Martin Walker in Brussels
A surreal war has broken out in Belgium as veterans of a revolutionary art movement rally against an arts festival in honour of the surrealist master René Magritte. The retrospective, to mark his centenary, is being billed by others as the biggest cultural event in Europe this year. The Belgian state is using the centenary to promote Belgium as “a country within the reach of dreams”.
The festival “has absolutely nothing to do with the internationalist and subversive spirit of surrealism”, complains Jacques Lacomblez, a surrealist painter himself and an old friend of Magritte.
Lacomblez, whose own paintings are in national Belgian museums, is refusing to lend works from his collection to the festival. “It is a matter of ethics,” he says.
The Belgian art critic Xavier Cannone, who sees the dark hand of Disneyfication at work, says: “It is a massive distortion, a shift towards the pseudo-culture of the theme park.”
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, the Belgian government and its tourist boards and cultural offices have banded together to mount the biggest-ever retrospective of Magritte’s work at the museum. Its own collection of 150 Magrittes is being doubled by loans from galleries and collectors around the world.
Magritte’s jarring juxtaposition of images – which included a woman with genitals instead of a face, and a pipe with the inscription “This is not a pipe” – embody the strangeness and shock value that gave surrealism its artistic and political force. Both a political and artistic revolutionary, Magritte (who began as a designer of wallpaper) was a member of the communist party. He declared: “My art is only valuable as far as it struggles against bourgeois ideology.”
The Belgian establishment’s homage to Magritte will dominate the Royal Museum of Fine Arts for months. His house and the pub where he used to play chess are part of a “Magritte trail” for tourists.