In the building of Belgium’s Royal Museums of Fine Arts, visitors can explore the 2,500 m2 of the Magritte Museum. This museum stands right in the centre of Brussels, on Place Royale, and exhibits for public viewing the surrealist artist’s creations belonging to Belgium’s Royal Museums of Fine Arts and originating mainly from purchases and from the Irène Hamoir-Scutenaire and Georgette Magritte bequests. This multidisciplinary collection is the richest in the world. It comprises more than 200 works consisting of oils on canvas, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and painted objects as well as advertising posters, music scores, vintage photographs and films directed by Magritte himself.







Visitors start their tour in a lobby that takes them immediately into the world of Magritte with a stylised remake, by the scenographer Winston Spriet, of the fresco Le Domaine enchanté created in 1953 for the Knokke Casino. The tour then continues via the top floor of the museum where the chronological and themed trail of Magritte’s work begins. Influenced at the start of his career by a constructivist period with the 7 Arts group, the artist was also to be marked throughout the interwar period by what he called his "travaux imbéciles" (idiotic works), in other words his work in advertising, which was crucial to his grasp of the concept of image and its repetition. From constructivism to his discovery of the work of de Chirico, the unifying thread is also accompanied by themed showcases displaying the wealth of surrealist archives also kept at the museum: from the first surrealist magazines via the tracts and correspondence of Magritte, these archives highlight the artist’s fellow travellers: E.L.T. Mesens, Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans and Louis Scutenaire, and the French surrealists during his stay in Paris: André Breton, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon. Each milestone is accompanied by educational screens where digitised documents comment interactively on the archives, a feat achieved thanks to the INEO company, one of the main contributions of the skills patronage of GDF SUEZ. 



                                                                    
The next floor of the museum looks at the artist’s return to Brussels, a period also marked by his closer links with the Communist Party of Belgium. Put in the dock by the Nazis, Magritte laid low during the Second World War, when he embarked on “plein-soleil” surrealism, an impressionist version of his painting. On Liberation, he re-established his links with Paris, in an ambiguous way, by exhibiting the so-called “cow period” series, which still exerts a strong influence on the work of contemporary young artists today. Finally, the last part of the museum is illustrated by his friendships with Maurice Rapin, Harry Torczyner and his gallery owner Alexandre Lolas, who accompanied him intellectually in his research into repetitions and the large Magrittian images focused around L’Empire des Lumières and Domaine d’Arnheim, key works which are accompanied by loans kindly provided by private collectors.

Visitors can then complete their tour via a bookshop entirely dedicated to the painter’s work and life, a discovery centre adjoining a cinema showing films dedicated to the artist as well as some films that Magritte liked to watch with his friends and that inspired him in his work on the subversion of images. The museum also has new technology facilities for the purpose of spreading Magritte’s work, and the archives of the René Magritte Research Centre are open to the public. Like the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam or the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne, the Magritte Museum is, in its field, the leading world centre of knowledge on the artist.

Discover also  the René Magritte Museum in Jette : www.magrittemuseum.be