Highlight follows highlight: The Secret Player (1927), the artist’s largest oil painting, depicts a Surrealist game of skittles that has sent a shiny black turtle flying in a thicket of baluster posts sprouting into trees. There are portraits of patrician blonde collector Adrienne Crowet (1940) and her daughter Anne-Marie, who became a favorite muse in The Ignorant Fairy (1956), where a candle casts a mysterious darkness on her face. The Domain of Arnheim (1962), whose mountain rises in the shape of a bird’s head and wings, was inspired by an Edgar Alan Poe story. In Black Magic (1945), sorcery turns Georgette’s head and upper body into blue sky. Magrittean motifs — bowler hats, green apples, spherical bells, blue-sky birds, and the pipe that isn’t a pipe — all take bows.

There are examples of the artist’s less successful forays into Impressionistic styles reminiscent of Renoir and van Gogh in his “Full Sunlight” period during the 1940s and his provocation of the florid art of his “Vache” period in a 1948 one man show designed to shock a chic Parisian gallery (both styles later abandoned). These are accompanied by charming Art Deco musical score covers and advertising posters that he dubbed “idiotic work,” but nonetheless were necessary to make a living. Such droll objects as painted wine bottles — eagerly snapped up by collectors — include “A Rare Old Vintage Picasso” (1944).

Magritte’s late work is characterized by innovative “repetitions.” Two examples — he did many — of the famous masterwork The Empire of Lights, one a vertical version from 1954, the other a horizontal rendering from 1961, show a lighted street lamp before a house at night, all set against a daytime sky. Along with his last signed oil canvas, The Blank Page (1967), where a full moon glows in front of floating leaves above a slumbering landscape, they are the climax to a journey through surrealist poetry.

“The museum resembles the man: bourgeois on the outside and unexpected on the inside,” confirms foundation President Herscovici, who was instrumental in bringing the 10-year dream to reality. “Magritte was an enchanter. Each time you look at his paintings you see something new.”

The second Brussels opening is actually outside the city in Louvain-La-Neuvre, a new town about 20 miles east of the Belgian capital. On the edge of an oak forest, the beguiling new Hergé Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc in white concrete, steel, and glass, floats like a ship coming into port. A long wooden footbridge leads to the entrance, reinforcing the evocation of the maritime vessels that truffle the books of the Belgian cartoonist’s most popular creation, the cub reporter Tintin and his white fox terrier Snowy, whose exotic globe-trotting comic strip adventures have sold over 200 million copies worldwide. (Steven Spielberg plans to bring a Tintin trilogy to the big screen beginning in 2011.)

While architecture recedes at the Magritte collection, here it embellishes the experience: The façade sports a scene of Tintin on a quai from the book Crab with Golden Claws, and de Portzamparc’s playful picture windows resemble comic-strip panels when viewed from the exterior. Inside, the soaring atrium is the building’s key. Enchanting pastel islands of curved walls divide the reception spaces, and visitors ascend to the permanent collection in an elevator whose tower is painted in a navy-and-white checkerboard recalling the rocket of Tintin’s lunar flights in Destination Moon. In the eight permanent exhibition rooms, arranged over three floors, the light is filtered to protect the treasury of 80 original comic-strip panels and 800 documents, photos, and objects. But there’s plenty of light on the metal walkways that link the rooms and crisscross the luminous central atrium, offering vistas through the building to the greenery outside.

Commissioned by Hergé’s widow, Fanny Rodwell, and built at a cost of about €18 million, the 38,750-square-foot structure aims to show how the comic strips were produced, their inspirations — from Erroll Flynn’s pirate movies to the Marx Brothers farces — and the intriguing research resources such as a scary Peruvian mummy viewed with 3-D glasses or Chinese lanterns that Georges Remi (Hergé was his pen name) assembled to help set the scene of the far-off countries he never traveled to himself. There is also a projection room, a restaurant, a boutique, workshops, and offices.