The new museum's parent, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, is well-placed to achieve the first goal, since it has the largest, most comprehensive René Magritte collection in the world. The second goal is harder, because many of the most famous paintings are in other hands. It might be fairer to mount a warning sign over the door: This Is Not a Museum with a Pipe.

If you are looking for Magritte's Greatest Hits there is just enough here to satisfy. There are two versions of "The Empire of Lights", showing a daylight sky above a house shrouded in night, and the sky-shaded nude "Black Magic". Expansive dreamscapes such as "The Battle of Argonne" and "The Domain of Arnheim" are impressive up close, as is "Blood Will Tell", showing a tree with doors opening in its trunk. Being in the presence of these paintings, however familiar their images, raises hairs on the back of the neck.

Many works have been loaned from private collections, filling gaps in the museum's own holdings and allowing the curators to explore Magritte's love of variations on a theme. Among the most enjoyable are the two versions of "Scheherazade" (photo above), all face and no body for a change, and the bird-plants in "Treasure Island", "The Companions of Fear" and "The Flavour of Tears".

The museum is organised chronologically over three floors, with the early years at the top of the building highlighting Magritte's work as a commercial artist and amateur photographer. Artistic treats from the early years include "The Subjugated Reader" from 1928, a woman physically shocked by the book in her hands.

And if you think you know Magritte, there are intriguing surprises to be found in his vibrant "Surrealism in full sunlight" paintings from the war years and the gaudy "vache" pictures, painted in a flurry of activity in 1948 to annoy the Parisian art world and satisfy the artist's need to do something different. Hat's off, I say.

The Magritte Museum
Regentschapstraat 3, Brussels

www.musee-magritte-museum.be