A Mystery of Uncommon Sense

A new museum in Brussels for the Surrealist whose sly images have entered our visual language

Here truly was the man in the bowler hat, the very one who rains down on the city in the Golconda he painted in 1953, or who hides behind a big green apple in The Great War of 1964. He was wearing the same kind of dark suit, with shirt and tie. His wife was fussing over some redecorating of their prim and proper brick house on the outskirts of Brussels and she’d relegated him to a cramped alcove off the second-floor hall, his paints and brushes in neat rows at his elbow. By all appearances, he might have been a humble postal clerk enjoying an hour of Sunday painting. But it was all obviously an elaborate disguise, beneath which conspired a committed, hot-eyed subversive.

For on his easel, as he leaned forward to apply some finishing touches to its broad-brushed grays and blues, was The Idol, the picture of a huge bird of sculpted stone flying across the sky above the sea. The tension created by that absurd vision, all of it painted with an almost photo-realistic precision, was obviously to his liking. “Heh-heh-a flying bird of stone!” René Magritte cackled with a proud grin and a wave of his hand toward the canvas. “Now that’s not just any old thing, is it?”

That’s how I recall being greeted when a pair of us, both young Paris-based journalists at the time, visited Magritte for an afternoon a couple of years before he died in 1967. He was already a recognized Surrealist master, sure, but not yet the lionized artistic legend he would become. And now they’re sounding the trumpets.

The new Magritte Museum that opened in Brussels last month is virtually a monument to him-a five-story €7.5 million museum installed in the Hôtel Altenloh, a 19th-century neoclassical edifice adjoining the city’s traditional Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts. The prolonged rollout of the new museum has become Belgium’s event of the year, accompanied by weeks of fanfare, poster campaigns, TV specials, conferences, concerts, and an inaugural visit by King Albert and Queen Paola. One of the Thalys high-speed trains that zip between Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels has been decked out with promotional Magritte motifs, in hopes of carrying bandwagons of art buffs to the Belgian capital through the summer and on into the fall.

The museum, it’s hoped, may shake up visitors’ traditional priorities. “As it stands, tourists in Brussels head first to the Grand-Place in the old city for mussels and then to the Louisa Quarter for shopping. Now the Magritte Museum, located as it is near the Royal Palace somewhere in the middle, could become the pivot between those two poles,” says Roger Hotermans, a Walloon diplomatic representative in Paris. “In fact, for many it could become the city’s number one tourist attraction, like the Prado in Madrid, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, not to mention the Gehry in Bilbao.”

The artist had it coming. The museum’s 250-plus works, from the Belgian royal museums and on long-term loans from other museums and private owners, form the world’s largest collection of Magrittes. Displayed chronologically starting on the top floor and descending to the ground level, they span the whole of the prolific artist’s 50-year career-in all he produced some 1,800 paintings, drawings, gouaches and collages, and a handful of sculptures, between 1920 and 1967. Enigmatic and strangely poetic, his pictures not only continue to capture the public imagination but have also entered the visual language of the western world. Haven’t his bowler hat, green apple and pipe become as familiar today as Picasso’s Cubist damsels, maybe more so?

But how? It’s not that his bag of tricks isn’t soon apparent. He lined up several devices as early as 1927 in pictures like The Secret Player, on view on the museum’s top floor, which shows two men in cricket whites at play among giant bowling pins-or are they balusters, or possibly bilboquets-that are sprouting branches and leaves, while an ominous black sea turtle soars over their heads. The lesson for imitators is plain: give ordinary objects like bowling pins a shockingly oversize dimension. Make inanimate objects morph into living things. Set up jarring juxtapositions between unrelated-or normally unrelated-elements like cricket players and a turtle. And finally, add a parting red curtain at the side for explicit theatricality. The tricks have been often imitated, but not matched because Magritte infused them with his singular sense of mystery. Then, for good measure, he and his Surrealist pals over beers on Sunday nights would dream up the titles for the pictures, the more cryptic the better.

Games? Sure. Tantalizing, otherworldly, exasperating games. Some of these works, though, are oddly rational. They make a kind of uncommon sense. The Empire of Light (1954), in the “Enchanted Domain” section downstairs, which many viewers don’t “get” at first because it appears utterly normal with its night-and-day depiction of a blue sky above and a dark lamp-lit street below, could be just straightforward elapsed time, couldn’t it? Consider the door with the man-sized hole in it, in The Unexpected Answer (1933). Magritte himself explained that he wanted simply to rescue this ordinary thing, a door, from familiarity and indifference, and give it back some of its meaning and mystery. Certainly, if you’re like me, you won’t contemplate a door, or a green apple, with quite the same indifference again.

Or take the celebrated 1929 The Treachery of Images, a later version of which is on display. It shows an ordinary tobacco smoker’s pipe above the inscription, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). “Why is this not a pipe?” Magritte repeated with a sly smile, after we’d had the temerity to ask about it on our visit those years ago. “Well, uh… because it’s a painting of a pipe, and not a real pipe.” Obviously the inscription is not a pipe either. Playful as they are, that simple picture, and simple explanation, actually go to the philosophical core of our elusive understanding of reality, and the limits of language. Magritte was well aware of the way logicians since Wittgenstein have worried about how the spoken, or in this case written, word is not reality-it’s basically arbitrary and at a remove from the reality it claims to describe. And in that case, how can we be sure we know what’s real? In weak moments, in fact, Magritte was given to corresponding with post-structuralist thinkers like French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Throughout his career, Magritte remained always his own man. In the 1930s and ’40s he hooked up with André Breton’s French Surrealist movement, which, for all its protestations of radical new freedoms, he found too authoritarian. Surrealist poet Paul Eluard recounted that at one get-together at Breton’s house in Paris, Breton imperiously commanded Magritte’s wife Georgette to remove the “despicable” crucifix she was wearing around her neck. She indignantly refused, and both Magrittes promptly stalked out. In the late 1940s Magritte first flirted with and later enrolled in the Communist Party. After months of their systematic rejection of his inventive agitprop posters, however, he decided the comrades were in their own way just as stiflingly conformist about art as bourgeois society, and he drifted away. In the 1950s young US artists like Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, on the leading edge of the Pop Art movement, embraced Magritte as a quasi-mystical discoverer of the ordinary. He didn’t embrace them back. “Small thinking as banal as that of any decorator,” he said of their work. “What’s the great feat in putting one star too many in a picture of a plain old flag?”

The phenomenon that cries out for explanation is advertising’s uncanny love affair with Magritte’s motifs. Why, exactly, is he “the most reproduced artist in the world,” as he’s called by Michel Draguet, director of Belgium’s Royal Museums of Fine Arts complex and principal promoter of the Magritte Museum? Why does commercial art-logos, ads, movie posters, you name it-exploit his images even to the point of distraction? If one more book jacket appears with the man in the bowler hat showing us the back of his head, it might be enough to launch a protest movement-say, SLAMM, for Slow Down Advertising’s Magritte Mania.

Draguet believes it’s simply a contemporary extension of Magritte’s own stock-in-trade. “Magritte knew very well how to make effective images because he himself came from advertising,” says Draguet. To make ends meet in the 1940s, in fact, Magritte doubled as Surrealist artist and poster illustrator. He and his brother Paul had their own ad agency, Studio Dongo, in a small building in René’s backyard. Art historian Werner Spies, former director of the Pompidou Center in Paris and an expert on Surrealism, ventures that, in particular, it’s Magritte’s paradoxes that work well in advertising, because they make you look twice, and the visual puns, “which, like any jokes, you can tell over and over again.”

Guy Dellicour, a marketing specialist who serves as Belgian Communications Manager of the GDF Suez Group, which bankrolled the lion’s share of the new museum’s cost, argues that there’s an anarchical undercurrent in Magritte that’s especially appealing to young viewers-and customers. “Many people have a secret anarchical streak,” he says. “They don’t want to act out against order and tradition, like the punks, say, but they respond to an anarchical perspective when it’s rendered in a quieter, acceptable manner. In this sense, Magritte is the gentleman anarchist.”

“Why is Magritte so widely reproduced, so recognized, so popular?” Charly Herscovici, Chairman of the Magritte Foundation, repeats the question a mite impatiently. “There aren’t 50 grand explanations for it. Just one. In his way of seeing, expressing himself, and imagining things, he is always, first and foremost, the great charmer and the great seducer. That’s Magritte.”

Some of the residents near the Magritte house on Rue des Mimosas in the Schaerbeek district on the northern edge of Brussels still remember how reserved, almost timid, their artist neighbor seemed to be. How he always wore a suit and tie no matter what. How some people found him somewhat gruff-although not Becco Cornet, who as a teenager used to tease Magritte about his chapeau melon (literally, melon hat) when he went to collect the artist’s white terrier Loulou to take her for a walk.

People also remember how, after René died and Georgette lived there alone until her own death in 1986, they were quick to call the police every time they heard an alarm set off by some second-story man trying to get at those increasingly valuable Magrittes on the walls inside.

What I recall from our visit years ago is Magritte telling us the secret of the decisive artistic conversion that was to make his fortune. In a word, Picasso was responsible. Here’s what happened, he said: Like most young painters in the 1920s Magritte wanted to live and work in Paris, the artists’ mecca. He and Georgette moved there for three years. “And in Paris,” he said, “I soon saw that there was this mad Spaniard who was doing everything there was to be done with technique. He wasn’t leaving anything new for the rest of us to do. So that’s when I decided to paint ideas.”

Musée Magritte Museum, 1 pl Royale, Brussels. +32.(0)2.508.3211. website