10 things to know about Paul Delvaux

Paul Delvaux was born in the Belgian town of Wanze in 1897. While his parents hoped he would follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a legal career, his aunt encouraged his leanings towards literature and music. A compromise was reached, and the young Delvaux was allowed to study architecture. To his parents’ dismay — but Delvaux’s relief — he failed his mathematics exam. But his grounding in classical architecture and perspective provided him with a skilled hand for draughtsmanship, as is clear in works such as Le temple from 1949.

After enrolling at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels to study painting, Delvaux finally graduated at the age of 27. It took almost three more years before he felt confident enough to set up his own studio in his parents’ Brussels home.

It wasn’t until the artist’s mother died in 1933, when he was in his mid-thirties, that he felt comfortable exhibiting his painting of a sleeping Venus, inspired by a mechanical model he had spotted in a wax museum. It was a theme to which he would return again and again; the work, however, was severely criticised, and Delvaux destroyed it, along with many other paintings from the period.

The majority of Delvaux’s motifs were inspired by adolescent experiences: encountering a grinning human skull at school; discovering Greek mythology and the poetry of Homer; taking the train to the Sonian Forest near Brussels to paint en plein air while on military service. The artist once said of these key moments: ‘Youthful impressions, fixed once and for all in the mind, influence you all your life.’

Childhood summers spent at the house shared by his four aunts also made a lasting impact on the artist. Their lace collars and tightly corseted long dresses provided a deep well of memories from which Delvaux would draw throughout his life. Works such as Rosine from 1968 typify his fixation with period dress.

In 1926, Delvaux visited an exhibition of work by Giorgio de Chirico, whose sparse vistas and dark palette made a deep impression on him and influenced the Surrealists. The works of René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst also played a key role in shaping Delvaux’s aesthetic. But, wary of ‘isms’, Delvaux refused any formal association with the Surrealists or any other artistic circle.

Nevertheless, the influence of the Surrealists on Delvaux’s work is unmissable: his fascination for fantasy and the juxtaposition of seemingly anachronistic elements echo the forces that had shaped the Surrealist landscape half a century earlier. His compositions — often of eerily assembled, trance-like figures in a setting at the cusp of classical antiquity and modernity — convey a sense of uncanny beauty and melancholy that is unique to his oeuvre.

André Breton, who wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, admired Delvaux’s adoption of ‘poetic shock’ — a term coined by early-20th-century Surrealists to describe the technique of cutting up poems to create incomprehensible verses.

Delvaux used the method to bring together disparate subjects, forms and ideas in his pictures, resulting in bizarre visual narratives.

After the Germans occupied Belgium from the spring of 1940, Delvaux refused to exhibit his art publicly. The works he painted under occupation depict the despair he witnessed first-hand.

One of Delvaux’s best-known images from the period, Sleeping Venus from 1944 — now in the Tate collection — was painted while Brussels was being bombed. Referring to the work’s depiction of women wailing in despair behind a sleeping goddess, Delvaux said: ‘I wanted to express this anguish in the picture, contrasted with the calm of the Venus.’ Other depictions of Venus painted during the war include La Vénus endormie from 1943.

Delvaux steadily gained international recognition after the war. He was invited to take part in the 1954 Venice Biennale, where his Crucifixion (1951-52), showing the skeleton of Christ on the cross alongside those of the two crucified thieves, caused Cardinal Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII) to condemn them as heretical and ban the clergy from attending the show.

The artist said of his work, ‘Skeletons magnify the very structure of life itself, with all those admirable lines like the bars of cages through which the light sheds vivifying rays.’

Delvaux’s paintings are often described as visual representations of Freudian dreams, although he claimed to find the pioneering psychoanalyst’s ideas unimportant. His canvases are replete with spectral night scenes, railways and erotic motifs.

Works such as Nuit de Noël, 1956, display Delvaux’s ability to create monumental and compelling visions of dreamlike worlds — its urban setting both realistic and familiar yet uncanny, as if depicting a theatrical tableau from the artist’s subconscious.

In 1987, Delvaux was asked to explain the role of the male figure in his 1962 painting The Sabbath. He responded: ‘Any plausible explanations are necessarily fanciful, including any I might put forward myself. I am convinced that the explanation of the picture is written in the picture itself. Anyone who cares to do so can find his own personal interpretation, nothing more. I can suggest a number of possible explanations.’

Having continued to paint well into his eighties, Delvaux died in 1994, aged 96, in Veurne, Belgium. In accordance with his wishes, the Paul Delvaux Foundation and Museum had been established in Saint-Idesbald more than a decade earlier.

Delvaux’s paintings have influenced many artists working in other media. His visual world is reflected in the films of André Delvaux (no relation) and David Lynch. Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu’s 1983 symphony, To the Edge of Dream, was inspired by his dreamlike tableaux. And the writer J.G. Ballard references Delvaux in many of his novels.

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