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.

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