Brussels Celebrates Its Native Sons

Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Alberto Giacometti Balthus Jeff Koons Andre Lhote Rene Magritte Giorgio de Chirico

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Top of the list is the bilingually innovative Musée Magritte Museum, celebrating the city’s famed Surrealist painter, who notably influenced artists from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, along with untold thousands of advertising campaigns. The brand-new 27,000-square-foot space is carved from the 19th-century Hotel Altenloh next to the royal palace on the historic Place Royale and exhibits the largest collection of one of the world’s most popular artists. The staid neo-classical façade is pepped up with five animated windows showing Magrittean blue sky with fluffy white clouds drifting across in an invitation to see the avant-garde art inside.

Completed in only eight months, the museum is the result of a partnership between the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; the Magritte Foundation, headed by Charly Herscovici, a family friend and heir of the artist’s widow, Georgette Magritte; and the Franco-Belgian energy group Suez, which has renovated the interiors to be as green as a Magritte apple (a contribution valued at €6.5 million, or about $9.25 million). Solar panels are on the roof, thermal screens are on the windows, and 600 low-voltage spots illuminate the art. Another €1 million to restore the building’s façade was provided by the state’s department of buildings.

The installation of the collection, a combination of museum-owned works and extended loans from private collectors, comes as a welcome surprise. As the elevator rises from the ground floor to the third level, where the visit begins, a slim glass panel allows a piece-by-piece peek at a full-length portrait of the painter’s wife and favorite muse, Georgette, a copy of a work owned by Houston’s Menil Foundation that has been divided into framed sections. First the feet, then the legs, the torso, and finally the head appear in an example of the wit that delightfully defines the mise-en-scene by interior designer Winston Spriet.

On the landing, a large window overlooks gardens in the direction of the suburban house where Magritte lived and painted most of his masterworks. Also here, a vast photo shows the artist with his eyes closed — the best way of understanding his work, he once suggested. Then, visitors enter a dimly lit Magritte universe just as deep-sea divers might plunge into the ocean’s depths.

And what a theatrical universe it is. Set off by the deep-toned blue, green, and brown walls of the structure’s second skins — anti-white boxes within boxes — 250 remarkable paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures, archives, films, documents, and Magritte maxims, written in red above the art (and all happily identified in French, English, and Dutch), are made the unrivalled focus of attention in this poetic and magical mystery tour through his work.

The chronological and thematic odyssey is divided into three sections: "The Triumph of Surrealism," from his birth in 1898 to 1929, on level three; "Taking Flight," from 1930 to 1950, on level two, and "Mystery at Work," from 1951 to his death in 1967, on level one.

Early works like The Bathers (1921) and Woman on Horseback (1927) were experiments in abstraction and Cubism influenced by André Lhote, Fernand Leger, and Pablo Picasso. Magritte’s discovery around that time of Giorgio de Chirico’s cool metaphysical style reinforced his own belief that “the art of painting is the art of thinking” and resulted in the striking Man from the Sea (1927), with the artist right on an enigmatic surrealist track of “the mystery without which the world would not exist.” The monumental figure in the painting, a man clad in black with a faceless wooden head, was inspired by the movie arch criminal Fantômas.