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Lot Essay
In Delvaux's La fin du voyage (The End of the Journey) an enigmatic encounter is set up between the two best-loved and most enduring motifs of the artist's work; a naked woman and a tram.
A quiet suburban street complete with cobbled stones, manhole and tramtracks stretches through a nocturnal and shady valley complete with tropical vegetation and tall craggy rocks to emerge into the light of day on a Mediterranean beach. The strange simultaneity of night and day in this picture in some ways echoes the strange duality to be found in Magritte's L'empire des lumières as well as in the frustrated sentiment expressed by André Breton when he exclaimed, "if only the sun were to come out tonight." Yet, here, the mysterious dual nature of the light seems almost explicable given the twilight atmosphere. The title of the painting suggests that the tram has reached the end of the line, yet its illuminated headlight seems also to suggest that it is arriving at the nude and in the nocturnal world amidst the rocks that she inhabits. Standing like a Cranach Venus leaning languidly against the rock in the foreground this demure damsel is no Andromeda in peril but seems, through the self-containment of her untroubled Grace-like pose, to be expecting its arrival.
For Delvaux, both the nude and the trams and trains that he had loved since his childhood were potent motifs which, though he held them in great affection, were ultimately only tools by which he sought to generate the specific atmosphere of poetic mystery that he wanted his art to convey. "Painting is not only the pleasure of putting colours on canvas," he once asserted, "it is also the expression of a poetic poetry in painting, which had been lost for centuries" (cited in exh. cat. Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, Brussels, 1997, p. 1).
"The nudes", he explained, participate in his paintings "purely as a presence without any particular role. They form part of the pictorial structure, the aim of which is purely poetic; they are active only in the lyrical sense; they have no mission in the picture beyond that of the poetic" (Jacques Meuris/Paul Delvaux: Sept Dialogues Brussels, 1987, pp. 22 & 58). Similarly, the trams and trains that punctuated so much of the artist's childhood in and around Brussels, were important only insofar as they invoked a specific emotion. "I loved trains 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, 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, Brussels, 1997, p. 27).
The strange dialogue that takes place between the nude and the tram in La fin du voyage once again combines to create a visual poetry that eloquently expresses the potency and freshness of the child's view of the world.
A quiet suburban street complete with cobbled stones, manhole and tramtracks stretches through a nocturnal and shady valley complete with tropical vegetation and tall craggy rocks to emerge into the light of day on a Mediterranean beach. The strange simultaneity of night and day in this picture in some ways echoes the strange duality to be found in Magritte's L'empire des lumières as well as in the frustrated sentiment expressed by André Breton when he exclaimed, "if only the sun were to come out tonight." Yet, here, the mysterious dual nature of the light seems almost explicable given the twilight atmosphere. The title of the painting suggests that the tram has reached the end of the line, yet its illuminated headlight seems also to suggest that it is arriving at the nude and in the nocturnal world amidst the rocks that she inhabits. Standing like a Cranach Venus leaning languidly against the rock in the foreground this demure damsel is no Andromeda in peril but seems, through the self-containment of her untroubled Grace-like pose, to be expecting its arrival.
For Delvaux, both the nude and the trams and trains that he had loved since his childhood were potent motifs which, though he held them in great affection, were ultimately only tools by which he sought to generate the specific atmosphere of poetic mystery that he wanted his art to convey. "Painting is not only the pleasure of putting colours on canvas," he once asserted, "it is also the expression of a poetic poetry in painting, which had been lost for centuries" (cited in exh. cat. Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, Brussels, 1997, p. 1).
"The nudes", he explained, participate in his paintings "purely as a presence without any particular role. They form part of the pictorial structure, the aim of which is purely poetic; they are active only in the lyrical sense; they have no mission in the picture beyond that of the poetic" (Jacques Meuris/Paul Delvaux: Sept Dialogues Brussels, 1987, pp. 22 & 58). Similarly, the trams and trains that punctuated so much of the artist's childhood in and around Brussels, were important only insofar as they invoked a specific emotion. "I loved trains 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, 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, Brussels, 1997, p. 27).
The strange dialogue that takes place between the nude and the tram in La fin du voyage once again combines to create a visual poetry that eloquently expresses the potency and freshness of the child's view of the world.