The iconic painting is returning to its country of origin for the first time in 45 years as part of a major exhibition at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium examining Magritte’s influence on contemporary artists from Jasper Johns to Gavin Turk, giving us a fresh opportunity to attempt to define the indefinable.

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“This word that we pronounce ‘pipe’ is this object in reality, not on the paper, and the idea of Magritte is to show that it is nothing to do with reality, it is just a convention,” says Michel Draguet, curator of the exhibition. While it is easy enough to understand an image of a pipe is not an actual pipe, Draguet explains that “the real problem with the work is that you have to give a new definition to the pipe, your own definition”.