René Magritte is the biggest Magritte archive anywhere and most of the work is directly from the collection of the artist's widow, Georgette Magritte, and from Irene Hamoir Scutenaire, who was his primary collector. Additionally, the museum includes Magritte's experiments with photography from 1920 on and the short surrealist films he made from 1956 on. Another museum is located at 135 Rue Esseghem in Brussels in Magritte's former home, where he lived with his wife from 1930 to 1954. A painting, "Olympia" (1948), a nude portrait of Magritte's wife by Magritte, was stolen from this museum on the morning of 24 September
Western painting During the 1920s André Masson's work was decisive in helping the young artist Joan Miró find his roots in Surrealist painting. Miró's "The Tilled Field" (1923–1924) verges on abstraction while suggesting a complex of objects and figures and arrangements of sexually active characters; it was Miró's first Surrealist masterpiece. Joan Miró, Jean Arp, André Masson, and Max Ernst were very influential, especially in the United States during the 1940s. Max Ernst, whose 1920 painting "Murdering Airplane" is seen here, studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane. His paintings may have