Paul Delvaux (; 23 September 1897 – 20 July 1994) was a Belgian painter noted for his dream-like scenes of women, classical architecture, trains and train stations, and skeletons, often in combination. He is often considered a surrealist, although he only briefly identified with the surrealist movement. He was influenced by the works of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte, but developed his own fantastical subjects and hyper-realistic styling, combining the detailed classical beauty of academic painting with the bizarre juxtapositions of surrealism.
Throughout his long career, Delvaux explored "Nude and skeleton, the clothed and the unclothed, male and female, desire and horror, eroticism and death – Delvaux's major anxieties in fact, and the greater themes of his later work [...]".
Early life and education Delvaux was born on 23 September 1897 in Antheit (now part of Wanze) in the Belgian province of Liège. His parents lived in Brussels, but his mother went to her own mother's home to have her first child. His birthplace house would later be destroyed by fire, in 1940.
His father was Jean Delvaux, a prosperous barrister at the Court of Appeal in Brussels. His mother was the musician Laure Jamotte, who became a strong, dominant presence in his life, directing, controlling, and repressing his childhood and adolescent desires.
The young Delvaux studied Greek and Latin, and absorbed the fiction of Jules Verne and the poetry of Homer's Odyssey. His artwork was to be greatly influenced by these works, starting with his earliest drawings showing mythological scenes. His music lessons were conducted in the school's museum room, where a human skeleton in a glass cabinet was always present.
From 1910 to 1916, he studied Classics at the Atheneum of Saint-Gilles, where he was a middling or average student. Upon his graduation, his parents got him an office job with a shipping company in Brussels. It was soon evident that he had no skills or interests in business or law, and he was grudgingly allowed to study architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts despite his ambition to become a painter.
In 1916, he started at the Académie, initially learning the basics of architecture and perspective drawing. He was then disqualified due to his weakness in mathematics, and dropped out after his first year. Delvaux was worried about his future career, and passed the time by copying postcards. His mother advised him to paint from nature, and in 1919 he produced his first watercolors of some scenic vistas.
On a family vacation in Zeebrugge in 1919, he met by chance the painter Franz Courtens. Upon seeing some of the watercolor landscapes Delvaux had painted, Courtens told the parents, "Your son has talent and has a great future in front of him". Courtens encouraged the failed student to return to the Académie to study painting, and the parents finally acquiesced to this plan.
In 1919, Delvaux returned and studied with decorative painter Constant Montald (a former student of Puvis de Chavannes), and other teachers. The painter Alfred Bastien and symbolist painter Jean Delville also encouraged Delvaux, whose works from this period were primarily naturalistic landscapes. During 1920–1921, he also performed his mandatory military service as a minor logistics clerk, while studying with Delville at the Académie.
Artistic career
Initially, Delvaux was influenced by the style of 19th-century French and Belgian academic painting as represented by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres or Puvis de Chavannes. Delvaux completed some 80 paintings between 1920 and 1925. His early paintings were mostly post-impressionist, somber landscapes, but also included dark, gritty urban scenes, such as Les cheminots de la gare du Luxembourg ("Railroad Workers of Luxembourg Station", 1922).
In 1924, he set up a studio in his parents' house, at 15 Rue Ecosse (Schotlandstraat), Brussels. In 1925, he had his first solo exhibition, in Brussels.
Delvaux's paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s began to feature nudes in landscapes, and were strongly influenced by such Flemish Expressionists as Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, and the palette colors of James Ensor. His nude figures and portraits from this period are posed somewhat stiffly, whether outdoors or in domestic surroundings indoors. Relatively few of his paintings from the late 1920s have survived, and Delvaux recorded his destruction of 50 of his canvases to re-use the frames.
In 1929, Delvaux first met Anne-Marie de Maertelaere, whom he nicknamed "Tam", and they fell in love. However, his domineering mother forced him to separate from Tam, exacting his promise to never see her again. Delvaux was greatly saddened by this, and his paintings took on a more isolated, lonely, detached tone.
In 1932, Delvaux found fresh inspiration in visits to the Midi Fair () in Brussels, where the Spitzner Museum (), a collection of medical curiosities, displayed wax models of bizarrely deformed anatomical specimens and diseases, including syphilis. The exhibit also maintained a booth in which skeletons and a mechanically breathing Venus figure were displayed in a window with red velvet curtains. This spectacle fascinated Delvaux, supplying him with some of the motifs that would appear throughout his subsequent work.
His mother died on 31 December 1932.
A change of style around 1933 reflected the influence of the metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico, which he had first encountered in 1926 or 1927. Delvaux women wear elaborate costumes or are semi-nude, in scenes of classical ruins or dark forests.
In the mid-1930s Delvaux also began to adopt some of the motifs of his fellow Belgian René Magritte, as well as that painter's deadpan style in rendering the most unexpected juxtapositions of otherwise ordinary objects. Delvaux would maintain a respectful but uneasy relationship with Magritte, who was his almost-exact contemporary. He also admired the work of his younger contemporary, Balthus.
Delvaux acknowledged his influences, saying of de Chirico, "with him I realized what was possible, the climate that had to be developed, the climate of silent streets with shadows of people who can't be seen, I've never asked myself if it's surrealist or not."
In 1934, Delvaux joined Salvador Dalí, de Chirico, and Magritte in an exhibition entitled Minotaure, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. In 1936, he and Magritte had separate shows at the Palais, which received favorable reviews.
Although Delvaux associated for a period with the Belgian surrealist group, he did not consider himself "a Surrealist in the scholastic sense of the word." As Marc Rombaut has written of the artist: "Delvaux ... always maintained an intimate and privileged relationship to his childhood, which is the underlying motivation for his work and always manages to surface there. This 'childhood,' existing within him, led him to the poetic dimension in art."
On 16 January 1937, his father died. In July that year, Delvaux married Suzanne Purnal; the artist later said it was purely a marriage of convenience. He made his first trip to Italy, and would return there the next year. Mermaids and ocean surfside scenes started to appear among his paintings.
Delvaux perfected his mature artistic style between 1937 and 1941, reflecting both his sublimated desires and the increasing anxiety of the times. The artist's own continuing awkward presence in his paintings, along with skeletons and various male characters from Jules Verne novels, were a counterpoint to his idealized female nudes, who gradually became more relaxed in their elegant beauty.
When the Germans invaded and occupied Belgium in 1940, Delvaux retreated to Pas-de-Calais with his aunts for eight days, but then returned to Brussels. He spent the war years quietly at home continuing to paint, but exhibiting nothing in Belgium. His painting La ville inquiète ("The Anxious City", 1941) reflects both the chaotic worries and the uncanny everyday routine of his environment.
Delvaux frequently visited the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels to sketch human skeletons. In 1943, Delvaux finished the first of what would become a series of articulated skeletons in his paintings, posed in lifelike stances and interacting with other skeletons or occasionally with nude women.
In the post-war years, Delvaux continued the productive period he had started under the German occupation, painting many works that would later establish his reputation.
In January 1945, Delvaux had a major retrospective show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, including 57 large-scale canvases. "Public and critical reception was mixed, divided between admiration and incomprehension."
In 1946, he experimented briefly with exaggerated perspectives and a flattened picture plane, as shown in Les cariatides ("Caryatids") and La ville noire ("Black City").
In 1947, the influential Julien Levy Gallery in New York City mounted a show of Delvaux paintings, which was well received by critics. However, two of his paintings had been seized by customs as obscene, and one of them was damaged.
In August 1947, Delvaux again met Tam in a chance encounter at a newsstand in Saint-Idesbald, and they resumed their close relationship. The next year, Delvaux divorced his first wife Suzanne and moved to a temporary new home with Tam. In 1951, the reunited couple built a small house/studio in the coastal dunes of Saint-Idesbald. The pair married on 25 October 1952, and would be inseparable for many years until Tam's death in 1989.
In 1949, Delvaux experimented with tempera to paint a mermaid on the front of a friend's house in Saint-Idesbald. However, since then the fresco has been largely erased by the effects of weathering.
From 1950 to 1962, Delvaux served as professor of "monumental painting" at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et d'Architecture de La Cambre, Brussels. In the 1950s, he painted a series of crucifixions and deposition scenes enacted by skeletons. Some of his paintings from this period are almost monochromatic, showing more concern for line than for color.
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.
In 1952, Delvaux collaborated with Emile Salkin and three students from La Cambre to produce a wall mural at the gaming room in the Ostend Kursaal, portraying a Roman-style classical dancing scene with a large mermaid in a prone posture. In 1954–1956 Delvaux collaborated with Salkin for a series of wall panels at the house of Gilbert Périer in Brussels. They portrayed women in either contemporary or classical costume in Greco-Roman architectural settings, contrasting with one panel depicting an all-male dining table scene.
In 1954, Delvaux joined the 27th Venice Biennale, whose theme that year was "Fantasy in Art". He exhibited his paintings of religious scenes enacted by skeletons, but the show was censored for heresy by Cardinal Roncalli (who would later become Pope John XXIII).
In 1956 Delvaux visited Greece, where classical architecture originated, the land of Homer and the Odyssey. He also visited Italy, reinforcing his favored themes of classical settings and costumes.