Art: The Poker-Faced Enchanter

THE IMAGES AND IDEAS OF RENE Magritte are known to millions of people who do not know him by name. So argues the art historian Sarah Whitfield in her catalog to the retrospective of 168 works by the great Belgian Surrealist that opens at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art this week, and she is certainly right. This accounts for the faint feeling of deja vu that even non- Magritteans sometimes get when looking at his work. Magritte died in 1967, but for the best part of a half-century his images -- or variants on them -- have been used...