Paul Delvaux, le rêveur éveillé (book)

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Paul Delvaux, le rêveur éveillé / Paul Delvaux, the waking dreamer (book) by Olivier Cousinou, Georges Banu, Régine Rémon, Laura Neve. Supple cover. 2014. 171 pages. Very good state. Publisher Snoeck-Gent. French edition.

Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) is an internationally known Belgian artist, whose universe is inhabited by naked women who seem to be waiting for the male to shake them from their immobility. The latter, often present in the painting and correctly dressed, completely ignores them or examines them with the attitudes of old scholars often borrowed from Jules Verne. These astonishing and strange characters evolve in settings of urban areas, ruins of ancient buildings or train stations.

This set includes paintings and watercolors. The Cantini Museum offers to host the presentation of this collection in 2014. Is he a surrealist? “Not always. I am not an inventor of forms. I am rather, let’s say, a naturalist: I do not distort nature and I do not want to,” replies Delvaux. In his paintings, each element is identified with an aspect of reality, but the components disturb the natural data of the everyday world.

Like Magritte, Delvaux repudiated Flemish expressionism. With him, everything is reasoned, composed, limited. By a fatal, involuntary inclination, he found himself on the native soil of Latinity. Under his skill, the object escapes matter and captures a meaning of immediately cerebral density. Imbued with Latin culture, he is one of its messengers. It is similar to Surrealism in its latent eroticism, its dry and academic craft, and to the Naïves in its sense of values and its accuracy.

Delvaux would rather place himself, like Balthus, in the vast current of “Magical Realism” which, between the wars, built a bridge between the fantastical Surrealism and the more measured approach of the painters whose gaze never left point this side of the mirror. The murals, in a very neo-classical style, produced at Gilbert Périer in Brussels in 1954, are among the artist’s best creations; Sapho (1957, Brussels, part coll.) has the same aesthetic. Other main paintings are also the series “Skeletons” (1939-1944), “The Temptation of Saint-Antoine” (1945-1946), “Night Train” (1947), “The Little Path” (1961) and ” The Blue Sofa” (1967). Delvaux is represented in Belgian museums as well as at the Tate Gallery in London, in Paris (Museum of Modern Art) and in New York (M. O. M. A.).

Feel free to check out the additional photos at the top left, thank you!

If you prefer to pay in euros, =before= you start ordering, you must click on the word “Français” in orange, under the main photo above, which will redirect you to the same description in French and payment in Euros.