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1 3 4 Y T H I S I S N O T A T I T L E R U T H B E R N A R D Y E A Z E L L Ceci n’est pas une pipe: ‘‘This is not a pipe.’’ Perhaps few words more readily summon up a painted image than René Magritte’s paradoxical commentary on the nature of representation. Both the pipe and its legend have become familiar icons of modern culture, appearing on everything from T-shirts and perfume bottles to the cover of an influential book by Michel Foucault. Yet the picture that so many people think they know does not, strictly speaking, exist. Though Foucault evidently titled his own work after the object that inspired it, there is in fact no painting called Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The photograph that Foucault reproduces with that caption does closely resemble Magritte’s first painting of the subject , but according to the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, that painting was completed in 1929 (not 1926, as Foucault has it) and was named by its creator La trahison des images (The treachery of images). The five volumes of the catalogue record many versions of this treacherous image – with this, as so much else, Magritte was happy to repeat himself – but none of them bears the title with which it is routinely associated. I say that none of them ‘‘bears’’ the title in question because that is a common idiom for the relation of a painting to the words 1 3 5 R R E N É M A G R I T T E L A T R A H I S O N D E S I M A G E S ( T h e Tr e a c h e r y o f I m a g e s ) , 1 9 2 9 . Oil on canvas. Canvas: 23 ≥ ⁄ ∂ x 31 ∞∑ ⁄ ∞∏ x 1 in. (60.33 x 81.12 x 2.54 cm). Framed: 30 π ⁄ ∫ x 39 ∞ ⁄ ∫ x 3 in. (78.42 x 99.38 x 7.62 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection (78.7). Modern Art Department. ∫ 2011 C. Herscovici, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 1 3 6 Y E A Z E L L Y that identify it. But the question of where, if anywhere, we should expect to find such a title is by no means a settled one. Though modern publishers typically place a title below the picture it identi fies (as Foucault’s do with Magritte’s painting) and museums often place a label somewhere on the wall adjacent to the painting itself, both of these practices are subject to considerable variation; and the latter in particular is of quite recent date. It was still rare when Magritte first produced his famous image. To adopt a useful term from Anne Ferry’s study of poetic titles in English, paintings lack a ‘‘title space’’: a fixed location where the viewer of a picture can expect to find the words that name it. More immediately to the point, the titles of most easel paintings – the original version of La trahison des images included – are not physically part of the work they name. Though Ferry makes clear that the convention of placing a title above a poem has a history of its own, that convention was pretty much stabilized by the culture of print in the late seventeenth century, and the fact that both poem and title inhabit the same medium obviously strengthens the connection. Even when an artist has painted a title directly on the canvas, reading the words remains di√erent from looking at the image. That Magritte did inscribe the words ‘‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’’ in large characters across his painting no doubt explains why so many people misidentify it. Those who make the error might find further justification in the fact that the first reference to the authorized title appears only in a letter from the artist of 1935, six years after the work itself was completed. Though in...

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