Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe. Les Deux Mystères. This is not a Pipe. Two Mysteries. by René Magritte, 1898-1967

René Magritte, 1898-1967
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Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe. Les Deux Mystères. This is not a Pipe. Two Mysteries.

Original etching in black ink. 1966. Signed in pencil. Inscribed in pencil as E.A. (Epreuve d'Artiste - Artist's Proof). Proof apart from the numbered edition of a total of 92 impressions. Issued in the series: L'Aube à l'Antipode, 1966. Printed at the Atelier Rigal, Paris 1966.
Ref: Kaplan and Baum - Magritte Graphic Work no 12

Excellent impression. On cream wove paper. Excellent condition. Sheet: 11 1/8 x 10 7/8ins. Plate: 7 x 5 ins (180x130mm).

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Only very few of Magritte?s etchings were actually issued in impressions hand-signed by him in pencil. (All the last groups of etchings in colour were only issued with stamped facsimile signatures, and all the pencil signed etchings were worked in monochrome ink, never in colours). The work above is the second version of his famous ?This is not a Pipe? composition in etching, and it elaborates on the version drawn about a year or so earlier.

Ceci N?Est Pas Une Pipe - This is not a Pipe - is one of the most characteristic compositions in Magritte?s graphic work which explores the concept of what might be called ?multilevel interpretation?. The image shows a pipe (drawn in etching on paper), and then also a representation of a painting of a pipe. At the same time the words state that it is not a pipe. Do they indicate that the image is not in fact of a pipe, or do the suggest that this is not a real pipe but merely a representation of one. At the same time the images offer two levels of interpretation - a pipe (but not an actual pipe) and a picture of a pipe.

All these apparent contradictions and complexities are used by Magritte to show how the appreciation of objects exists on many planes - simple recognition, belief that we are seeing something we know but only in representation, and merely that we think that a combination of lines on a page create the form of an object. Magritte?s whole investigation of the interaction of reality, of recognition and of subconscious suggestion is one of the most important statements of Surrealist thinking in the work of any painter.