Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)

Traditionally affiliated with Belgian surrealism, like René Magritte, Paul Delvaux creates mysterious universes of great poetry, immediately identifiable. His works are similar to silent dreamlike constructions deeply nourished by the history of art since antiquity. They are populated with female figures, naked or partially clothed, with frozen gestures and an often absent gaze that seem to belong to a suspended time.

Buffet_Bernard_General_view_of_the_port_In_St_Tropez_1979

Horst Tappe Foundation / Keystone Switzerland / Roger-Viollet

Biography

Born in 1897 in Antheit, Belgium, Paul Delvaux received a bourgeois education that was seen as a straitjacket. He studied architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, which he abandoned after one year. He returned to the Academy in 1919 in the studio of Constant Montald, professor of decorative and monumental painting. After the years of apprenticeship and self-searching, influenced by major trends such as Post-Impressionism and Expressionism, strongly influenced by James Ensor, several inspirations encountered in the first half of the 1930s led Delvaux to the elaboration of his universe.

The Spitzner Museum, an anatomical and fairground museum, a sort of cabinet of curiosities, discovered in 1932, revealed to him a "Poésie du Mystère et de l'Inquiétude". In the spring of 1934, the Minotaure exhibition organized at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels by Albert Skira (creator with Tériade in 1932 of the Parisian magazine of the same name) and Edouard-Léon-Théodore Mesens (one of the founders of surrealism in Belgium) marked another decisive moment in Delvaux's work. In the exhibition, Mystère et mélancolie d'une rue by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914 (private collection), left a deep impression on him. Similar feelings of melancholy, silence and absence, if not emptiness - despite the presence of figures - can be found in his paintings. The painter's work "teaches him the poetry of Solitude". These two major discoveries were joined by the work of his compatriot René Magritte, who had been a Surrealist for almost ten years. His painting shares with Magritte's a form of poetic mystery, as well as smooth workmanship and meticulous attention to detail.

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