Tuesday’s centenary of the birth of Belgian painter Paul Delvaux gives a perfect occasion to re-examine the fortunes of an artist who, beyond his renown in Europe, once had significant impact on the collecting community in Chicago.
The Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute of Chicago own strong examples of Delvaux’s work, which perhaps is natural for a city held in thrall by surrealist painting and object-making. But for a long time, in the United States, at least, Delvaux’s particular kind of surrealism was out of fashion, and only in recent years has it again begun to receive favorable critical appraisal.
The large exhibition consecrated to Delvaux in Brussels earlier this year certainly will have an impact on his re-evaluation, and for that reason alone it’s a pity no museum in North America committed to showing it. Any revisions we make regarding his place in art history will therefore be made without having had a fresh look at his paintings, though to students of modern art Delvaux is, of course, a well-known commodity.
He died just three years ago, after an especially active career that began in 1925 and ended in the mid 1980s. At base an oil painter, he nonetheless created watercolors, ink drawings, works in light varnish and lithographs — the last two not until early in his 70s.
An avid reader with a passion for music, Delvaux had a privileged childhood that he idealized ever after. The one great trauma was parental opposition to his marrying the love of his life. Yet that, too, he resolved, for after an early marriage to another woman, he re-encountered the first in middle age, brought her to the altar and apparently lived happily ever after.
Delvaux was classically trained and showed an inclination toward decorative mural painting. But apart from a brief period of influence by Flemish expressionists, he settled into a cool figurative surrealism stemming from the eerie quiet of Giorgio De Chirico, and this vision remained fundamentally unchanged for the rest of his life.
The turning point for Delvaux occurred upon seeing a pseudo-scientific fairground display known as the Spitzner Museum, which included two skeletons and a mechanical sleeping Venus made from papier mache. He wrote: “There was something strange and sad about it in the middle of the hubbub of the carousels,” and such attributes apply equally well to the figures that became central to his painting.
As at the Spitzner, Delvaux’s figures are either nude women or skeletons. The nudes are so similar in face and body type that when more than one appear, they often seem to be just one, multiplied.
How the figures relate to their landscapes or interiors gives them their strangeness, for, in truth, they always look calmly at home though they seldom relate to anything, including one another. This dichotomy contributes to an impression of sadness, as the women move in the physical world like counterparts to filmmaker Wim Wenders’ angels, there yet not there, present but vacant.
Delvaux’s skeletons offer de-sexed versions of the same condition but perhaps appeal to a wider spectrum of feeling that ranges from pathos (as when they re-enact the crucifixion and deposition) to comedy (six of them striking poses like employees in a business office). Still, they never are as scathing or macabre as the skeletons in paintings by another famous Belgian, James Ensor, whom Delvaux much admired.
Delvaux’s nudes and skeletons preside over a world free from the kind of upheavals created by his surrealist colleagues. In fact, he was not at all interested in administering explosive shocks. His work has an atmosphere altogether more subtle, though his many years of performing variations on silent, unsettling states tended to deaden our awareness of how psychologically insightful they were.
“The kind of subjects he favored from the mid-’30s on, particularly those involving the female nude, blend eroticism with a kind of alienation,” says Jeremy Strick, curator of 20th Century painting and sculpture at the Art Institute. “And that, I think, is his great contribution.
“There’s a sense of desire represented through the (nude) figures, but they’re always very distant, in their own world. They seem to be sleepwalking, unaware. And they’re in situations that look back to classical myth and history without having particularly direct associations. Sources could come from Jules Verne novels as well as dreams the artist had.
“Delvaux was influenced by De Chirico, (Rene) Magritte, and (Salvador) Dali. And he’s certainly in that line. But his work is quite distinct. It symbolizes a kind of longing. The female figures clearly are symbolic of erotic desire. And the paintings are allegories of desire, of its distance and impossibility.”
Such distance carried over to Delvaux’s paint handling. Always it’s smooth and unvaried in color, texture and line, showing no sign of passion. Were it otherwise, the pacific atmosphere of his images might be broken, thereby also shattering the illusion that extraordinarily incongruous situations could somehow appear normal.
Delvaux’s illusion of normalcy exemplified a side of surrealism that was accessible to a broad audience, for viewers always accepted more readily images that were depicted realistically yet proved incongruous. For a long time his work was used as a kind of touchstone to introduce surrealism, but its accessibility eventually came to count against it just as its unwavering vision ultimately devalued its invention.
In recent years that has, however, been changing.
“It may be because of some of the major exhibitions that were organized around the world in the last decade or so,” says Lucinda Barnes, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection. “There have been a couple of really significant exhibitions exploring different ideas around Surrealism, and naturally, after you look at the core (artists), you are going to look at some of the concentric rings.
“Delvaux was, I feel, one of the close concentric rings. I don’t associate him with the initial group of Surrealists who, after all, worked in Paris. But his early influences came out of that first generation.
“Late Surrealism is really the fundamental school of artistic activity at the beginnings of (the MCA) collection. And our Delvaux, which dates from 1945 and came to us only recently, shows interesting relationships to several post-World War II artists.
In that context, Delvaux occupies a similar place to Matta and Wifredo Lam. All three have a direct early influence from the Parisian core of Surrealists but develop personal strains and styles that may be associated with later artists from entirely different geographic regions.”
For some, those links may keep Delvaux relevant, while others will continue to extol the freshness of his initial impulse in works of the 1930s. Either way, an artist who a decade ago seemed too easy and repetitive is slowly reclaiming a place in the modernist pantheon.
That at least part of the effort should happen at the time of his 100th birthday observance is, as they say, the icing on the cake.
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Paul Delvaux’s “Women with Lamps” (1937) and “The Awakening of the Forest” (1939) are on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue; his “Penelope” (1945) is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.
