ArtistDelvaux, Paul

Artist Years1897-1994

Artist NationalityBelgian

TitlePhryné

Year1969

MediumPrint > Lithograph

DimensionsComposition: 12 X 9.3 inches

Catalog ReferenceJacob 40

Accession NumberRC1820

NotesPaul Delvaux (French: [dɛlvo]; 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 [...]".

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.[13] 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.

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 125. 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 (Foire du Midi [fr]) in Brussels, where the Spitzner Museum (Musée Spitzner), 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.
(source: wikipedia.org)