Take another look

Taking pride of place in New York's Museum of Modern Art's new exhibition of Belgian surrealist René Magritte's between-the-wars work is his famous 1929 oil painting, the strange The Treachery of Images. The painting shows a tobacco pipe, realistically depicted. Underneath the pipe, Magritte has painted the words: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (French for "This is not a pipe").

Even though the object plainly is a pipe, Magritte's intention was not to shock with an absurd statement in the manner of his Dadaist precursors such as Marcel Duchamp, who once exhibited a urinal to challenge the viewer's notion of what is or is not art.

Magritte was making the point, by juxtaposing the contradictory text and image, that the viewer is not actually seeing a pipe in the picture, but an image of one: so, it's true, " ceci, n'est pas une pipe".

The work is a fitting centrepiece to the MoMA show, as the idea that no image could ever fully represent reality, the outside world that we experience each day, remained central to Magritte's work until his death in 1967.

It's often forgotten that theoretical ideas such as this lie at the core of Magritte's painting. His iconography - men in bowler hats, household objects, umbrellas, clouds - has been so absorbed into mass culture that its deeper meaning is often passed over.

This passing over is the point of "Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926-1938", says its curator Anne Umland. "There hasn't been a show on Magritte in New York for two decades, even though his works are so iconic," she says, flanked by some of the works at the exhibition. "A lot of people think they already know everything about Magritte, and wonder why anyone would want to do a show about him."