A Pipe, a Hat, and the Question of Reality

After a nice pre-Christmas visit, my son and his family, who live in Sebastopol, took advantage of being in the Oakland–Berkeley area to visit one of their favorite pizza places. While there, he sent me a photo of a picture displayed at Zachary’s Pizza on College Avenue near the Rockridge BART station.

“Look who is here,” he wrote.

He had mistaken the figure in the picture for Fernando Pessoa, and when I saw it, I understood why. The resemblance was striking. But tipped off by the bowler hat (Pessoa always wore a fedora) and the red tie (far too extravagant for Fernando), I recognized the man as René Magritte — another favorite of mine.

Magritte famously questioned the nature of what we see reproduced versus the real object itself: the reality of what we think we see versus the thing’s own reality. His best-known example is the painting of a pipe accompanied by the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe — “This is not a pipe.”

As the curator of an SFMOMA exhibition explained, “the canvas highlights the fact that the viewer isn’t looking at a pipe, but a picture of a pipe. Far from a petty provocation, the distinction gets at the difference between art and reality.”

That idea reappears elsewhere in Magritte’s work, particularly in paintings that show scenery framed by a window. I’m reminded of something similar in the paintings of Antonio Costa Pinheiro, especially those depicting Fernando Pessoa. In both cases, I find myself wondering whether the act of framing a subject — a statue, a ship, a person — subtly removes it from reality. Does a frame announce: this is not the thing itself, but your interpretation of it?

Magritte was influenced by the Surrealists in Paris and moved from Brussels for a time to immerse himself in the movement. Yet a certain rigidity within Surrealism eventually sent him back to Belgium. He was also deeply affected by the stark, minimalist works of Giorgio de Chirico. That economy of detail, along with their shared metaphysical concerns about reality, is evident in much of Magritte’s work.

So Fernando Pessoa and René Magritte, de Chirico and, most likely, Antonio Costa Pinheiro — without conspiring — were drawn to the same question: reality versus the ways our interpretations shape it. For all of them, I suspect, the answers lay within the mind, and they remained in constant pursuit of some ultimate truth.

As curator Caitlin Haskell writes in the SFMOMA catalogue, Magritte “asks viewers to reevaluate their acceptance of what they see… and as rapidly improving technology amplifies our ability to realistically distort images, it’s more important than ever to consider what is a pipe, and what’s not.”

I find myself agreeing with Magritte’s doubts — that the world as we see it differs from what we are told we see through replication. Is that too strange a thought? I remember once asking my mother whether the reflection we see in a mirror is the same as how others see us. She didn’t want to deal with that question. I still raise it from time to time, though not too often — largely in the interest of keeping the peace.