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Magritte Museum
Magritte Museum
Whether you’re an amateur art critic with an insatiable appetite for all things aesthetic, or a full-blown philistine whose knowledge of Belgian art only extends about as far as Tintin’s quiff, here’s an essential idea for your next Eurostar trip to Brussels.
The Magritte Museum in the city’s Place Royale is home to over 200 works by the famed Belgian surrealist René Magritte, making it the ideal place to brush up on a touch of Brussels culture.
Spread over three floors and 2,500m2 in the neo-classical Altenoh Hotel building (part of Brussels’ Museum of Modern Art), the Magritte Museum takes in works from throughout the artist’s career and shows him working in a wide variety of media: oils on canvas, drawings, gouaches (a kind of watercolour mixed with gum or glue), posters, advertising work, letters, photographs, sculptures, and films produced by Magritte himself, to name just a few.
The Magritte Museum collection is laid out chronologically according to themes. Thankfully, despite Magritte’s own predilection for the weird and wonderful charms of Dada and Surrealism, the curators haven’t tried to reinvent the whole art exhibition paradigm. Instead they’ve gone for something far less head spinning: a collection that’s presented in an easily digestible format. So while you may arrive not knowing your “Son of Man” from your “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, you’ll leave understanding Magritte’s involvement in some of the 20th century’s most important artistic movements.
Starting with the early impressionist works he produced while studying at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Magritte Museum then goes on to show the results from his adventures in Constructivism with the “7 Arts” group, his forays into Futurism, his dalliances with Dada and his eventual settling on the school with which he would become most readily associated: Surrealism.
Along the way the Magritte Museum collection also gives a fascinating insight into the life of a working artist, as he struggles to find success, recognition and, of course, that next elusive commission. Among some of his most famous paintings we see examples of what Magritte himself referred to as his “Idiotic Works”: artworks for advertising, film posters and covers for musical scores. These commercial works may have been carried out simply to pay the bills, yet their artistic merit is easily discernible nonetheless.
By the 1950s Magritte had begun to gain increasing acclaim and success, so from his later life there are a number of copies of earlier works, carried out in response to specific commissions. Even in these though we can still see how Magritte manages to subvert expectations; he reinvigorates whole paintings with just the slightest repositioning of their elements, giving unexpected twists on works we believed to be familiar and making us question what we thought we knew.
A worthy lesson there from Magritte in how to be surreal to the very last. So, with that in mind, exploding cowshed.
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