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Paul Delvaux

Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) Belgian painter. Inspired by the travelling wax museum Musée Spitzner and the surrealist painters René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux developed his own surrealist pictorial universe around the mid-1930s. Paul Delvaux's silent stage space is often populated by sleepwalking, statuary female figures who move in railway stations or in ancient architectural backdrops. These are often nocturnal visions with a touch of dreamy unreality, operating in the grey areas of the subconscious. Despite their cool colouring, the pictures contain erotic undertones, including in the interaction between a man in a suit who plays a voyeuristic role and the undressed women who move around the same backdrops. Metamorphoses between the woman and the tree often appear, and from 1940 onwards skeletons, inspired by the paintings of James Ensor.  In the 1950s, he painted a series of crucifixions and deposition scenes enacted by skeletons. In the late 1950s, he turned temporarily from painting nudes to producing a number of night scenes in which trains are observed by a little girl in a dress, viewed from behind. These compositions contained nothing overtly surrealistic, yet the unnatural clarity of moonlit detail is hallucinatory in effect. Trains had always been a subject of special interest to Delvaux, who never forgot the wonder he felt as a small child at the sight of the first electric trams in Brussels. Paul Delvaux never formally became a member of the international surrealist movement. From 1950 to 1962 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. In 1982 a museum of his art opened in St. Idesbald, Belgium.

November 25nd 2024

 

 
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