An inspiring interior
Magritte sometimes borrows these
"familiar objects" from his direct surroundings and from the setting of his life. Therefore, a careful observation of the painter's house is not irrelevant. The visitor can be caught, in the living-room, by a sash window which unvelts the pretence of the view in a series of canvas (see
"La condition humaine"); by the fire place of the same living-room from which a train is looming up in
"La durée poignardée"; from the French window which, prosaically transposed by Magritte, unwinds for us the mystery of the horizon in
"Le monde invisible". As for the stairs which furnishes in
"Irène" or
"La lecture défendue", a blind or dead-end room, it leads today to many other mascots shown in the permanent exhibition. Thus this tuba which is on fire in
"La découverte du feu", or else the rifle covered with blood in
"Le survivant", the little bells that Magritte believed
"to grow like dangerous plants at the edge of abysses", or else a cap-and-ball game of which the shape recall the big pieces of turned wood that are still dominant in his pictures. These objects which are to be seen in the museum set up the basic elements of a Magrittian grammar.
