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.

Of Belgian origin, Paul Delvaux's bourgeois upbringing was a straitjacket. After completing his humanities in 1916, he studied architecture at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but dropped out after one year. He returned to the Académie in 1919 to Constant Montald's studio, where he taught decorative and monumental painting. In 1924, André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism, followed in 1928 by Surrealism and Painting.

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