Surrealism and the Mexican Muralists

The Belgian painter René Magritte pursued a cooler, more conceptual strand of Surrealism, less concerned with automatism than with visual paradox and the unstable relationship between images, objects, and language. His best-known painting, The Treachery of Images (1929), depicts a smoking pipe rendered with deadpan precision above the handwritten French caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), a deliberately disorienting reminder that a painted pipe is only a representation, not the object itself. Magritte returned repeatedly to such visual riddles, painting men in bowler hats with their faces obscured by floating objects, as in The Son of Man (1964), and canvases like The Human Condition, in which a painting on an easel seamlessly continues the landscape visible through the window behind it, blurring depicted reality and the world beyond the frame. His deadpan, illustrational technique, quite unlike the melting distortions of Dalí, showed that Surrealism's exploration of the irrational could be pursued through cool, precise realism as readily as through fantastical invention, and it proved deeply influential on later Pop and Conceptual artists drawn to his interrogation of images and their captions.