Delvaux, Paul

Delvaux, Paul (1897–1994). Belgian painter and printmaker. He was born at Antheit, near Huy, the son of a lawyer, and studied architecture, then painting at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, 1920–4. After working in Neo-Impressionist and Expressionist manners, he discovered Surrealism in 1934 and became an instant convert, destroying much of his earlier work. He was never formally a member of the movement, and was not in sympathy with its political aims, but he became regarded as one of the foremost upholders of the Surrealist tradition. Most of his paintings show nude or semi-nude women in incongruous settings. The women are always of the same type—beautiful, statuesque, unattainable dream figures, lost in thought or reverie or even in a state of suspended animation: André Breton said that ‘Delvaux has turned the whole universe into a single realm in which one woman, always the same woman, reigns over the great thoroughfares of the heart.’ These dream beauties are often placed in elaborate architectural settings, reflecting both de Chirico's strange perspectives and Delvaux's interest in the buildings of ancient Rome (he visited Italy in 1938 and 1939). Sometimes the settings are timeless, but in many paintings the buildings, costumes, and accessories are part of a mysterious turn-of-the-century city that the artist referred to as ‘La Ville inquiète’ (The Uneasy City). Delvaux often included skeletons in his pictures (influenced by Ensor), as in Sleeping Venus (Tate Gallery, London, 1944), and trains were another recurrent motif. A large retrospective of his work was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1944, and this marked the beginning of his international reputation. From 1950 to 1962 he taught at the École Superieure d'Art et d'Architecture in Brussels. In his later work he could be rather repetitive, but George Heard Hamilton writes that in his best years, 1936–42, ‘Delvaux added to the Surrealist iconography an unforgettable and Freudian danse macabre of love caught between time and death'. There is a museum devoted to Delvaux's work at Saint-Idesbald, Belgium.