Paul Delvaux

Paul Delvaux
Paul Delvaux signing autographs (1972) Brussels, Belgium
Born	(1897-09-23)23 September 1897 Antheit, Belgium
Died	20 July 1994(1994-07-20) (aged 96) Veurne, Belgium
Nationality	Belgian
Known for	Painting

Paul Delvaux (French: [dɛlvo]; 23 September 1897 – 20 July 1994) was a Belgian painter associated with Surrealism, famous for his paintings of female nudes.

Delvaux was born in Antheit in the Belgian province of Liège, the son of a lawyer. The young Delvaux took music lessons, studied Greek and Latin, and absorbed the fiction of Jules Verne and the poetry of Homer. All of his work was to be influenced by these readings, starting with his earliest drawings showing mythological scenes. He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, albeit in the architecture department owing to his parents' disapproval of his ambition to be a painter. Nevertheless, he pursued his goal, attending painting classes taught by Constant Montald and Jean Delville. The painters Frans Courtens and Alfred Bastien also encouraged Delvaux, whose works from this period were primarily naturalistic landscapes. He completed some 80 paintings between 1920 and 1925, which was the year of his first solo exhibition.

Delvaux's paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which feature nudes in landscapes, are strongly influenced by such Flemish Expressionists as Constant Permeke and Gustave De Smet. A change of style around 1933 reflects the influence of the metaphysical art of Giorgio de Chirico, which he had first encountered in 1926 or 1927. In the early 1930s Delvaux found further inspiration in visits to the Brussels Fair, where the Spitzner Museum, a museum of medical curiosities, maintained a booth in which skeletons and a mechanical Venus figure were displayed in a window with red velvet curtains. This spectacle captivated Delvaux, supplying him with motifs that would appear throughout his subsequent work. In the mid-1930s he also began to adopt some of the motifs of his fellow Belgian René Magritte, as well as that painter's deadpan style in rendering the most unexpected juxtapositions of otherwise ordinary objects.