rene magritte

Was re-reading hanakimi manga yesterday and saw the artist's name. They mentioned a surrealistic drawing with daylight sky but nightscape surface. Since I've got nothing better to do, I went googling the name 'magritte' so here's the painting


The Empire of Light
1954, oil on canvas
Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts

Rene Magritte was a swedish surrealist artist (somewhat influenced by Dali althou his major inspiration was from another artist) whose most famours work known to date is probably 'the treason of pictures' (this is not a pipe) drawn in 1929.


There's a poster of this art piece hanging in our medical science building. For a moment when I passed by, I couldn't recall exactly where I read about it. It must be in an introductory surrealism book now i think back on it. the TREASON of an image, it's an representation of a pipe but not a real object, not something you can smoke, merely colours and lines. That's why it's not a pipe. That's the standard explanation given in many books. To define reality by usage. Reminds me of Almasy the English Patient. 'A broken car, a new car, still a car', then came Katherine's reply 'a husband's love, platonic love, definitely different things'.
Can we blatantly argue 'drawing of a pipe, sculpture of a pipe, a real pipe, still a pipe?' Since that's the word that comes to our mind when we seize upon the image.
In later decades, Rene drew another painting with duplicated theme. A huge realistic looking apple annotated below 'this is not an apple'. Sure. Why would our medical science building adopt the pipe I was wondering? To interpret the hidden? If I force the reasons in their possible 'what's great for a sicentific mind' way, the pipe might shine some sparks. Still the avant garde idea must be appealing and daring in his time. Even now the influence is still everywhere.

I remembered my biology teacher in my junior high school told us you could infer how smart a person is from how easy he can cap a pen. The rather dense headed me practised for a while decapping and recapping my ballpen and it wasn't easy as I thought. Is this 'precision gripping' or eye-hand coordination really an indication of IQ? It made an impression on me no doubt and later I was a bit agitated why the hell I was bothered by such fickle comments.

And why my blogger interface suddenly changed from eng to chinese...