or play on perspec­tive
or style to differentiate them. If his iconic treatment had been arbitrary or the setting for
the real object had been treated in a more naturalist style and the depiction in a more
notably pictorial style – as Banksy does when he plays on the juxtaposition of a picto-
gram of a dog à la Keith Haring fig. p. 64 and the sombre naturalism of its owner – Magritte
could maybe have hoped to make us accept his counterintuitive theory. 38 But he does
none of this. Everything in the picture makes us think of the resemblance between an
object and its image. Why did he not draw a more convincing illustration in which there
63
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is a stronger contrast between painting and world? There is a very simple explanation: object, a relationship that is so obvious, so striking that one could be mistaken if one did
the principle is the theoretical equivalent of La Trahison des images, the country house not know better. This relationship is the (subjective) resemblance that enables immedi-
the analogon of the pipe depicted. More than convincing us, Magritte is questioning us, ate recognition. It is not because Magritte the theorist is wrong that Magritte the painter
prompting us to go beyond what appears to be visually obvious. He is telling us that the is right, but the latter could not have the success he has if the former were right in every
“obvious” here (as elsewhere?) is only apparent and that, no matter what our percep- respect.
tion and common sense tell us, there is in fact little connection between the real object
and its image.
So Magritte’s thinking is opposed to the doxa rarely contested before the twentieth
Banksy century. If what we now call the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign was debatable for
Choose your Weapon, 2010 Cratylus and Plato in Cratylus, no one thought of contesting the natural nature of the
(Bermondsey, London) iconic sign: no one denied that the image resembles (in our perception) its object. Yet
this is precisely what Magritte does, as does the American philosopher and logician 1. Plato, Cratylus, transl. Benjamin 1996), 256. 10. M. E. Barrera and D. “L’art pur. Défense de l’esthétique”, in interaction between the painted world
Nelson Goodman, one of the most notable theorists of art and images in the twentieth Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive Maurer (see note 2). 11.  Edna Daitz, Écrits complets, edition compiled and and real world recurrent in Banksy’s
century. Goodman is the foremost representative of a position in image theory some- (http://classics.mit.edu, accessed “The Picture Theory of Meaning”, annotated by André Blavier (Paris: work would be hardly i­maginable
15 September 2016).  2.   See Maria Mind, vol. 62, no. 246 (1953), 184–201, Flammarion, 2009); 1st edition 1979), without Magritte and works such as
times called conventionalism and which is opposed to naturalism, the traditional pos-
E. Barrera and Daphne Maurer, 199.  12. Ferdinand de Saussure, 19. 24. The title of a picture central in Tentative de l’impossible (1928). What
ition considerably modified and updated in the twentieth century by the art historian
“Recognition of Mother’s Photographed Cours de linguistique générale, Charles Magritte’s pictorial research, depict- Banksy adds is an internal variation
and theorist Ernst Gombrich. To prove that resemblance is not enough or even neces- Face by the Three-Month-Old Infant”, Bally, Albert Sechehaye and Albert ing an enormous egg in a cage (repr. of style that fully exploits the associ-
sary for the image, Goodman tells us that a picture depicting a castle resembles any other Child Development, vol. 52, no.  2 Riedlinger (eds.) (Paris: Payot, 1971), p. 17).  25.   The egg-bird-knife-cage ation between style and ontology and

image more than it does a castle and that cars coming out of a factory all resemble one (June 1981), 714–16.  3.   See Suzi
Gablik, Magritte (London: Thames &
another yet do not represent each other. 39 According to Goodman, the link between an
Hudson, 1970). 4. The term “peinture-­
image and its object is no less conventional than that between a word and the object it alphabet” sometimes used in French
denotes. The analytical philosopher’s affirmation that “with suitable principles of correl- seems less convincing because it
ation, Constable’s landscape painting [Wivenhoe Park, Essex] could provide an enormous makes one think more of isolated let-
ters or painted alphabet books, which
amount of information about a pink elephant” 40 would definitely have pleased Magritte.
have indeed been used by other
Without going into the details here of the debate between conventionalism and natural-
painters. Magritte always writes (or
ism in image theory, 41 one should, however, emphasise that it is difficult to accept that it paints) words, and he uses painting
is merely visual habit which explains why, all other things being equal, a photograph of primarily to make an image. 5. René
100. 13. Ibid. 14.  See Jean David,
“René Magritte, illustrateur du Cours
de linguistique générale de Ferdinand
de Saussure”, Mémoires de l’Académie
nationale de Metz (2008), 125–36,
129.  15.   On the other hand, see
Sophie Saffi, “Discussion de l’arbit-
raire du signe. Quand le hasard occulte
la relation entre le physique et le men-
tal”, Italies, no. 9, Figures et jeux du has-
ard (2005), 345–94. 16. The catalogue
ensemble also gives an impression of
the web that Magritte spins between
spoken or painted objects, whose
almost inexhaustible resonances are
still being explored. 26. The same is
true of the 1935 version, in which “the
bird” is associated with the image of
a jug, which of course has a spout (bec
[beak] in French). 27.  From a mod-
ified version of the lecture “La ligne
de vie I” given by Magritte in 1938 at
thus makes the interaction between
two levels of reality even more surpris-
ing, a procedure also frequently used by
Saul Steinberg but not by Magritte. For
a brief reflection on differences of style,
see Klaus Speidel, “Style”, ATALA, no.
18, Découper le temps, II: “Périodisations
plurielles en histoire des arts et de la lit-
térature” (December 2015). 39. For a
critique of Nelson Goodman’s theory,
see Laure Blanc-Benon, “Logique des

an elephant generally seems to be a more adequate or faithful representation of an ele- Magritte, “Les mots et les images”, in
La Révolution surréaliste, no. 12 (15
phant than the image of Wivenhoe Park, Essex. One should also keep in mind that, con-
December 1929), 32–33. 6. Here, “rep-
trary to what has sometimes been suggested, the capacity to recognise familiar objects resentation” has exclusively the follow-
in an image is widely shared in different cultures, whether they have developed iconic ing meaning assigned to it by Merriam-
practices or not. This capacity might even not be acquired through a learning process. Webster: “something (such as a picture
or symbol) that stands for something
This is what three-month-old babies recognising their mother in a photograph suggests,
else” (ht tp://w w w.mer r ia m-web -
and it was also the finding of one of the most radical experiments conducted to deter­
ster.com/dictionary/representation,
mine whether iconic perception is learned. In the early 1950s, the psychologists Julian accessed 5 September 2016). What
Hochberg and Virginia Brooks kept their son away from images from birth until he was we call “representation” can there-
raisonné of Magritte’s works leads one
to suggest that the Pinakothek dating
(1930) is erroneous and stems from con-
fusion with the second version of the pic-
ture, which effectively dates from 1930.
The four-compartment Clef des songes
is thus the first of Magritte’s image-
word works and precedes in particu-
lar La Trahison des images (see David
Sylvester, René Magritte. Catalogue
raisonné (Paris/Anvers: Flammarion/
the Koninklijk Museum van Schoone
Kunsten, Antwerp, first published
in 1947 in a monograph on Magritte
by Louis Scutenaire, and in Écrits
complets (see note 23), 120. 28. R.
Magritte, “La ligne de vie I”, pp. 28–35
of this catalogue. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.  “E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A
31. Ibid. 32. R. Magritte, interviewed
by Pierre Descargues II, in Écrits com-
plets (see note 23), 660. 33. R. Magritte,
“Une fausse idée …”, in ibid.,
relations et / ou psychologie de la per-
ception: le sens de l’héritage good-
manien”, in Charlotte Morel (ed.),
Esthétique et logique (Villeneuve d’Ascq:
Presses universitaires du Septentrion,
2012), 101–1 4.  40.   N. Goodman,
Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation”, The Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 57, no. 18 (1960),
595–99. 41. For an analysis of the

nineteen months old, yet when he was first shown a choice of pictures, he was still per- fore be verbal or visual, both conven-
tional and natural, etc. 7. The adject-
fectly capable of recognising known objects in them. 42 Today, one can only agree with
ive “iconic ” is used here to denote that
Jean-Marie Schaeffer when he says that “facts are sometimes more stubborn than the- which pertains to the domain of the
ories: the existence of a biological capacity for analogical recognition of visual forms is image (or icon), and “verbal” to denote
a fact too firmly established by neuropsychology and the psychology of perception for it everything pertaining to the domain
of language (written/spoken). 8. The
to still be possible to rid oneself of it by arguing the philosophically disreputable status
question of syntax, that is to say, the
of the notions of representation and resemblance.” 43
question of knowing how signs organise
One can thus say that Magritte the painter’s affirmation in La Trahison des images that themselves together, is clearly import-
“This is not a pipe” is indeed justified, whereas that of the theorist who maintains that ant in reflection on language but has
Fonds Mercator in association with
Menil Foundation, 1992), 239). 17.  S.
Gablik (see note  3), 137. 18. Todd
Alden, The Essential Magritte (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999). 19.  J.
David (see note 14), 130. 20. Michel
Butor, Les Mots et la Peinture (Paris:
Flammarion, 1969), 70. 21.  Rainer
Maria R ilke, In Celebration
Me (1909), transl. Annemarie
Kidder.  22.   Ludwig Wittgenstein,
555. 34.  Michel Foucault, This Is Not
a Pipe (1973), James Harkness (transl.
and ed.), (Berkeley/Los Angeles/
London: University of California
Press, 1983), 20.  35.   R. Magritte,
interview by Jean Stévo [I] (12 May
1954), in Écrits complets (see note
23), 383 .  36.   L . Wit t genstein,
of Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M.
S. Anscombe and R. Rhees (eds.), G.E.M.
Anscombe (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell,
Goodman/Gombrich debate, see L.
Blanc-Benon, La Question du réalisme
en peinture. Approches contemporaines
(Paris: Vrin, 2009), 64–81 and through-
out. 42. See Julian Hochberg and
Virginia Brooks, “Pictorial Recognition
as an Unlearned Ability. A Study of One
Child’s Performance”, The American
Journal of Psychology, vol. 75, no. 4
(December 1962), 624–28. 43.  Jean-
Marie Schaeffer, “Narration visuelle

there is little relationship between the iconic representation of an object and the object is been little explored in treatises on the Culture and Value, George Henrik 1953). 37.   Robert Musil, The Man et interprétation”, in Mireille Ribière
image. 9. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Les Wright, Heikki Nyman, Alois Pchler without Qualities, Sophie Wilkins and and Jan Baetens (eds.), Temps, narra-
false. The image of an object is clearly not the object. But if Magritte’s affirmation and its
Célibataires de l’art. Pour une esthétique (eds.), (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 23. R. Burton Pike (transl.), 2 vols. (New York: tion et image fixe, (Amsterdam/Atlanta:
reaffirmation (“This is not an apple,” etc.) continue to intrigue, delight or outrage gener- sans mythes (Paris: Gallimard, Magritte and Victor Servranckx, Knopf, 1995), 11. 38. The complex Rodopi, 2001), 13.
ations of viewers, postcard buyers and users of calendars and smartphone hardshells, it
is precisely because there is a strong connection between the image of the object and the ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

64 65
 La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)
[The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)], 1929
Oil on canvas, 60.33 × 81.12 × 2.54 cm
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds
provided by the Mr and Mrs William Preston Harrison
CollectionCollection

67
 Fêtez le 18 septembre. Poster for
“La centrale des ouvriers textiles de
Belgique”, 1938
Pencil, gouache on paper, mounted
on paper, 24.3 × 16.3 cm
Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique,
Brussels, inv. 11704
Pour faire diminuer la durée du travail.
Poster for “La centrale des ouvriers
textiles de Belgique”, 1938
Pencil, gouache, ink on paper, mounted on paper,
17.4 × 15.2 cm. Musées royaux des beaux-arts de
Belgique, Brussels, inv. 11705
68
Toffée Antoine Tonny’s, 1931
Offset print on paper, 37.3 × 56.2 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Charly Herscovici
69
Primevère [Primrose], 1926
Offset print on paper, 124 × 85.2 cm
Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique,
Brussels, inv. 8584
 L’Alphabet des révélations Le Dormeur téméraire
[The Alphabet of Revelations], 1929 [The Reckless Sleeper], 1928
Oil on canvas, 54.3 × 73.3 cm Oil on canvas, 116 × 81 × 2 cm
The Menil Collection, Houston Tate. Purchase, 1969

70 71
 Le Masque vide [The Empty Mask], 1928
Ceci n’est pas une pomme [This is not an apple], 1964 Oil on canvas, 73.3 × 92.3 × 1.5 cm
Oil on panel, 142 × 100 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen,
Private collection Düsseldorf

72 73

Le Corps bleu [The Blue Body], 1928
Oil on canvas, 73 × 54 cm
Private collection, Switzerland
74
Querelle des universaux
[Clash of Universals], 1928
Oil on canvas, 53.5 × 72.5 cm
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris
Purchase, 1993. AM 1993-116
75
L’Arbre de la science [The Tree of Knowledge], 1929 This is not a pipe, 1935
Oil on canvas, 41 × 27 cm Oil on canvas, 27 × 41 cm
Ageas, Belgium Private collection

76 77
 Le Palais de rideaux III
[The Palace of Curtains III], 1928–29
Oil on canvas, 81.2 × 116.4 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The
Sydney and Harriet Janis Collection, 1967

79
 Le Sens propre La Clef des songes
[The Literal Meaning], 1929 [The Interpretation of Dreams], 1935
Oil on canvas, 73 × 54 cm Oil on canvas, 41.3 × 27.3 cm
Private collection Jasper Johns Collection

80 81
 Les Charmes du paysage L’Apparition [The Apparition], 1928
[The Delights of Landscape], 1928 Oil on canvas, 82.5 × 116 cm
Oil on canvas, 54 × 73 cm Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
Private collection, London Purchased with lottery funds, 1972

82 83

La Clef des songes
[The Interpretation of Dreams], 1952
Gouache on paper, 18.8 × 14 cm
Timothy Baum Collection, New York
84
La Lecture défendue. L’usage de la parole
[Forbidden Literature. The Use of the Word], 1936
Oil on canvas, 54.4 × 73.4 cm
Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique,
Brussels, inv. 11683
85
English catalogue © Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2016 Copyrights
(French edition) For all works by René Magritte: © ADAGP, Paris, 2017
Editor For Giorgio De Chirico and Chema Madoz: © ADAGP, Paris, 2017
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Copernicus, Typewriter

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N001967
The Philosopher’s Lamp, 1936
Gouache on paper, 23.5 × 30.6 cm
Private collection
 Sometimes, the names written in
a picture designate precise things, A word sometimes serves An image can take the place of In a picture, words have the
while the images are vague only to designate itself a word in a proposition same substance as images

An object encounters its image, an object

encounters its name. It may be that the image An object makes one suppose that One sees images and words
Or equally the opposite and the name of the object encounter each other there are other objects behind it differently in a painting

An object is not so attached Everything tends to make one think that

to its name that we cannot find Sometimes, the name of an object there is little connection between an Any form whatsoever can replace
another that suits it better can take the place of an image object and that which represents it the image of an object

The words which serve to designate two

There are some objects A word can take the place different objects do not show what may An object never has the same function
which need no name of an object in reality distinguish those objects from one another as its name or its image

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