In our street art ramble today we almost missed the Fleur de Papier Doré bar where Magritte and his surrealist friends used to hang out.
I wouldn’t have noticed the bland facade with the tiny Fleur de Papier Doré sign hanging out front except that there was a large photograph in the window display next door and one of the guys in the photo seemed to look like the famous painter. I wasn’t sure since Magritte’s mug isn’t as iconic as Picasso’s, but in checking out the names of the suited gents in the photo there was Magritte’s. A little arrow underneath pointed to the nondescript hole in the wall I had almost passed.
Inside it didn’t look like much had changed since the 1920s except for the politically incorrect cheesecake mural behind the curtain of what appeared to be a converted patio. Otherwise the bar was dark and cluttered with irreverent memorabilia, a nude photo here, a jokey ad there, tiny paintings, cut out newspaper headlines, a whole collage of contrasting images aged by cigarette smoke, fodder for the surrealist imagination.
What would it have been like to be there in, say, 1927? Sitting down at a table and with the strength of the dollar buying rounds for the painters and poets. “Here, let me buy you another drink, René, and let me take that canvas youn have doubts about, yes, the one with apple, let me take it off your hands.”
I love these old cramped and seedy bars that helped fire a certain brand of creativity and let us look at the world in a different way. I can see these guys in their stodgy suits and silly hats finding the post-war machine age so disorienting it was like living in a crazy dream. If only they could capture it on canvas…