Certainly, we have often seen and still see his works since then, in museums, in his Foundation on the Belgian Coast, in Saint-Idesbald and up to the major exhibition Surrealism which is currently being held at the Center Pompidou in Paris which shows Dawn, a 1937 Delvaux on loan from the Guggenheim in Venice.
Two exhibitions show how the Surrealists marvelously confronted the world
We all have in mind his large paintings which made his reputation sometimes to the point of cliché, around the subjects which were close to his heart and which we find in this exhibition in Liège, organized by theme: empty stations, trains coming from nowhere, the skeletons resuming human poses, the naked women, Eros and Thanatos, the melancholy vestal virgins who wander by the sea, the reminder of Antiquity with its ruins, the mystery and the poetry. In 2019 again, the museum Train World in Schaerbeek mixed historic trains with the world of Delvaux.
Painted by Warhol
But there had not been a major Paul Delvaux exhibition since that of 1997 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. His work was then in full glory; he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1968; in 1997, a Delvaux exhibition had just taken place at the Grand Palais in Paris; In 1981, Warhol painted the portrait of Delvaux (which can be seen at the entrance to La Boverie). He was still almost on par with Magritte. Since then, the latter has climbed into the stratosphere while Paul Delvaux has remained too confined.
This exhibition allows us to revisit his great paintings but also to discover new angles to judge that he was an important painter who cannot be reduced to a label.
One train can hide another… Delvaux at Train World
Thematically, the exhibition is also chronological: beginning with his first painting from 1920, it ends with his last from 1986.
After a brief stint at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Paul Delvaux continued his apprenticeship as an autodidact. The journey begins with his still classic paintings of the Rouge-Cloître park and, already, the stations. When young, he haunted the Luxembourg station in Brussels.
We then see how he seeks his way by varying the techniques.
The exhibition innovates by opening new pictorial dialogues, first with Modigliani by painting stretched bodies, then with Constant Permeke and Gustave De Smet when Delvaux was attracted by expressionism. The paintings on display respond perfectly to each other: a nude by De Smet and the Dame rose de Delvaux.
In 1930 he painted a magnificent large portrait full of melancholy of Tam, the woman he had fallen in love with but whom his parents prevented him from marrying!
Surrealist
Dialogue also with Ensor and Rops around masks and skeletons. And, of course, links also with paintings by Magritte and De Chirico. He had seen Mystery and melancholy of a street by Giorgio De Chirico in Brussels in 1934. It was, as for Magritte, a revelation. Xavier Canonne in the rich catalog of the exhibition emphasizes that Delvaux saw “an invitation to confide to the web one’s obsessions and sufferings. There he rediscovered his taste for the ancient, of sleeping palaces and cities, of silent stations, a frozen world where the past and the present combine.”
Paul Delvaux stayed away from the Belgian surrealists, avoiding any political significance, mocked by Magritte who did not appreciate him, sometimes calling him “Delvache”.
guillementA frozen world where the past and the present combine.
Along the way, we bring together drawings by Delvaux and Picasso. The exhibition shows through numerous examples that Delvaux was a great designer.
The exhibition continues according to Delvaux’s major themes, with his famous or rarely shown paintings.
We also recall that Delvaux was able to “shock” some: in The Visit (1939), a naked teenager enters a room where a naked woman sits waiting for him. In Ostend in 1962, the work was taken down for “attack on good morals” and prohibited for those under 21! In 1954, his burial in which Jesus was a skeleton led the cardinal to call for a ban on its exhibition.
“The worlds of Paul Delvaux” of which Michel Draguet is one of the curators with Camille Brasseur, also has an important multimedia component so that visitors can better enter the artist’s world, from the reconstruction of his studio which allows you to see how Delvaux worked, to that of a sleeping Venus like the one Delvaux had seen at the Spitzner Museum at the Foire du Midi.
The exhibition is designed and proposed by the Paul Delvaux Foundation of Saint-Idesbald (it is still thinking of coming to Brussels) and by Tempora which will then travel it to the Maillol museum in Paris.
Les Mondes de Paul Delvaux, La Boverie, Liège, until March 16
