The show's most theatrically compelling work, "Detour," a room in which two walls are completely mirrored, is like a walk-in Magritte painting.

In his Sutton Place apartment overlooking the East River, with ships' lights nosing past the windows and the walls hung with a splendidly eerie collection of Magritte paintings, there was a permanent welcome on the mat.

The museum shows about 200 original Magritte paintings, drawings and sculptures.

The Son of Man resembles The Great War on Façades (La Grande Guerre Façades), another Magritte painting featuring similar imagery.

He is more interested, he writes, in "the sense of sadness that comes with all intensely beautiful things," which he also finds in Magritte paintings based on the same Poe work.

For inspiration, Mr. Caron keeps a notebook filled with clippings and photographs, striking images he may return to later, ranging from Magritte paintings to comic strips.

He therefore strongly resembles a walking Magritte painting.

The three attempt to quell a riot at the Louvre, which was incited by four Black Garden inmates, led by the mysterious Son of Man (garbed after the famous Magritte painting).

Its surrealist imagery, inspired by Magritte paintings, lends it a thread of visual zaniness (although there are several too many images of shaved fish).

Housed in the five-level neo-classical Hotel Altenloh, on the Place Royale, it displays some 200 original Magritte paintings, drawings and sculptures including The Return, Scheherazade and The Empire of Light.