Traveling Outside France: Brussels (Part 3 of 3)

Our visit to Brussels continues.

The primary impetus to travel to Brussels was not eating Brussels sprouts.  Instead, we wanted to visit the Musée Magritte, which opened in 2009.  The museum features a large collection of the paintings of Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte (1898-1967).  

We enjoyed viewing the collection, which spanned Magritte's entire career and featured a few of his best known paintings.  

Understanding the Surrealist paintings was a challenge.  The imagery and symbols in the paintings were disjointed, conventional perspective was ignored and the titles of paintings added to the mystery rather than solving it.  We also noticed that many of the same images appeared in different paintings over the decades, like the blue sky with clouds, the green apple, and the jingle bell.  

 

(1927)

Sheherazade (1948)

The Flame Rekindled (or The Return of the Flame) (1943) (from Magritte's Impressionist period)

(The French word rêve means dream.)

Blood Will Tell (1961)

The Listening Room (1952)

(In the painting above, the sun reflecting on the water might be an homage to Claude Monet.)

The Curse (1960)

The Empire of Lights (1961)

We especially liked the version of Empire of Lights pictured below.

The Empire of Lights (1954)

The effect of the lamplight reflecting on the water was amazing.

One of the works featured in the museum was a recreation of Magritte's painting Threatening Weather (1929), painted after Magritte attended a gathering of other Surrealists, like Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel and Joan Miró.  The painting was recreated as a video with animation.

Below is a photo of three images that materialized in the sky at the end of the video.

Jean-Claude is fascinated by staircases leading nowhere.  So, he enjoyed the Magritte painting pictured below.  Jean-Claude hopes to live in a house with a stairway to nowhere.   

Some of the mystery surrounding Magritte's artwork was solved when we discovered a Rosetta Stone of sorts.  Magritte, early in his career, described principles of his Surrealist paintings in a work called Words and Images (1929).  The next photo below offers a translation of some of the principles.  

 

In case you want to own a Magritte reproduction, one option is the well-known Son of Man on a skateboard (pictured below).

Thanks for visiting Brussels with us.