Treachery of images (This is not a pipe)

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Dimensions: 63,5 x 93,98 сm.
Location: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the USA).

The famous philosophical canvas depicts a regular smoking pipe, and the calligraphic inscription at the bottom of the painting, which says, “This is not a pipe,” is bewildering. According to the author’s idea, the work proves the statement that images sometimes replace real things, although in reality they are not, because a drawn pipe is just an image, it can’t be picked up to smoke. The paradox of the picture, in which the tube is not a tube at all, was used by the author in several paintings, not in such an open but a more veiled form. Much later, advertising masters began to use this method in their work to attract the attention of the public with the effect of surprise.