The Son of Man, 1964, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99, (1 other size available)

La Chateau des Pyrenees, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

Golconde, Art Print, 40 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $23.99

Le Seize Septembre, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

L'Empire des Lumieres, 1954, Art Print, 28 x 39 in, Rene Magritte, $23.99

Les Amants, Art Print, 40 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $36.99

La Victoire, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

Le Tombeau des Luteurs, Art Print, 39 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $34.99

The Empire of Light II, Art Print, 30 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $27.99

La Promesse, Art Print, 28 x 20 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

Le Blanc-Seing, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

La Belle Saison, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

Homesickness, 1940, Art Print, 28 x 40 in, Rene Magritte, $36.99

La Clairvoyance, Art Print, 32 x 24 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

L'Homme au Chapeau Melon, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

L'Empire des Lumieres, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99, (1 other size available)

La Trahison des Images, Art Print, 28 x 20 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99, (1 other size available)

La Magie Noire, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

Golconde, 1953, Art Print, 39 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $34.99

L'Homme au Chapeau Melon, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

La Corde Sensible, Art Print, 32 x 25 in, Rene Magritte, $36.99

Le Seducteur, Art Print, 28 x 20 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

L'Entree en Scene, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

Le Domaine d'Arnheim, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

Golconde, Art Print, 40 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $34.99

Les Valeurs Personnelles, Art Print, 40 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $34.99

La Chef d'Oeuvre ou les Mysteres, Art Print, 28 x 20 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

Ceci n'Est Pas une Pomme, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

La Malediction, Art Print, 40 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $36.99

Empire of Light, 1954, Art Print, 39 x 53 in, Rene Magritte, $51.99

La Grande Famille, 1963, Art Print, 27 x 39 in, Rene Magritte, $41.99

Le Domaine d'Arnheim, Art Print, 28 x 40 in, Rene Magritte, $36.99

Le Modele Rouge, Art Print, 24 x 32 in, Rene Magritte, $36.99

Le Chef d'Oeuvre, Art Print, 28 x 20 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

Un Musee Ephemere, 1986, Art Print, 20 x 29 in, Rene Magritte, $27.99

La Rencontre, 1926/27, Art Print, 28 x 36 in, Rene Magritte, $46.99

La Jeunesse Illustree, Art Print, 32 x 24 in, Rene Magritte, $24.99

La Magie Noire, Art Print, 20 x 28 in, Rene Magritte, $25.99

The Son of Man, 1964, Framed Art Print, 30 x 38 in, Rene Magritte, $149.99

Les valeurs personnelles, Framed Art Print, 40 x 34 in, Rene Magritte, $156.99

La Chateau des Pyrenees, Framed Art Print, 22 x 30 in, Rene Magritte, $114.99

The Son of Man, 1964, Framed Art Print, 22 x 30 in, Rene Magritte, $125.99

L'Empire des Lumieres, Framed Art Print, 29 x 37 in, Rene Magritte, $129.99

The Son of Man, 1964, Framed Art Print, 30 x 38 in, Rene Magritte, $188.99

Les valeurs personnelles, Framed Art Print, 41 x 35 in, Rene Magritte, $209.99

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!"