During the 1920s Brussels and Antwerp were two important centres of Avant-garde. A circle of literati gathered around the painter René Magritte in Brussels. Astute, humorous and polemic, they mocked conventional thought and experimented with new forms.

One of their discoveries were pictures in which words played the main role. Magritte imagined images, "in which the eye had to think", as he said, "and in quite a different way than usual."

The Lost World, painted in 1928, is an example of such a word image. The grey surface is reminiscent of a map: and the written words "PAYSAGE", or, 'landscape', refers to this. The are two adjacent shapes sketched onto this map are reminiscent of watercourses. They are written with the words “personnage perdant la mémoire,” (person losing his memory) and with “corps de femme,” woman’s body). The bold calligraphy is familiar from contemporary school posters. There is a blotch next to it, which is joined by a dash to the word “cheval”, horse.

It is apparent that words and forms do not go together. Picture and statement gape apart–how are we to understand this? Painting served Magritte as a medium for portraying philosophical problems. And one of these problems is the puzzling relationship between image, language and reality.

In his word pictures Magritte unsettles the language and picture associations that we take for granted. Bewildered the viewer hears within it, “the silence of the world”, as Magritte called it.