In Liège, the strange worlds of Paul Delvaux celebrated

More than one will be surprised: Paul Delvaux was never part of the group of surrealists, and denied being one. The artist nevertheless participated in the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris in 1938, and this major retrospective of his works deliberately coincides with the centenary of surrealism. But this free electron refused to be affiliated with a doctrine. For their part, the surrealists did not necessarily see him as one of theirs. In 1947, the surrealist writer Marcel Mariën viciously accused of “dishonestly” exploiting “surrealist discoveries” of the 1920s, by repeating on an “industrial” scale the same “stupid” juxtapositions of elements…

Certainly repetitive to the point of obsession – a “mass” production of striking motifs with infinite variations that captivated the father of pop art Andy Warhol – the compositions of the Belgian artist nevertheless display a mystery, a dreamlike and a fascinating incongruity, recognizable at first glance as being by his hand.

Hallucinatory visions

This son of a Brussels lawyer studied architecture, then painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels between 1920 and 1924. It was in the mid-1930s that his emblematic style exploded, represented in this course by an avalanche of masterpieces and which earned him, after being revealed to the public in 1945, great success in the 1960s. Inspired by his discovery of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico in 1934 in the “Minotaure” exhibition in Brussels, the artist starts to paint strange scenes with bare settingsstrewn with clues like indecipherable rebuses…