René Magritte

He painted a pipe with great precision and wrote beneath it: this is not a pipe. Which is true. It is a picture of a pipe. Magritte unsettled the act of seeing by putting ordinary objects in the wrong place. An apple hides the face of a man in a bowler hat; a canvas showing the view outside blocks the very window it depicts. The handling stays deadpan throughout, which makes it worse. He spent years making advertising layouts and wallpaper patterns, and that smooth commercial manner stayed in the work. He lived in a Brussels suburb like an office clerk. He died in 1967.