This is not a commemoration: Knokke pays tribute to Magritte

Knokke isn’t the first place you associate with the name of Belgian surrealist René Magritte, yet the Flemish seaside resort is out in front when it comes to commemorating the 50th anniversary of the painter’s death. Its Magritte Experience, on the beach, will run until September. This will be followed in October by an exhibition on Magritte and the sea.

Knokke’s reason for adopting Magritte lies in the town’s casino. In 1952 and ’53, Magritte oversaw the production of a massive mural called “The Enchanted Realm”, which reprises many of his most famous themes. Wrapping around the walls of the casino’s circular gaming room, it is arguably the world’s biggest Magritte.

“‘The Enchanted Realm’ is an important work in René Magritte’s oeuvre, and we are very proud that it can be seen in Knokke-Heist,” says Leopold Lippens, the town’s mayor. “So it should come as no surprise that we want to commemorate Magritte here, 50 years after his death.”

The Magritte Experience is directly opposite the casino, on a large patch of beach surrounded by a white picket fence. Inside, a boardwalk leads visitors past panels explaining aspects of Magritte’s life and the most famous of his images, some of which are also brought to life.

There is a large pipe, of course, and large green apples scattered here and there. And there is a vast bowler hat, resting on the sand as if dropped from a great height.

Playing with scale

The centrepiece of the Experience is inside the hat: a virtual reality “ride” through a landscape made up of Magritte’s most celebrated motifs. Once wearing the headset you can look around Magritte’s world, but you stay sitting throughout the ride; this is not the kind of virtual reality where you get to explore or interact with the digital world.

Magritte’s art is full of flying and floating objects, which lends itself to this kind of experience. It’s as if you become one of his bowler hatted men, hovering in mid-air.

There are moments of vertigo as you float over a cliff edge or up and out of a hollow tree. When you look back, these turn out to be floating over a mountain range.

The ride also picks up on Magritte’s games with scale, floating you past the massive figure of a nude woman who is partly changing into sky – although clouds preserve more of her modesty than in the original painting. His optical illusions are also here, in particular a very effective plunge into a mirror which becomes a kind of roller coaster.

There is an intentional resonance here between the landscapes in Magritte’s work and the world outside the bowler hat. “Magritte’s iconography is everywhere on the beach at Knokke-Heist,” says Jeroen Overstijns, chief executive of WPG Uitgevers, the publishing company behind the Experience. “With your feet in the sand, you are standing in a painting.”

While the ride is less than 10 minutes long, it works rather well, particularly if you already know your way around Magritte’s work. That would seem to be a safe bet, given how ubiquitous his imagery is, but it will be fascinating to see what children make of this as an introduction to his particular brand of surrealism.

Exit through the gift shop

Once the ride is over, visitors can have a drink at the Magritte bar, take the kids to the play area or check out the shop. Merchandise plays an important role in the Experience, from the usual cloth bags and notebooks to designer clothes incorporating Magritte’s motifs. Among the books, there is a Magritte-themed thriller by Flemish crime writer Toni Coppers, commissioned for the commemoration.

The €15 ticket to visit the Magritte Experience also allows you into the casino to see the mural, a privilege usually reserved for people attending events there. Rather than leaving you to explore the room on your own, a 20-minute commentary in Dutch, English or French guides you around as each of the eight large panels is lit up in turn.

The motifs are described, related to Magritte’s other work and personal obsessions, and the ingenuity of the work explained. Rather than just a reprise of Magritte’s greatest hits, the mural has a sense of continuity that weaves together sea and sky, but which also echoes the room, for instance by including a lush red curtain.

Scandalous

It’s worth ignoring the commentary for a moment and trying to imagine sitting down to play cards or roulette here in the mid-1950s, when these images of cloud-tinged nudes, bird-mountains and burning musical instruments were lit by a monumental chandelier made of Murano crystal.

“The naked breasts in the painting caused an enormous scandal at the time,” Lippens says. While not quite old enough to speak from experience, he did know Magritte, meeting him through the Nellens family, who built and owned the casino.

This connection gives him a good stock of stories about the creation of the mural. For instance, it seems that Gustave Nellens, who commissioned the work, was so vexed by the slow progress in completing it that anyone visiting Magritte in the room was interrogated to check that they were a painter, and so presumably coming to help out. Since this included fellow artists such as Paul Delvaux, the answer “yes” was not always a guarantee that Magritte would be hard at work.

And although Magritte personally oversaw the team painting the mural, he never spent a single night in Knokke. “He took the train three to four times each week, to see how the work was progressing, but he didn’t like to spend the night at the coast,” Lippens says. “He always went back to Brussels, to sleep at home.”

For present-day trippers, Knokke-Heist has also devised a Magritte-themed treasure hunt around the town. An app takes you around 15 locations, where you have to carry out an assignment or do some detective work. Designed for families, the route should take about an hour to complete.

And from October to January there will be an exhibition exploring Magritte’s art linked to the sea, at the town’s Scharpoord Cultural Centre.

Characters in a play

Commemorations of Magritte’s death also take place in Brussels, where the inside of the Atomium will be turned into another Magritte experience. Here the use of Magritte’s imagery will be more tangible, combining projections and prints with objects lifted from the paintings.

“Like characters in a play, visitors will walk through the decor and soak up the ambiance in a playful way,” explains Henri Simons, director of the Atomium. The installation will last for a year, beginning on 21 September.

Meanwhile, the Théatre des Galeries in central Brussels has finally received the ceiling Magritte designed for it in 1951. A preliminary gouache, now in the Magritte Museum, proposed a sky filled with sleigh bells, but this idea was rejected as too obscure.

So he suggested his trademark clouds, an idea that was more acceptable but still not followed through. Sixty-five years on, this safe option has finally made it on to the ceiling above the main auditorium.

Taking inspiration

In addition to Coppers’ thriller, various books are being published to mark the 50 years since Magritte’s death. These include scholarly volumes by Flemish arts critic Eric Rinckhout and German museum director Siegfried Göhr, and a book on Magritte for children.

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels will also be joining the commemorations, not just this year but running on to the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Magritte Museum in 2019.

The first stage will be an exhibition that opens in October, looking at Magritte’s influence on contemporary art. It will begin with the effect he had on fellow Belgian Marcel Broodthaers, and go on to examine the influence of Magritte’s “word paintings” from 1927-29 on the emergence of Conceptualism.

Then it will look at the way artists from the 1980s onwards have been inspired by his bright, naive “vache” period. This will take in artists such as George Condo, Gavin Turk, Sean Landers and David Altmedj.

We are also promised a Magritte beer, although not the Pig Beer the artist once suggested, hopefully in jest. The limited-edition brew will be produced by Brussels brewery Brasserie de la Senne and will only be available at the museum’s cafe and shops, from September.

Photos: Frank van Paridon