Magritte & the Old Masters

The goal of this morning’s trek was to get to the Magritte Musée by ten-thirty. That was the time on electronic the ticket I purchased in January that let us in to the Magritte museum and the Old Masters museum next door. Wait—did I say “ticket”?  When we arrived at the building with the large green apple on top…

…we were on time except that in the travel doc on my phone I could only come up with the code for one ticket when I was certain I had purchased two. So after the ticket taker scanned one code Ella told me to scroll through my emails to find the other while the line behind us started to grow. The young guy armed with the scanner didn’t have the patience for a this old fool poking ineptly at his cell phone, so he waved us in before Ella strangled me on the spot. 

By then I didn’t need any more reminders about aged inefficiency. In walking down the avenues Stéphanie and Louise to admire buildings like the foliage-fronted hotel…

…I was conscious of how quickly people whipped by without breaking stride. I thought I was ambling at a decent stroll, but as far as pedestrian traffic went I could have been confused with one of the lampposts.

The three floors of the Magritte Musée exhibit his work as it evolved from colorful Fauvist examples when he was in his early twenties to the Surrealist masterpieces that dominated his maturity followed by impressionist experiments and polished ironic word play paintings that he continued to produce until he did in the late 1960s. Most of the famous examples of his iconic style are owned by other museums (my favorite, “The Empire of Light” is part of a permanent exhibit at MOMA), but I was surprised at how good he was from the get-go. 

I mean how many painters have retrospectives covering an entire lifetime that leave you smiling the whole way through? 

And even in the photographs where he poses with his wife and friends he can’t help make fun of the vanity of posturing. Magritte must have been a great dinner guest.

Anticipating that I might spend the rest of the day there, Ella was leery of joining me in the Old Masters Museum. But outside of lingering at a Rembrandt and a Jan Steen and the remarkable collection of Van der Weyden paintings, I was in cruise mode.

Well, okay, I was until I got to the Bruegal’s. Those busy depictions of rollicking, fighting, absurdly penitent peasants! Each painting is an entire movie. You just don’t know what’s going on with a cursory glance.

It was worth every second of stalled-on-the-runway nothingness just to be able to stand there absorbed in that 16th century world.