[3] It is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in Les Mots et Les Images,[5] La Clé des Songes,[6] Ceci n'est pas une pipe (L'air et la chanson),[7] The Tune and Also the Words,[8] Ceci n’est pas une pomme,[9] and Les Deux Mystères.

[10] The painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message[11] like the Alfred Korzybski's "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory", as well as Denis Diderot's This is not a story.

On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in Les Nouvelles littéraires of September 28, 1929.

[12][13] In the same edition of La Révolution surréaliste, Magritte published "Les mots et les images" (his founding text which illustrated where words play with images), his answer to the survey on love, and Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt, a painting tableau surrounded by photos of sixteen surrealists with their eyes closed, including Magritte himself.