Travel Belgium About Brussels Upper Town Musees Royaux Des Beaux Arts Surrealism DelvauxAnd Magritte
Level -5/6 is given over to the Surrealists. There's a fine Dalí,
The Temptation of St Anthony , a hallucinatory work in which spindly-legged elephants tempt the saint with fleshy women, and a couple of haunting de Chirico paintings of dressmakers' dummies. Amongst the Belgian Surrealists, Paul Delvaux is represented by his trademark themes of ice-cool nudes set against a disintegrating backdrop as well as trains and stations - see the Evening Train and the
Public Voice . Even more elusive is the gallery's collection of paintings by René
Magritte (1898-1967), perplexing works whose weird, almost photographically realized images and bizarre juxtapositions aim to disconcert. Magritte was the prime mover in Belgian surrealism, developing - by the time he was thirty - an individualistic style that remained fairly constant throughout his entire career. It was not, however, a style that brought him much initial success and, surprising as it may seem today, he remained relatively unknown until the 1950s. The museum has a substantial sample of his work, amongst which two of the more intriguing pieces are the baffling Secret Player and the subtly discordant Empire of Lights