Born in Antheit, Belgium, in 1897, Paul Delvaux's bourgeois upbringing was a straitjacket.

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.

After the years of apprenticeship and self-searching, influenced by major trends such as post-impressionism and expressionism, very much influenced by James Ensor, several inspirations encountered in the first half of the thirties led Delvaux to the elaboration of his universe.

The Spitzner Museum, an anatomical and fairground museum, a sort of curiosity cabinet, discovered 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 in 1932 of the Parisian review of the same name) and Edouard-Léon-Théodore Mesens (one of the founders of surrealism in Belgium) was another decisive moment in Delvaux's work. In the exhibition, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914 (private collection), marks him deeply. Similar feelings of melancholy, silence, and absence, if not emptiness - despite the presence of characters - are found in his painting. The work of the painter "teaches him the poetry of Solitude". To these two major discoveries is added the painting of his compatriot René Magritte, surrealist for nearly ten years. His painting shares with Magritte's a form of poetic mystery as well as a smooth workmanship and a very careful attention to detail.

At the end of the 1930s, the foundations of Delvaux's work as we know it, deeply dreamlike, were established. The painter orchestrates unusual encounters of objects in frozen and silent atmospheres, populated by figures absent from each other. Delvaux's world of poetic reverie has obvious analogies with surrealism. In 1938, the artist participated in theInternational Surrealist Exhibition organized by Breton and Paul Eluard at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with Propositions diurnes (La Femme au miroir) painted in 1937 (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts). The same year, The Call of the Night, 1938 (Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland) is reproduced in The Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism

Two years in a row Delvaux travels to Italy. He visits Rome, Florence, Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum. Ancient architectural decorations became more and more prominent in his paintings, undoubtedly influenced by Italian painting. His work is strongly nourished by the history of art from Antiquity to his contemporaries through the Italian and Nordic Renaissance, the School of Fontainebleau, Poussin, Ingres, etc. One recognizes a figure, a gesture, an attitude, the very constructed perspective architectures.

The main themes around which his work is based are also almost fixed at the end of the thirties. The motif of train stations immersed in a climate of mystery, the elements of classical architecture, the woman, naked or partially clothed, the red thread of all his work.

"Delvaux has made the universe the empire of a woman who is always the same and 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. The artist confided that "it is always the same woman who comes back with, when she is dressed, the same dress or so. When she is naked, I have a model who gives me more or less the same anatomy. The question is not to change [the elements], the question is to change the climate of the painting. Even with characters that are the same one can do completely different things."[2].

As for the men, they are almost always represented by the same male figure, at least when it is not the artist himself. The man is dressed in dark colors and is usually busy. For Delvaux, he embodies the "man in the street", that is to say "a small man with a curved chin and a large, bulky ball cap" - one thinks of course of Magritte. Two male characters from the illustrations of Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires, published by Hetzel, permeate his work: the geologist Otto Lidenbrock and the astronomer Palmyrin Rosette. Otto Lidenbrock can be found in Les Phases de la lune 1939 (New York, MoMA). Finally, skeletons are another recurring motif. They appear a little later. The artist drew them from life at the Museum of Natural History in 1940. Especially armatures of the living being, the skeletons are for him expressive and living characters. He represents them against the current, in life, in everyday situations, in an office, a living room, etc.

[1] André Breton, "Genesis and perspective of surrealism" 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.

After the war, group and solo exhibitions as well as major retrospectives in Belgium and abroad multiplied. Delvaux's work began to conquer the United States. Until the mid-sixties, however, the reception of his work was mixed. His submissions to the Venice Biennale were regularly castigated for their immorality and scandalous nature. His retrospective exhibition 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 de Bruxelles (La Cambre) where he taught until 1962. His first experience in decoration dates back to a few years earlier, with the set for the ballet Adame Miroir by Jean Genet, created on May 31, 1948 on the stage of the Théâtre Marigny in Paris. His position as a professor at La Cambre undoubtedly favored the multiplication of decorating commissions, which would continue well beyond his teaching years: the games room of the Kursaal in Ostend (1952), the Gilbert Périer house, director of Sabena in Brussels (1954-1956), the Palais des Congrès in Brussels (1959), the Institute of Zoology at the University of Liège (1960), the Casino in Chaudfontaine (1974), the costumes for Roland Petit's ballet, La Nuit transfigurée (1976), the Bourse subway station in Brussels (1978).

Delvaux's work achieved recognition and consecration in the 1960s, against the backdrop of cultural revolutions and liberation movements. In parallel with retrospectives in Lille, Paris, Brussels[1] and the great exhibitions around surrealism in which he participated[2]2], he accumulated nominations and prestigious awards until the end of the seventies, in particular from the Royal Institutions of Belgium.

In France, he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1975 and in 1977 became a member of the Institut de France. 1979 saw the creation of the Paul Delvaux Foundation, one of whose objectives was the creation of a museum in Saint-Idesbald on the initiative of his nephew Charles Van Deun. The Paul Delvaux Museum was officially opened in 1982. At more than eighty years of age, the artist continues to paint.

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

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

Anne Coron, Doctor in History of Contemporary Art

Gallery of the Institute

[1] Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1966; Paris, Musée des Arts décoratifs 1969; Tokyo, 1975; Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, then Liège, 1977 

[2] Les Peintres surréalistes, Copenhagen 1966, as well as Peintres de l'imaginaire symbolistes et surréalistes belges, Paris, Grand-Palais, 1971