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Lot Essay
Painted in 1932 Nu au lever (Nude rising) is an early work that in both its atmosphere and iconography anticipates the nocturnal sleepwalking ambience of Delvaux's best-known paintings.
The subject of one or more naked women wandering through mysterious nocturnal landscapes of classical architecture, busy with empty trams and silent trains travelling from one Brussels suburb to another was to become the predominant theme of Delvaux's art. But this was only after Delvaux had been given the confidence to pursue this mysterious world that invoked in him strange and powerful echoes of his childhood by witnessing in 1934, the mystery and enigma of Giorgio De Chirico's empty Italian piazzas.
In 1932, Delvaux was beginning to explore the strange resonance of his childhood memories through his art. Having become acquainted with E.L.T. Mesens in 1930, Delvaux was aware of Surrealism, but initially unmoved by the more conceptual approach to the enigma of reality he had been shown in Magritte's work. It was primarily an encounter at the Midi Fair in Brussels around this time that set Delvaux on his path towards Surrealism. There in the shed of the Spitzner Museum, Delvaux came across a cabinet of curiosities including a wax figure of a naked women in a glass case entitled Venus endormie (The Sleeping Venus). The contrast between the theatricality and morbidity of the display and the false gaiety of the fairground fascinated him. In 1932 he painted the subject for the first time, depicting it in such a way that the viewer is unsure whether the image is of the sleeping Venus or the dream of the sleeping Venus.
In Nu au lever painted shortly after this painting, the Venus seems to have awoken, but has she?; the look on her face suggests that maybe, like Delvaux's later promenading women, she is still dreaming. Everything in the painting evokes a sense of the half-state between waking and sleeping. The blandness and stage-set artificiality of the girl's surroundings deliberately only partially rendered, seems to suggest that she has awoken into a strangely unreal location. Her face, turned to the viewer, appears paradoxically to be both drowsy and inquisitive, as if asking the viewer or her creator, the artist, where it is that she has found herself.
The subject of one or more naked women wandering through mysterious nocturnal landscapes of classical architecture, busy with empty trams and silent trains travelling from one Brussels suburb to another was to become the predominant theme of Delvaux's art. But this was only after Delvaux had been given the confidence to pursue this mysterious world that invoked in him strange and powerful echoes of his childhood by witnessing in 1934, the mystery and enigma of Giorgio De Chirico's empty Italian piazzas.
In 1932, Delvaux was beginning to explore the strange resonance of his childhood memories through his art. Having become acquainted with E.L.T. Mesens in 1930, Delvaux was aware of Surrealism, but initially unmoved by the more conceptual approach to the enigma of reality he had been shown in Magritte's work. It was primarily an encounter at the Midi Fair in Brussels around this time that set Delvaux on his path towards Surrealism. There in the shed of the Spitzner Museum, Delvaux came across a cabinet of curiosities including a wax figure of a naked women in a glass case entitled Venus endormie (The Sleeping Venus). The contrast between the theatricality and morbidity of the display and the false gaiety of the fairground fascinated him. In 1932 he painted the subject for the first time, depicting it in such a way that the viewer is unsure whether the image is of the sleeping Venus or the dream of the sleeping Venus.
In Nu au lever painted shortly after this painting, the Venus seems to have awoken, but has she?; the look on her face suggests that maybe, like Delvaux's later promenading women, she is still dreaming. Everything in the painting evokes a sense of the half-state between waking and sleeping. The blandness and stage-set artificiality of the girl's surroundings deliberately only partially rendered, seems to suggest that she has awoken into a strangely unreal location. Her face, turned to the viewer, appears paradoxically to be both drowsy and inquisitive, as if asking the viewer or her creator, the artist, where it is that she has found herself.