Paul Delvaux

(1897-1994)

Traditionally affiliated with Belgian surrealism, like René Magritte, Paul Delvaux fashions mysterious universes of great poetry, immediately identifiable. His works are akin to silent dreamlike constructions, deeply rooted in the history of the arts since antiquity. They are populated by nude or partially clothed female figures, whose frozen gestures and often absent gazes 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, a course he abandoned after one year. He returned to the Académie in 1919 in 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.

After years of apprenticeship and self-discovery, influenced by major trends such as Post-Impressionism and Expressionism with its strong James Ensor influence, several inspirations encountered in the first half of the thirties led Delvaux to develop his own universe. The Spitzner Museum, an anatomical and fairground museum, a sort of cabinet of curiosities, discovered at the Brussels Fair in 1932, revealed to him a “Poetry of Mystery and Worry”. In the spring of 1934, the Minotaure exhibition organized at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels by Albert Skira (creator, with Tériade, of the Parisian magazine of the same name in 1932) 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.

By the late 1930s, the foundations had been laid for Delvaux’s deeply dreamlike work as we know it today. The painter orchestrates unusual encounters of objects in frozen, silent atmospheres populated by figures who are absent from one another. Delvaux’s world of poetic reverie has obvious analogies with Surrealism. In 1938, the artist took part in theExposition internationale du surréalisme organized by Breton and Paul Éluard at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with Propositions diurnes (La Femme au miroir) painted in 1937 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The same year, L’Appel de la nuit, 1938 (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) is reproduced in Le Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme. Two years in a row, Delvaux travels to Italy. He visits Rome, Florence, Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum. More and more of his paintings feature antique architectural settings, no doubt influenced by Italian painting. His work is strongly influenced by the history of art, from Antiquity to his contemporaries, via the Italian and Nordic Renaissance, the École de Fontainebleau, Poussin, Ingres and more. You’ll recognize a figure, a gesture, an attitude, highly constructed perspective architectures. The great recurring themes around which his work revolves were also virtually fixed at the end of the thirties. The motif of railway stations immersed in a climate of mystery, the elements of classical architecture, the woman, nude or partially clothed, the common thread running through all his work. “Delvaux has made the universe the empire of a woman who is always the same, who reigns over the great suburbs of the heart, where the old mills of Flanders spin a string of pearls in a light of ore.[1] “wrote André Breton in 1941. As for the artist himself, “it’s always the same woman who comes back with, when she’s dressed, the same dress or thereabouts. When she’s naked, I have a model who gives me more or less the same anatomy. It’s not a question of changing [the elements], it’s a question of changing the mood of the painting. Even with the same characters, you can do completely different things.[2] “. As for the men, they are almost always represented by the same male figure, at least when it’s not the artist himself. The man is dressed in dark colors, and is usually busy. For Delvaux, he embodies “the man in the street”, i.e. “a little man with a chin in a roll and a big, bulky ball hat” – Magritte comes to mind, of course. Two male characters from the fantastic world of Jules Verne, whom Delvaux discovered as a child in 1907 in illustrated editions for Hetzel, permeate his work: the geologist Otto Lidenbrock and the astronomer Palmyrin Rosette. Otto Lidenbrock is featured again in Les Phases de la lune 1939 (MoMA, New York). Finally, skeletons are another recurring motif. They appear a little later. The artist drew some from life at the Museum of Natural History in 1940. Above all, as armatures of the living being, skeletons are expressive, living characters for him. He depicts them against the current, in life, in everyday situations, in an office, a living room, etc. La Conversation 1944 (private collection), Les Grands squelettes, same year (private collection).

After the war, group and solo exhibitions and major retrospectives in Belgium and abroad multiplied. Delvaux’s work began to conquer the United States (Julian Gallery, New York, 1947). It acquired a certain notoriety there. Until the mid-sixties, however, the reception of his work was mostly lukewarm (Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1945; Galerie Drouin, Paris, 1947). His entries for the Venice Biennale were regularly criticized for their immorality and scandalous nature(Pygmalion, 1939, Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 1948). Above all, his submissions, on religious subjects and skeleton figures, to the ^27th Venice Biennale in 1954, on the theme “The Fantastic in Art”, aroused the ire of Cardinal Roncalli, future Pope John XXIII, and the censorship of the exhibition for heresy. His retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum voor Schone Kusten in Ostend in 1962 once again caused a scandal. It was banned for minors.

In 1950, Delvaux was appointed professor of monumental painting at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels in Brussels (La Cambre), where he taught until 1962. His first experience of decoration came a few years earlier, with the set for Jean Genet’s ballet Adame Miroir, premiered on May 31, 1948 at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris. His professorship at La Cambre undoubtedly led to a proliferation of decorating commissions, which continued well beyond his teaching period. The games room at the Kursaal in Ostend (1952), the Gilbert Périer house, director of Sabena in Brussels (1954-1956), the Palais des Congrès in Brussels (1959), the Zoology Institute at the University of Liège (1960), the Casino in Chaudfontaine (1974), costumes for Roland Petit’s ballet La Nuit transfigurée (1976), the Bourse metro station in Brussels (1978).

Delvaux’s work achieved recognition and consecration in the sixties, against the backdrop of cultural revolutions and liberation movements. Alongside retrospectives (Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1966; Paris, Musée des Arts décoratifs 1969; Tokyo, 1975 ; Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, then Liège, 1977) and the major exhibitions in which he took part, notably those focusing on Surrealism(Les Peintres surréalistes, Copenhagen 1966, and Peintres de l’imaginaire symbolistes et surréalistes belges, Grand-Palais, Paris, 1971), he accumulated prestigious nominations and awards until the end of the Seventies.

In 1962, he was appointed member of the Commission de Peinture Moderne des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, and the following year vice-director of the Fine Arts class at the Académie Royale de Belgique. In 1965, he was awarded the Prix Quinquennal de Consécration de Carrière: Cadet d’Honneur du Travail, Grand Officier de l’Ordre de Léopold. He was appointed President of the Royal Academy of Belgium and Director of the Fine Arts class. He is also appointed to the Board of Directors of the Academia Belgica de Roma. His first lithographs date from this period.

He was named Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1975. Another exceptional distinction came in 1977, when he became a member of the Institut de France as an associate foreign member in the Fine Arts section. Two years later, on January 26, 1979, the Université Libre de Bruxelles awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa, along with Jean Starobinsky. 1979 also saw the creation of the Paul Delvaux Foundation, approved by King Baudouin^I, one of whose aims was to set up a museum at Saint-Idesbald on the initiative of his nephew Charles Van Deun. At over eighty, the artist continues to paint. The Paul Delvaux Museum was officially inaugurated on June 26, 1982, and expanded several times until 1988.

His ninetieth birthday was celebrated with exhibitions in Belgium, France and Japan. On the death of his wife, Tam (Anne-Marie de Maertelaere), on December 21, 1989, Delvaux ceased his activity. In 1991, the renowned Salon des Indépendants in Paris devoted a retrospective exhibition to him, Paul Delvaux Peintures-Dessins 1922-1982.

He died at his home in Veurne on July 20, 1994.

DELVAUX AND PRINTMAKING

Paul Delvaux came to printmaking late in his career. In 1960, he was 63. By comparison, his contemporaries, born as he was at the dawn of the twentieth century, had been working in the field since the early thirties: Alberto Giacometti in 1931, André Masson in 1932, and Jean Fautrier since 1925. At the time, Delvaux was professor of monumental painting at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels in Brussels (La Cambre). During a visit to the etching studios with his students, he tried his hand at etching with Buste de femme, of which he produced two variants the same year. At the end of 1965, he produced his first lithographs – a technique that dominated his etching output. They were printed by Fernand Mourlot the following year. His Œuvre gravé numbered around one hundred works up to 1975, twenty years before his death. Women are omnipresent, even more so than in his paintings. His compositions are strongly imbued with art history, from Antiquity to Giorgio de Chirico, via the École de Fontainebleau, among many other references. Le Silence, for example, on view on rue de Seine, evokes the famous Louvre painting Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses sœurs, 1575/1600.

Finally, in two books, Delvaux’s etchings resonate with literary creations. The first, 7 Dialogues avec Paul Delvaux, illustrates texts by Jacques Meuris (Paris, Le Soleil noir éditions, 1971). Four of the five etchings, with their Dürerian accents, are presented on rue de Seine. The second, Construction d’un temple en ruine à la déesse de Vanadé (Paris, galerie Le Bateau Lavoir éditeur, 1975) includes texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the creators of the Nouveau Roman, in conjunction with eleven etchings by Delvaux, including one in the frontispiece.

[1] André Breton, “Genèse et perspective du surréalisme” 1941, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, Folio Gallimard, 2002, p. 109.

[2] Quoted in Paul Delvaux. Odyssey of a dream exhibition catalogue, Musée Delvaux, Saint-Idesbald, 2007, p. 47.