The Menaced Assassin

In a stark room a murdered nude woman lies bleeding on a divan while a calm man in shirtsleeves listens to a gramophone, his hat and coat ready; just outside the door two bowler-hatted men wait with a club and a net to seize him, and three blank faces peer in at the window. Rene Magritte stages the Menaced Assassin like a still from a silent crime film, deadpan and dreamlike. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, it is an early Surrealist masterpiece - banal and sinister at once, narrative withheld, menace frozen in eerie, theatrical calm.