René Magritte’s The Treachery (or Perfidy) of Images (1928–1929), is a highly realistic oil painting of a tobacco pipe with the words Ceci n’estpas une pipe (“This is not a pipe.”) painted below. The message raises the obvious question: why not? Why is this pipe, especially one so meticulously rendered, not a pipe? The answer is that Magritte did not make a pipe, he made a painting, and with this work Magritte draws the viewer’s attention to a tendency to casually equate pictures of things with what they represent. The work reinforces the idea that even a realistic painting is an illusion, a concept that would have a profound impact on later modern and postmodern art.