The Treachery of Images is a 1929 painting by surrealist painterRené Magritte. It is also known as This is Not a Pipe and The Wind and the Song. Magritte painted it when he was 30 years old. It is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The painting shows an image of a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", French for "This is not a pipe". The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in Les Mots et Les Images, La Clé des Songes, Ceci n'est pas une pipe , The Tune and Also the Words, Ceci n’est pas une pomme, and Les Deux Mystères. The painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message conveyed by paralanguage, like Alfred Korzybski's "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory", as well as Denis Diderot's This is not a story. One interpretation is that the pipe in the painting is not a pipe, but rather a drawing of a pipe. On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in La Révolution surréaliste as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in Les Nouvelles littéraires of September 28, 1929. When Valéry wrote "Poetry is a survival", Breton and Éluard made fun of it and wrote "Poetry is a pipe", as a reference to Magritte's painting. In the same edition of La Révolution surréaliste, Magritte published "Les mots et les images", his answer to the survey on love, and Je ne vois pas la cachée dans la forêt, a painting tableau surrounded by photos of sixteen surrealists with their eyes closed, including Magritte himself.
The painting is featured on a T-shirt and discussed in John Green's 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars and its subsequent 2014 film adaptation. In 2020, South Korean boyband Tomorrow X Together released a concept photo teaser for their EP , featuring a shabby plush toy with the caption: "Ceci n'est pas un nounours", evidently in the fashion of The Treachery of Images. The video gameTerraria has an item that is a homage to the painting, called "The Duplicity of Reflections". The in-game painting has a golf club replacing the pipe.
