In 1929, the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte gave us “The Treachery of Images.” The work is probably better known as “This is Not a Pipe,” because that’s what it says in French beneath the depiction, against a neutral background, of the kind of smoking pipe ubiquitous in the early half of the last century. It’s an image that will be recognized by even the most casual student of modern art or popular culture. The painting is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which tells us the work is “a treatise on the impossibility of reconciling word, image, a…