“La race blanche” – Signed color lithograph by René Magritte

"A picture is not to be confused with a thing you can touch. Can you fill my pipe? Of course not! It is only a representation. If I had written on my picture 'This is a pipe,' I would have been lying. The image of a slice of jam is certainly not something edible," the Belgian artist René Magritte, one of the most famous representatives of Surrealism, once said about his art. His paintings possess a dreamy enigmatic quality, even though they mostly depict everyday objects. Magritte drew on a personal repertoire of recurring subjects such as the apple, the pipe, the bowler hat, the curtain, the dove, and the blue sky with white clouds.