The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images)

The subtractive test is close to the whole of this picture, because there is almost nothing to subtract. Remove the sentence and what is left is a primer card or a shop sign, with nothing to say. Remove the pipe and the sentence denies nothing: its first word points at a blank. Fill the ground with a table, a room and a shadow, and the pipe becomes a still life and the sentence a riddle about a room. The plain ground is required, and so is the schoolroom hand, which makes the words read as a lesson. What holds the axis below the top is substitution, not removal: the pipe is apt, a common thing and a sign of the ordinary man, and another object could stand in its place. Required in its parts, permitted in its choice of object.

Score: 8.8 / 10

What is disclosed can be stated, and it is a meaning, not a mood. An image of a thing is not the thing: this pipe cannot be filled. A word is not an image either: the sentence is painted, and it too is only paint. The bond between thing, picture and name is a habit taught to children over pictures like this one, and the canvas undoes the lesson in the form of the lesson. A second disclosure holds: the first word has no settled referent, and pipe, painting and sentence each make the sentence true. Held below the deepest disclosures because what it uncovers is a condition of signs rather than of people, touching the human condition at one remove, and because part of it is carried by words.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is not what this picture seeks, and the figure says so. There is no grandeur here, no beauty pressed to its height, no terror and no transport. The register is flat by design: a sign painter’s deadpan, a pipe with the tidy highlights of a catalogue, words in a teacher’s cursive. What it gives instead is a small, cold vertigo when the sentence turns the picture over and the floor drops out of the act of looking. It comes once at first sight, and again more faintly each time the ambiguity of the first word is noticed: real, of one kind, closer to wit than to awe. Height and frequency are low by the work’s own choice of register; the figure stays above the bottom because the vertigo is genuine and recurs.

Score: 6.8 / 10

Little here is built as archetype. The structure that bears load is one of signs: object, image, word. It touches something primal, because naming is the oldest lesson and the canvas is shaped like the first page of a primer, where the drawing and the word are shown to a child as the thing itself. That inversion of the scene of naming is in the construction, not brought from outside. But it is a philosophical structure more than a mythic one, and its further depths are summoned rather than built: Plato’s painted bed at two removes from the true one, the image forbidden. The pipe, emblem of the ordinary man and Magritte’s own, is a sign and stays a pipe. Evoked well at one point, built nowhere.

Score: 7.0 / 10

The inheritance is the oldest contract of Western painting, that a picture of a thing stands in for the thing, and the forms built on it: trompe l’oeil, the emblem with its motto, the shop sign, the primer card, the advertisement in which word and image agree to sell. Behind it stand the Cubists’ letters, Dada’s titles, Duchamp’s objects and de Chirico’s still spaces. The departure is on this canvas: a picture that contradicts itself in writing, painting made the instrument of thought in the manner of commercial illustration, against the automatism and the dream of the Surrealists around him. The stake was his place in the Paris group, which he left within the year. Held below the top because this is the sharpest statement of a turn made across a group of word paintings, not a turn made by one canvas.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly entirely, and at one precise place: the sentence and the pipe share one plane and one material. Because the words are painted, they are an image too, and the denial applies to itself; set the sentence on a label beside the frame and the work becomes a picture with a comment, and loses the self-reference that is its knowledge. Because the pipe is painted with illusion, the denial bites; drawn as a diagram, it would be a sign denying it is a thing, which no one doubts. The plain ground isolates both as specimens. Held below the top because the oil itself carries little: the knowledge passes almost whole into a print or a reproduction.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over promise: 97 years of return, and a literature out of all proportion to two painted elements. What the picture keeps yielding is the referent of its first word: the pipe, the painting, the sentence, or the act of pointing itself. Michel Foucault’s essay of 1968, enlarged as a book in 1973, is the deepest return: the picture as a calligram undone, word and image made to coincide and then pulled apart, with a distinction between resemblance and similitude drawn from Magritte’s letters to him. Magritte’s own variation of 1966 is a reading in paint. Held below the deeper wells because the central point is grasped at first sight, the return refines one paradox, and much of the writing uses the picture to illustrate an argument made elsewhere.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the picture reorganised what a painting could be about, making the relation of image, word and thing its subject, and showing that a painting could state and test a proposition. The discount: the reach belongs partly to the word paintings as a group, and it came late, through Magritte’s rise in the 1950s and 1960s, the American exhibitions and Foucault; it is credited and discounted for delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: conceptual art’s use of language against the image, of which Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) is the plain descendant; Marcel Broodthaers, who took up the sentence and the denial in his fictive museum; and beyond painting, advertising and graphic design, where the picture is quoted as often as any image of its century.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over 97 years. Form: whole; the two elements stand as painted, and nothing that carries the work is lost. Presence: continuous and very wide. The image is among the most reproduced of its century, and it is one of the few paintings whose meaning passes entire into reproduction, so its copies do not thin it; but wide presence earns little, and fame is not proof of permanence. Fabric: a small oil in one museum, whose condition and conservation could not be verified and are not argued. The surface is fixed to its moment only in small things, the pipe and the copperplate hand, both receding from daily life, and neither stands between the work and its claim, which is not of 1929. Held at the foot of what this span allows, for the span and for the fabric unverified.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of oil on a small canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is deliberate and load-bearing in one sense: Magritte chose the anonymous competence of the commercial illustrator, and the picture needs it. The pipe is modelled cleanly, its bowl turned by graded tone and a few hard highlights, the black of the stem and the band at the shank distinct; the edges are crisp; the cursive is even and convincing as a teacher’s hand. Nothing is clumsy, and nothing calls attention to the painter. But the range commanded is narrow: one object, one light, no space, no air, no surface worth reading at close range. The impersonal manner is credited as fit for the thought; it does not raise the command itself.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the pipe, an illusion of a solid thing, and the sentence, a line of script. They obey one law, and the law is the picture’s argument: both are paint on one ground, both are signs, and neither is what it shows. The handling is one handling throughout, the same clean, impersonal finish for object and letters, and the plain ground gives them one space that is no space. There is no second rule anywhere in the field, no passage painted otherwise, no element that steps outside the claim. But narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is about as narrow as a picture allows: two elements, one tone of making, one idea. The law holds without strain because it is asked to govern almost nothing.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One object and one sentence hold few orders, and hold them by design. Representation, the image and its claim on the real; language, the word and its claim on the image; the object world, a common thing of use; the schoolroom, the scene of learning to name, which the composition quotes; and consciousness, the viewer’s mind caught confusing sign and thing. They are integrated: one problem seen five ways. What holds the axis lowest, below its own floor, is what is absent, which is nearly everything the rubric lists: no person, no family, no labour, no state, no history, no sacred, no natural order, no place. The work’s power is that smallness, a whole theory carried by two marks. The figure describes the form.

Score: 5.8 / 10