Ceci N'est Pas un Headline

Master of surrealism and famous Brussels resident René Magritte loved his city so much he rarely left . Nick Haslam walks (and drinks) in his footsteps, and ponders over his greatest works. Photo: Ann Van Wesmael - the Musée Magritte Museum

What’s the first thing that enters your head when you think of Brussels? Mussels and chips, beer… perhaps the European Parliament? Or is it men in bowler hats, candyfloss clouds, green apples and a picture of a pipe that is not a pipe?

All of the above could be correct, but it’s the latter, the work of René Magritte – reflected in the rather offbeat sense of humour and irreverent approach to life of Belgians – that most captured my mind on a recent trip to Brussels, and a walking tour of the artist’s hangouts and the museums dedicated to him.

The nation’s love affair with Magritte and the surrealist art movement he pioneered – which took off in Brussels during the 20th century – manifested itself in a major and long-overdue way last June with the opening of the magnificent Musée Magritte Museum in a neoclassical building on Place Royale. Then there’s also the house in the suburbs where he lived, which has been lovingly restored as the similarly named René Magritte Museum.

However, my journey begins at the Greenwich café in downtown Brussels. Here in the 1930s and 1940s Magritte, a small man looking more like an accountant than an artist in his sober brown suit, would jump off the No. 94 tram, push through the art-deco doors, greet fellow patrons and sit down for a game of chess and a glass of beer. Though the café was not at the heart of the surrealist movement like some of the city’s other bars, it was one of Magritte’s regular haunts. These venues that he loved, along with his close circle of friends, gave the artist little cause to ever leave Brussels, after a brief and difficult two-year stint in Paris in the late 1920s when he found it hard to fit in.

“I can always stay at home as the world offers me ideas,” he said, when asked why he rarely travelled. It was in Brussels that he was at his happiest and most creative.

Jumping on the same No. 94 today I travel north to the small terraced house at 135 Rue Esseghem, where Magritte lived with his wife Georgette from 1930–1954, and where he produced some of his most famous works while working for the advertising agency he had set up with his brother Paul. In between producing posters for cinemas and designing cigarette packets, he threw himself into painting, producing sometimes three surrealist works a week. After graduating from Brussels’ Académie des Beaux-Arts in the 1920s, his bizarre images garnered little interest – yet slowly but surely from the 1930s onwards they began to sell.

Entering the discreet little house is like taking a step back in time. It has been restored so well it feels as if Magritte is still alive and living there today. The artist never favoured a decadent, bohemian style of life like many famous artists of his era, and the house reflects this. It’s relatively simple except for a few pieces of original furniture that stand out – the bedside rug made from the skin of one of his favourite dogs, the blood-red furniture in the bedroom, and the electric blue living room walls. And yet it was here that the couple hosted events where the Brussels surrealists would meet and play. On Sunday afternoons, the house would fill with leading musicians, writers, and poets discussing the latest movements in art and philosophy, often performing impromptu plays wearing surreal costumes in the tiny garden. Some of his most iconic and well-known paintings were produced on the easel set up in the small dining room, including The Treachery of Images, a painting of a floating pipe with the caption: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (“This is not a pipe.”). There’s a permanent exhibition at the house featuring over 400 original documents of Magritte’s correspondence – brochures, adverts, and original drawings and paintings like La Lampe d’Aladin, as well as, until recently, Olympia, a nude portrait painted in 1948 of Georgette reclining with a shell balanced on her stomach. Reportedly worth up to €3 million, it was stolen by armed robbers in September last year and is yet to be recovered.

Following World War II, Magritte’s work began to make some impact on the international circuit. With the help and encouragement of Edouard Mesens, a young pianist turned art dealer, and lifelong friend, he was able to show his work in London and the US. But increasing success had little impact on Magritte, who admitted that he detested the actual process of painting and who still kept to his regular routine – escaping when possible to his favourite bars like the Greenwich to play chess and hang out. One of his preferred drinking spots was La Fleur en Papier Doré, which is where I’m heading next.

Back then the place was owned by one of Magritte’s inner circle, Geert Van Bruaene (nicknamed “Le Petit Gerard”), and the bar just off the Grand Place held regular exhibitions of the painter’s work and became the unofficial headquarters of the Belgian surrealist movement. Over long lunches well lubricated with the extensive range of wine and beers on tap, Magritte would encourage his friends to find titles for his pictures, a task he always found impossibly hard.

Blending poetry with whimsy in a slyly subversive way, his paintings and their names, such as The Copper Handcuffs, formed part of his witty and irreverent view of the art world. Today, La Fleur en Papier Doré remains virtually unchanged, including the interior designed by Le Petit Gerard himself – the walls lined with a bizarre collection of bric-a-brac and graffitied with sayings by Magritte and his friends. In pride of place is the motto attributed to Le Petit Gerard, which could have been the coda of the Brussels surrealists: “Every man has the right to 24 hours of freedom a day.”

“Hear, hear!” I think sipping a Belgian beer and tasting some very fine onion soup, one of the café’s specialities.

Nearby in the labyrinth of narrow 17th-century streets radiating from the Grand Place, A l’Imaige Nostre Dame was another popular watering hole for the surrealists. In the 1930s and 1940s, a room above the bar was an exhibition space for prominent artists, including Max Ernst, Paul Delvaux and Magritte himself. Today, although the exhibition room has long been closed, the cosy interior remains the same with the same bewildering array of local beers that Magritte and his friends would have sampled still on sale.

Outside, that irreverent Brussels attitude appears in a shop on the street leading into the baroque splendour of the Grand Place, selling bright little mini-chocolate “Manneken Pis” (after Brussels’ famous pissing boy fountain). There are rows of tiny peeing boys in bright fluorescent colours, adding a surreal touch of which Magritte surely would have approved.

And not far off in the classical splendour of the Place Royale is the exceptional Musée Magritte Museum, where the most important and biggest collection of his paintings in the world now has a permanent home. Covering all stages of his career, from the hastily worked paintings of the early prolific period to the more polished works of art of the later years, the collection includes sculpture, film, photography, notes, letters and examples of the adverts and posters from which he made his early living. Many of the works are on loan from private collections and have never been on public display before. Set over three floors, it’s the perfect way to experience Magritte and to round off a surrealist tour of Brussels. “Magritte is important because he is part of the Belgian landscape,” said the collection’s curator Virginie Devillez when the buliding opened last year. “It is because of him we understand the word ‘surreal’.”

She’s not wrong. One of his last works, Sky Bird, representing the silhouette of a dove filled with clouds and sky was commissioned by the now defunct Belgian airline Sabena for a price that Magritte admitted just before his death in 1967 would allow him to “put butter on my spinach”. But the painter had one more demand to make of the airline. In addition to the fee he asked for free first-class travel to New York to attend an exhibition, and that his dog should be able to travel with him in the cabin. The airline acquiesced, and you don’t get much more surreal than that.

RENE MAGRITTE MUSEUM, 135 RUE ESSEGHEM, TEL: +32 (0)2 428 2626, WWW.MAGRITTEMUSEUM.BE. MUSEE MAGRITTE MUSEUM, 1 PLACE ROYALE, TEL: +32 (0)2 508 3211, WWW.MUSEE-MAGRITTE-MUSEUM.BE. FOR MORE DETAILS ABOUT SURREALIST WALKING TOURS OF BRUSSELS, VISIT WWW.BRUSSELSINTERNATIONAL.BE. FOR GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT BRUSSELS, VISIT WWW.BELGIUMTHEPLACETO.BE