Magritte: This Is Still Not a Pipe review – brilliance and trash from the surrealist who sent up Freud

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 23rd September 2026

Magritte was no ordinary modernist, nor for that matter, an ordinary surrealist. Uninterested in surrealism’s dream culture (think Dali) he was attracted to the slippery connection between words and images. His deadpan, matter-of-fact style only made his paintings more confounding – most famously his painting of a pipe that declares “this is not a pipe”. Sometimes, to annoy people, he would “paint like a clumsy moron. Magritte was too intelligent to respect anything, least of all art.”