This
February, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting an exhibition on the
Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), an artist represented in both the
Museum’s Permanent Collection and the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.
Organised in collaboration with the Musée d’Ixelles and curated by Laura Neve,
that institution’s academic advisor, Paul Delvaux: A Walk with Love and Death will
present a thematic survey featuring more than 50 works loaned from public and
private collections in Belgium, in particular that of Nicole and Pierre Ghêne,
which constitutes the nucleus of this project and is represented by a loan of
forty-two works.
Fascinated
since 1962 by the work of Delvaux, Pierre Ghêne began his collection in the
early 1970s. Since that time it has continued to grow and now numbers hundreds
of them, most of which are in the Musée d’Ixelles.Following his experiments with
realism, Fauvism and Expressionism, Delvaux discovered the work of Magritte and
Giorgio de Chirico. Surrealism was a crucial revelation for the artist,
although he never considered himself a Surrealist painter in a strict sense.
Delvaux
was more interested in Surrealism’s poetic, mysterious facet than its
iconoclastic battles, leading him from the 1930s to create his own, unique
universe, free of the rules of universal logic and located between classicism
and the modern world and between dream and reality. Notable for its stylistic
unity, Delvaux’s output is characterised by a strange, enigmatic atmosphere.
The principal motifs, ranging from women to trains and including skeletons and
buildings, are part of that universe: isolated, self-absorbed, almost somnambulist
beings, often located in nocturnal settings and apparently unrelated to each
other, the only link between them being the artist’s own experiences.
The
exhibition focuses on the five principal themes in Delvaux’s iconography, all
revolving around love and death: Reclining Venus, a recurrent motif in his work
which refers to his unconditional love for women; The Double (Couples and
Mirrors),which focuses on seduction and the relationship with the alter ego; Architectures, which focuses
on the omnipresent buildings in his oeuvre, particularly classical ones but
also examples from Watermael-Boitsfort (Brussels, Belgium) where he lived;
Train Stations; which are essential to the construction of his pictorial
personality; and finally, The Skeleton of Life, which analyses Delvaux’s
fascination with that motif, which he used as substitutes for live figures
engaged in everyday activities.
Born
into a family of lawyers, Delvaux received his father’s permission to attend
the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels where, after briefly studying
architecture, he opted for decorative painting and graduated in 1924. His early
works reveal the influence of the Flemish Expressionists such as Constant
Permeke and Gustave de Smet, who represented the Belgian avant-garde of the
time. At this early date Delvaux began to reveal an interest in depicting the
human form, particularly women, which would remain a constant artistic concern
throughout his career.
In
the mid-1930s Delvaux discovered Surrealism and participated in the
International Surrealism Exhibition in Paris in 1938 and in subsequent ones in
Amsterdam and Mexico. Nonetheless, he did not join the group and was concerned
to maintain his artistic independence.
Reclining
Venus
Delvaux’s
interest in the motif of the sleeping Venus began in 1932 when he visited the
Spitzner Museum, one of the principal attractions at the Foire du Midi in
Brussels, which displayed wax figures showing surgical innovations, illnesses
and physical deformations, together with specimens preserved in formaldehyde.
Delvaux was above all struck by an exhibit entitled The Sleeping Venus and that
same year painted his first canvas on this subject, subsequently reinterpreting
it on numerous occasions and with striking variations.
The
version of 1932 included in the present exhibition is particularly original in
its execution. At this period Delvaux was close to Expressionism and his work
reveals the influence of James Ensor, particularly in the use of the grotesque
and in the strange atmosphere that pervades the work. The artist had not yet
created his Surrealist universe but already made use of some of its key
elements such as the woman, the skeleton, the unexpected, angst, etc.
Two
years later Delvaux admired De Chirico’s work in the exhibition Minotaure held
in Brussels in 1934, and his painting The Dream (1935) already reveals new
aesthetic ideas in which a dreamlike reality prevails over an objective one.
The principal figure in this canvas does not directly refer to Venus but rather
to the woman in general, as representative of the female sex. Probably due to
the fact that Delvaux’s relations with the opposite sex were never easy (he had
a domineering mother, a platonic affair and an unsuccessful marriage), the
theme of the woman was one of his obsessions and is expressed in his oeuvre in
the form of mysterious and beautiful but, to the artist, unobtainable young
women.
Double
(Couples and Mirrors)
Another
recurring concept in Delvaux’s oeuvre is that of seduction. From the early
1930s onwards he painted both heterosexual and lesbian couples, fascinated by
the latter relationship given that it pertained to the realm of female intimacy
and representing it in a much simpler and more intimate and spontaneous way.
His visit to a brothel around 1930 may lie at the origins of this theme of
“female friends”, which began to reappear in his work.
Over the following months Delvaux depicted numerous embracing women in sketches and studies characterised by an enormous freedom of expression. Livelier and more expressive than his canvases, these drawings allowed him to give free range to his imagination and to explore various taboos. Some experts consider that Delvaux made use of lesbianism to convey his disappointment with heterosexual relations, which he tended to stigmatise in his works, condemning his figures of opposite sexes to a lack of contact and dialogue.
Over the following months Delvaux depicted numerous embracing women in sketches and studies characterised by an enormous freedom of expression. Livelier and more expressive than his canvases, these drawings allowed him to give free range to his imagination and to explore various taboos. Some experts consider that Delvaux made use of lesbianism to convey his disappointment with heterosexual relations, which he tended to stigmatise in his works, condemning his figures of opposite sexes to a lack of contact and dialogue.
In
Pygmalion(1939), represented in the exhibition by a preliminary study, the
female character prefers a stone sculpture to a man, inverting the original
myth in which the sculptor fell in love with the statue he had carved. In the painting
the two members of the couple have their alter egos in the background. This
represents the theme of the double, which is notably present in Delvaux’s work
and is associated with his use of mirrors as another important element in his
paintings.
All
entitled “Woman at the Mirror”, examples of this theme such as the one of 1936
in the Museum’s Permanent Collection, endow the mirror with an active role and
favour the specular image rather than the tangible one.
A
separate area within this section is devoted to The Conflagration(1935). It has
recently been discovered that this is only the right-hand half of a larger
canvas that was cut in two by Delvaux before he exhibited it at the annual
Salon in Antwerp that same year. At a later date the collector Pierre Ghêne
acquired the rediscovered lost half, which he subsequently donated to the
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. The two parts could be seen together
for the first time last year at the Musée d’Ixelles and will also be present in
this exhibition.
Architectures
(Acropolis)
Architecture
occupied a prominent position in Delvaux’s work from the mid-1930s onwards.
Fascinated by classical mythology as a child, he drew battles inspired by the
ones he had read about in the Iliadand the Odyssey. Delvaux’s first
mythological canvas, The Return of Ulysses, dates from 1924 to 1925 and heralds
the importance that the classical world would have in his work, even though the
subject is treated in a relatively literal manner. The artist was not convinced
by the results and abandoned classical subjects in favour of Expressionism,
returning to them, however, in 1934.
De
Chirico’s influence is evident in this return to classical culture, which was
fundamental to Delvaux’s iconography and is expressed not just through
architecture but also through mythology and the
clothing of his female figures. For the artist, antiquity represented a means
of escape from everyday reality and a comforting way of liberating his
imagination.Delvaux’s works acquired a theatrical, even cinematic character due
to the importance of the settings, the structuring of the compositions into
successive planes and the hieratic poses of the figures. In some cases
classical antiquity is suggested by architectural details that become part of
the setting.
In
other works Delvaux painted entire classical panoramas; whole cities in which
he nonetheless included anachronistic elements and combined different styles,
giving the scenes an absurdist character.
Palace
in Ruins(1935) was his first authentically Surrealist work and paved the way
for the development of his subsequent style, characterised by a mood of poetic
mystery in which silence prevails.The buildings that appear in Delvaux’s
canvases are precisely painted. The artist researched and documented each
element through models and photographs with the aim of faithfully reproducing
reality.
His
depictions of classical architecture became increasingly accurate, particularly
after his visits to Italy in 1937 and 1939 and Greece in 1956. The motif of the
ancient city increasingly replaces the depiction of ruins, with references to
real buildings and partly surviving monuments. During this period Delvaux’s
chromatic range became lighter and he placed new emphasis on colour.
Train
Stations
From
a very early age Delvaux was interested inthe world of railways, which for him
represented a fascinating symbol of incipient modernity. By the 1920s the
Luxembourg Station in Brussels was already one of his favourite sources of
inspiration and he would paint there outdoors. Delvaux produced a dozen
large-format canvases in which he depicted the station’s bustling life, its
wintry atmosphere and the conditions of the railway workers, in a continuation
of the social realism initiated in Belgium by Constantin Meunier.
Delvaux
subsequently abandoned the world of trains but returned to it, better prepared
academically, in the 1940s and from then on it would be indissolubly linked to
his pictorial identity, to the point where he was known as the “painter of
stations”. Without referring to their actual destinations, Delvaux located
trains and trams in contemporary settings or in classical cities in scenes
peopled by women on the platforms or in the waiting rooms prior to a rendezvous
or to the start of their journeys.
With
regard to the artist’s childhood memories, in 1950 he embarked on a series of
nocturnal scenes in which young girls wait in empty stations, reflecting his
fears provoked by the adult world.
The erotic tension of the 1940s now gives
way to tranquillity and calm, as in The Viaduct (1963), in which everything is
frozen, seemingly for an event that never actually happens.
The
Skeleton of Life
Delvaux’s
fascination with skeletons dates back to his years at school when he paid close
attention to the skeleton in the biology classroom, which both frightened and
fascinated him. From 1932 onwards the skeleton became an element in his visual
vocabulary and one of particular expressivity.
On occasions, skeletons substitute
the principal figure and thus reinterpret the narrative in the manner of an
alter ego.
When not the principal figure they appear in the background,
blending in with the setting and playing a secondary but no less important role
in which they behave in the manner of humans.
