Hosting an exhibition dedicated to René Magritte (1898-1967) in your own country ensures audience success. We still need to innovate, because local people and foreign visitors sometimes seem to know everything about the Belgian surrealists, whose popularity here is on a par with Tintin, cyclist Eddy Merckx or singer Stromae. His museum, on the Place Royale in the Belgian capital, is one of the most visited museums in the kingdom and his name is everywhere, for example on the annual awards of French-language cinema, beer and a box set sold by the famous chocolatier.
To find a new introduction to the painter’s work, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (KMSKA), the largest museum in Flanders, has enlisted the services of a Walloon, Xavier Canonne, director of the Charleroi Museum of Photography. This doctor of art history from the Sorbonne, where he defended his thesis on Belgian surrealism, knew everything, or almost, about the painter’s life, and he was a member of the committee for the authentication of his work. If he is associated with the institutions of Antwerp, it is because Magritte set, in this city, one of the important milestones of his career, in 1938.
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