When Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) started, he didn’t think about anything else, he explained in 1973, than expressing “something that, at that time, was very indefinable”. So he began painting like the expressionists, then like James Ensor, while admiring Nicolas Poussin, Ingres, Picasso, Dalí.
Above all, he had been a fellow student of René Magritte (1898-1967) at the Royal Academy of Brussels and, as was necessary, he lamented, “that each artist be classified in a specific category”which is why he was considered, somewhat against his will, as one of the most original representatives of Belgian surrealism. Far, however, very far from his illustrious fellow student, whose fame or colossal popularity he never achieved in the art market.
The honors of Belgium were, in any case, largely reserved for Magritte, upset at being assimilated to the man whom he had renamed “Deboeuf” and in whom he detected “a smell of a sacristy”. A beautiful Magritte Museum is now located on the Place Royale in Brussels, while it is in Saint-Idesbald, a small coastal town in West Flanders, where the Paul Delvaux Foundation strives to perpetuate the memory of the artist, who died in 1994. Brussels. And if thousands of visitors come to admire the son of man EITHER The betrayal of images (“This is not a pipe”), of Magritte, twenty-seven years have passed since Delvaux’s were collected for an exhibition in Belgium.
A “misunderstanding”
For the organizers who installed “Les Mondes de Delvaux” in the La Boverie museum in Liège, it was necessary, above all, to convince the public to rediscover a work too often summarized in a few images: naked women in a sleepwalker’s outfit. gaze in public spaces, trams and trains, skeletons reminiscent of Ensor or Bosch.
The 150 works collected and grouped by themes (magical realism, surreal archetype, Eros, Thanatos, Dreamed Antiquity, etc.) illustrate both the surprising diversity of Delvaux’s production and the difficulty of seeing only this “surrealist” in him. that, from Paris, André Breton and his accomplices considered one of their own but who caused discomfort, in Brussels, where the poet and collagist Marcel Mariën (1920-1993) also created an ugly suit in 1947, accusing him of exploiting “dishonest” the discoveries of the surrealists, denounced Mariën “the stupidity of making your decorative panels”even “The indescribable mental degeneration” of his colleague.
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