Castle and Sun, Art Print, 26 x 22 in, Paul Klee, $19.99

Flora on the Sand, Art Print, 28 x 20 in, Paul Klee, $25.99

Palace Partially Destroyed, Art Print, 30 x 25 in, Paul Klee, $19.99

Sinbad the Sailor, Art Print, 22 x 17 in, Paul Klee, $19.99

Fig Tree, Art Print, 18 x 24 in, Paul Klee, $21.99

Primary Route and Bypasses, c.1929, Art Print, 24 x 32 in, Paul Klee, $25.99

Colour Table on Major Grey, Art Print, 24 x 32 in, Paul Klee, $24.99

Versunkene Landschaft, 1918, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Paul Klee, $19.99

Blossoms in the Night, Art Print, 31 x 27 in, Paul Klee, $33.99

Camel in Rhythmic Wooded Landscape, Art Print, 24 x 32 in, Paul Klee, $24.99

Seiltanzer, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Paul Klee, $19.99

Red and White Domes, Art Print, 24 x 32 in, Paul Klee, $24.99

A consummate technician, his work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects, or an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)

Note that Magritte pulled the same "stunt" in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an "internal" caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. It might be true that Magritte's point in these Ceci n'est pas works is that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas. But that interpretation trivializes Magritte's insight -- for it is true of any painting, and every artist and child would admit it, that what the painting does is only present an image of a thing, and the thing itself is not on or in the canvas.

It might be more plausible to interpret Magritte as commenting on Freudian psychoanalysis -- a topic not very far removed from many of his surrealistic works, anyway. Sigmund Freud, especially in his dream analysis, continually asserted that what clearly and obviously seemed to be an X in a dream was not really an X, that it was an X only patently, on the surface, but not latently or deeply, that the X in the dream represented or was a metaphor for some other thing, Y.

The dream-image train is really a penis, for example. So when Magritte says "This is not a pipe," what he means is that it may be possible to think that it is only an image that stands for something else, that the phenomenal reality of the pipe obscures or hides the true reality lying underneath.

The difficult question, if we go this far, is whether Magritte intended to provide support for or to illustrate sympathetically Freudian dream analysis -- the treachery of dreams -- or, instead, was mocking it: "You mean this image, which is obviously a pipe-image, is not really a pipe-image? Tell me another!"