Even though one of the best experts on the subject is French art historian José Vovelle (his thesis on Belgian Surrealism, "Le Surréalisme en Belgique," was published in 1972), little has been known in France about this dynamic movement across the border in Belgium. A rich and fascinating exhibition in Brussels, in the astonishing Center for Fine Arts/BOZAR building designed by Victor Horta, can remedy this. It is being complemented, at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, by another exhibition entitled "Imagine! 100 years of International Surrealism." The movement was founded by André Breton in Paris in 1924.

The latter was co-produced with the Centre Pompidou, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Fundacion Mapfré in Madrid and the Philadelphia Museum of Art − which has loaned one of Salvador Dali's masterpieces for the occasion, the 1936 Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) − with each country presenting its own vision of Surrealism from a common understanding. In Brussels, for example, the focus is on Belgian precursors, mainly Symbolists such as Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921). We'll come back to this in greater detail when the exhibition is presented in Paris in September.

BOZAR's purely Belgian offering, "No Laughing Matter: Surrealism in Belgium," tells of "a self-righteous laugh, a solemn laugh," said its curator, Xavier Canonne, director of the Photography Museum of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation in Charleroi and a former student of Vovelle. Canonne himself published a major work on the subject in 2006. In 260 paintings, drawings, collages, manifestoes and reviews, as well as a host of scathing leaflets of which the Belgians, led by poet and biochemist Paul Nougé (1895-1967), were so fond, it traces the history of a movement that is almost an exact contemporary of its Parisian version: Indeed, it was also in 1924 that Nougé gathered around him writers and artists (including musicians like André Souris and E. L. T. Mesens) such as Camille Gœmans, Marcel Lecomte, René Magritte and Louis Scutenaire, a writer and lawyer with a fondness for misfits.

The first rooms of the exhibition show that the movement had already taken root in fertile ground: Dadaism − as represented by Paul Joostens − and Constructivism − at which the young Magritte tried his hand for a time with Victor Servranckx and Pierre-Louis Flouquet − were already in bloom when Nougé, Lecomte and Gœmans published the 22 leaflets of the Correspondance series in 1924. They landed like bombshells, insofar as they were addressed (and sent by mail) to famous writers whose style they mocked, all the better to ridicule their desire for literary glory. Around the same time, Magritte discovered the work of Giorgio De Chirico, as did Paul Delvaux 10 years later. He was deeply moved by it and turned away from Constructivism.

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