“In this eerie surrealist painting, a murderer nonchalantly haunts the scene of his crime, unaware that it is surrounded by detectives who wait to pounce on the perpetrator. How long have they been watching? It seems that the voyeurs at the window and the bowler-hatted men, one armed with a club and another with a net, who stand concealed in the room must have been there when the woman was killed. They are complicit. Magritte’s deadpan art unsettles by melting boundaries between reality and fantasy. Here he reveals that crime and punishment are mirrors of each other, that detectives and police officers are mysteriously dependent on the existence of crime.”
The Devil's Muse 