René Magritte painted *La Trahison des images* (The Treachery of Images) in Brussels in 1929. The 63.5 × 93.7 cm canvas shows a clear bourgeois pipe; underneath, in careful handwriting, runs the line 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' (This is not a pipe).

The paradox, visually striking, is linguistically correct. The thing on the canvas is indeed not a pipe — it is an image of a pipe, something into which nothing can be packed, nothing smoked, only colours stuck to canvas. Magritte presents this simple fact as a tension between image and text. The viewer oscillates between 'yes, this is a pipe' and 'no, this is only a picture'; that oscillation is the content of the work.

In 1973 Michel Foucault used this painting as the starting point of his short book of the same name, on the relation of text to image. Classical representation — which Magritte refuses — holds that word and picture are two names for the same thing; Magritte shows openly that the two are never the same. For Foucault this had been the hidden assumption of Western painting since the sixteenth century; Magritte stops hiding it.

All of Magritte's art is in this kind of questioning: men raining from the sky, stone clouds, daylight skies over nocturnal cities. He is the central figure of the Belgian wing of the Surrealist movement — quieter, more ironic, more analytical than Breton's French Surrealism.

The painting was lost and rediscovered in 1936; it is today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).