RENÉ MAGRITTE

The Surrealist Who Made Us Doubt What We See

René Magritte (1898–1967) was one of the most important figures of Surrealism and one of the twentieth century’s great painters of ideas. Born in Belgium, he developed a visual language that was deliberately clear, precise and almost conventional, while using it to construct images in which ordinary reality becomes strangely unreliable. Apples float in front of faces, men in bowler hats fall from the sky, rooms contain objects impossibly larger than themselves, and familiar landscapes appear at impossible times of day.

Unlike the dreamlike worlds of Salvador Dalí or the automatic experimentation associated with other Surrealists, Magritte generally painted recognizable objects with remarkable simplicity. His mystery came from relationships: an object placed where it should not be, an unexpected change of scale, a face that cannot be seen, or a sentence that contradicts the image immediately above it. His paintings repeatedly question the distinction between reality and representation, between an object and its image, and between what we see and what we assume we understand.

This combination of immediate visual accessibility and conceptual disruption provides an important precedent for Banksy. Both artists begin with images that can be understood almost instantly, before introducing a contradiction that changes their meaning.

The Treachery of Images

Perhaps no painting expresses Magritte’s thinking more clearly than The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe), painted in 1929 and now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The composition could hardly be simpler. Against a plain background, Magritte painted an exceptionally recognizable tobacco pipe. Beneath it he wrote in careful cursive: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” — “This is not a pipe.” LACMA describes the painting as a Magritte masterpiece, a key work of Surrealism and an icon of modern art.

The apparent contradiction is also perfectly logical. The object in the painting is not a pipe; it is an image of a pipe. It cannot be filled with tobacco or smoked. Magritte therefore forces the viewer to recognize something that images normally encourage us to forget: representation and reality are not the same thing.

Discover Ceci n'est pas une Pipe at LACMA, Los Angeles ↗

The painting opened a deceptively simple philosophical question about the relationship between words, images and objects. A word is not the object it describes, just as a painted image is not the object it represents. Magritte turns the conventions of advertising and illustration against themselves, using an extraordinarily ordinary object to question how images communicate meaning.

Banksy: This Is A Pipe

More than eighty years later, Banksy answered Magritte with This Is A Pipe, created in 2011 and exhibited that year in Art in the Streets at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Banksy reverses Magritte’s proposition. Instead of painting an image of a tobacco pipe and declaring that it is not a pipe, he places an actual piece of reclaimed metal pipe inside an ornate gilt frame and writes underneath it: “This is a pipe.” The physical object protrudes beyond the picture plane, its rough industrial surface deliberately at odds with the decorative frame surrounding it.

The joke depends entirely upon understanding Magritte, but Banksy develops the idea rather than merely reproducing it. Magritte distinguishes an object from its representation; Banksy responds by bringing the object itself into the artwork. The relationship between image, language and reality that Magritte had destabilized is apparently restored: this really is a pipe.

Yet Banksy immediately creates another problem. Once the discarded piece of metal has been placed within a gilt frame and exhibited in a museum, it has ceased to function simply as plumbing and has become an artwork. The reference therefore extends naturally from Magritte to Marcel Duchamp and the readymade, where the selection and presentation of an ordinary object can transform its cultural status.

Banksy’s intervention connects two of the central questions of twentieth-century art: Magritte asks whether an image of an object can ever be the object itself, while Duchamp asks whether an ordinary object can become art simply through the decision of the artist. Banksy combines both questions within a single work, using the familiar visual language of street salvage, graffiti and institutional display.

The Lovers

Magritte approached the relationship between appearance and reality very differently in The Lovers, painted in Paris in 1928 and now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The painting depicts a man and woman kissing passionately, yet both of their heads are completely covered by white cloth. Their bodies express intimacy while the fabric makes genuine physical contact impossible. MoMA interprets this barrier as transforming an act of passion into one of isolation and frustration, although Magritte himself resisted attempts to reduce the mysteries of his paintings to straightforward biographical explanations.

Discover The Lovers at MoMA in New-York ↗

The image has become one of Magritte’s most recognizable explorations of concealed identity and frustrated intimacy. The lovers are physically close but remain separated, creating the characteristic tension in Magritte’s work between what an image initially appears to show and what it actually permits.

Banksy’s Embracing Couple

Banksy returned to this idea in Tank – Embracing Couple, created in 2003. The work depicts two lovers locked in an embrace, but instead of Magritte’s white fabric, their heads are enclosed within heavy diving helmets. The image was associated with Banksy’s artwork for Blur’s 2003 album Think Tank, whose imagery explored themes of love and politics against the background of the Iraq War and the anti-war movement.

The relationship with The Lovers is visually immediate. In both compositions, an embrace that should represent intimacy is interrupted by an object covering the heads of the participants. Banksy replaces Magritte’s ambiguous fabric with industrial equipment, however, giving the separation a heavier and more contemporary character.

The diving helmets allow the figures to approach one another while simultaneously preventing direct contact. Their embrace is therefore both intimate and strangely isolated. The image belongs comfortably within Banksy’s broader vocabulary of masked, helmeted and protected figures, in which equipment designed to shield the human body frequently becomes a symbol of the conditions separating individuals from one another.

Within the political atmosphere surrounding Think Tank, that tension acquires additional resonance. Love and conflict coexist within the same image, while the protective machinery associated with hostile environments intrudes upon an otherwise private human gesture. Banksy does not simply reproduce Magritte’s lovers; he translates their psychological separation into the visual language of a world increasingly shaped by conflict, protection and anxiety.

Magritte and Banksy

The connection between Magritte and Banksy extends beyond these two direct references. Both artists depend upon the viewer recognizing something familiar before discovering that its meaning has been destabilized. Their images are often immediately legible, yet the apparent simplicity conceals a conceptual problem.

Magritte achieved this through carefully constructed contradictions between objects, words and environments. Banksy frequently employs a comparable mechanism through juxtaposition: a protester throws flowers instead of a weapon, a child embraces a bomb, a maid sweeps dirt beneath the surface of a wall, or a discarded metal pipe enters an ornate picture frame. The visual grammar is different, but the underlying strategy is related. Ordinary things are placed into unexpected relationships so that their conventional meanings can no longer be taken for granted.

There is also an important difference between them. Magritte generally leaves the mystery unresolved. His paintings resist definitive interpretation and often seem designed to make certainty itself impossible. Banksy tends to direct the contradiction toward more recognizable social and political subjects: war, authority, consumerism, surveillance, inequality or the institutions of art. Magritte creates philosophical uncertainty; Banksy frequently converts that uncertainty into satire.

The two Banksy works inspired by Magritte demonstrate this relationship particularly well. Tank – Embracing Couple takes the visual paradox of The Lovers and relocates it within the contemporary language of protection, conflict and alienation. This Is A Pipe engages even more explicitly with The Treachery of Images, answering Magritte’s distinction between representation and reality by placing the physical object itself inside the frame.

Banksy’s relationship with Magritte is therefore not simply one of visual quotation. Across the two works, he engages with one of Magritte’s central artistic concerns: the instability of meaning and the unreliable relationship between what we see, what we call things, and what they actually are.