.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In accordance with Baudelaire's dictum that "genius is childhood recalled at will", Delvaux infused his art with powerful memories from his childhood creating works that eloquently convey a sense of an underlying poetry in the world of everyday life. Tram nocturne is a typical example of this aesthetic, being a work that celebrates the mystery and magic that Delvaux experienced as a child on first seeing the new electric trams in Brussels.
Remembering nearly ninety years later the thrill these magical moving boxes of light first gave him, he recalled, "On the first floor there was a balcony and on the balcony, I remember it clearly, I watched the first electric trams go past. Then I would imitate those trams with brushes. I would move the brushes along the balcony rail imitating the trams I saw go past at the end of the street in the rue de la Regence. I was three then, it was 1900. All those images that entered my head at that time remained and I watched the trams in Brussels because the trams were part of the mobile furniture of the streets of Brussels. As important as a house, a monument, a public square or any other urban element" (Paul Delvaux speaking in Paul Delvaux; the Sleepwalker of Saint Idesbald, a film by Adrian Maben, 1990).
As a child Delvaux was convinced that the local trams - the "mobile furniture" of the city - were in fact houses that moved from public place to public place. Tram nocturne is in many respects not a Surrealist painting in that nothing overtly unreal is evident in the painting. Yet, in the subtlest of ways, Delvaux has infused the deserted nocturnal scene with a pervasive sense of mystery. As in all his works, although it is night, every element is clearly visible - an effect that immediately bathes his work in a dreamlike atmosphere and, as is very evident in this work, generates a disturbing silence. The streetlights glare as does the headlight of the tram as it seems to clatter along the tracks without making a sound. Although ostensibly a normal scene Delvaux has cleverly infused the painting with the metaphysical sense of mystery that is common to de Chirico's early work which also has its silent steam trains pulling silently into town on a melancholy autumn afternoon. Here it is a quarter past midnight and the fact that Delvaux's tram - the No. 10 - is heading towards Champs perdus makes the mystery of the painting and its ghost-train-like ambience all the greater.
"I loved trains" Delvaux recalled, "and my nostalgia for them has stayed with me, a memory from youth. I don't attach any special significance to that, nothing to do with departure, but more an expression of a feeling. I paint the trains of my childhood and through them that childhood itself. The pictures of stations and trains do not represent reality. There remains the strange, a spectacle perhaps? I know that despite the pleasure I have in painting them, railways and stations are somewhat limiting subjects, but wrenching them out of normality has the opposite effect and pushes the subject towards the universal" (cited in exh. cat. Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 1997, p. 27).
Remembering nearly ninety years later the thrill these magical moving boxes of light first gave him, he recalled, "On the first floor there was a balcony and on the balcony, I remember it clearly, I watched the first electric trams go past. Then I would imitate those trams with brushes. I would move the brushes along the balcony rail imitating the trams I saw go past at the end of the street in the rue de la Regence. I was three then, it was 1900. All those images that entered my head at that time remained and I watched the trams in Brussels because the trams were part of the mobile furniture of the streets of Brussels. As important as a house, a monument, a public square or any other urban element" (Paul Delvaux speaking in Paul Delvaux; the Sleepwalker of Saint Idesbald, a film by Adrian Maben, 1990).
As a child Delvaux was convinced that the local trams - the "mobile furniture" of the city - were in fact houses that moved from public place to public place. Tram nocturne is in many respects not a Surrealist painting in that nothing overtly unreal is evident in the painting. Yet, in the subtlest of ways, Delvaux has infused the deserted nocturnal scene with a pervasive sense of mystery. As in all his works, although it is night, every element is clearly visible - an effect that immediately bathes his work in a dreamlike atmosphere and, as is very evident in this work, generates a disturbing silence. The streetlights glare as does the headlight of the tram as it seems to clatter along the tracks without making a sound. Although ostensibly a normal scene Delvaux has cleverly infused the painting with the metaphysical sense of mystery that is common to de Chirico's early work which also has its silent steam trains pulling silently into town on a melancholy autumn afternoon. Here it is a quarter past midnight and the fact that Delvaux's tram - the No. 10 - is heading towards Champs perdus makes the mystery of the painting and its ghost-train-like ambience all the greater.
"I loved trains" Delvaux recalled, "and my nostalgia for them has stayed with me, a memory from youth. I don't attach any special significance to that, nothing to do with departure, but more an expression of a feeling. I paint the trains of my childhood and through them that childhood itself. The pictures of stations and trains do not represent reality. There remains the strange, a spectacle perhaps? I know that despite the pleasure I have in painting them, railways and stations are somewhat limiting subjects, but wrenching them out of normality has the opposite effect and pushes the subject towards the universal" (cited in exh. cat. Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 1997, p. 27).