Philosopher of Surrealism, author of "This is not a pipe"
A Belgian Surrealist painter. His technique is realistic and calm, yet he sets everyday objects into impossible combinations: a bowler-hatted man whose face is hidden by a green apple, a daytime street beneath a night sky, a painting of a pipe captioned "This is not a pipe." With these visual paradoxes he forces the question: what exactly stands between image and reality, between the name and the thing?
Magritte painted a pipe as lifelike as could be, and beneath it wrote, neatly, "This is not a pipe." And he was right: this is not a pipe, only a picture of a pipe. One simple sentence punctures the illusion that "to see is to be real" — he turned a painting into a philosophical puzzle.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.