Delvaux, Paul

Delvaux, Paul (1897-1994), Belgian painter, who worked initially in Expressionist and Neo-Impressionist styles but who is known chiefly for his dreamlike images in the Surrealist style, to which, as the result of influences of Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, and James Ensor, he turned from 1934 onward.

Delvaux was born in Liège, Belgium, where he lived for most of his life. He studied architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1920 to 1924. In 1924 he set up a studio in his parents’ home, and began painting on the edge of the forest nearby. There he met Alfred Bastien, who became his painting teacher. Between 1926 and 1933, three major events occurred in his life: his mother died, he saw the painting of Giorgio de Chirico for the first time, and he visited the Spitzner Museum in Brussels. He credited these events as profoundly significant to his work.

Delvaux’s work was exhibited with that of the Surrealists in the 1930s and 1940s but, while he shared their interest in dreams and the unconscious, he preferred to distance himself from direct involvement in the movement. His work is rooted in the imaginary landscape of dreams. His paintings are characterized by deep, sometimes irrational space, an eerie, unnatural light, and a representational style that is both classical and intentionally stiff or naive. The figures, most often female nudes, seem to be sleepwalking; present, but in a kind of trance. Their glowing bodies and the world that they inhabit are both seductive and disturbing. In The Spitzner Museum (1943, Musée d’Art Wallon, Liège), a half-naked woman enters a classically styled building with her eyes closed while a skeleton, a naked boy, and a group of older suited men look on.

Besides his work on canvas, Delvaux executed a number of murals (for Palais des Congrés in Brussels, in 1959, and for the Institute of Zoology at University of Liège, in 1960, among others) and designed sets for dance, film, and theatre productions, including the ballet Adame Miroir (1947), the ballet by Jean Genet, and Erasers (1968), the film based on a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. From 1950 until 1962 Delvaux was Professor of Monumental Painting at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et d’Architecture in Brussels, and in 1965 became director of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts of Belgium. The Paul Delvaux Foundation was created in Saint-Idesbald in 1980, and the Paul Delvaux Museum opened there in 1982.