An installation in the main building foyer celebrates the Menil Collection’s extraordinary holdings of work by the Belgian Surrealist, René Magritte (1898–1967). It focuses on a core group of paintings from the 1950s and ’60s, in which the artist rendered impossible situations with virtuosic precision and uncanny clarity. Now regarded as icons of the Surrealist movement, these paintings were purchased within a couple years of their making by the museum’s founders, John and Dominique de Menil.
The de Menils were Magritte’s most important champions in the United States. Beginning in the late 1940s, they bought dozens of his artworks, lent to and organized major exhibitions of his work, and led the publication of a significant, six-volume catalogue raisonné. Through these and other activities, the de Menils fundamentally shaped the artist’s reception and reputation in the postwar American art world. In 2024, the Menil Collection continued this legacy by being a major lender to the first-ever retrospective of Magritte’s work in Australia, including the loan of the paintings in this display.
