Word: delvaux
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Magritte is 48, married, and has a pet Pomeranian, "Jacacki." He is a dapper dresser, paints on a time-clock daily schedule in a corner of his small, commonplace living room. Magritte considers Dali an excellent businessman ("he is rich") but has intense scorn for fellow Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux, who paints luscious nudes picking roses in classic landscapes, with now & then a streetcar lurking about in the background (TIME, Dec. 30). Painter Delvaux, Magritte thinks, "has exploited surrealism as he would have exploited pork-butchery...
...Delvaux's mysteriously out-of-place nudes earned him a growing reputation as one of Europe's finest fantasists, sold almost as fast as he could paint them. Last week the first full-dress U.S. exhibition of his buff-bare ladies was on display at a Manhattan gallery, sponsored by well-clothed U.N. General Assembly President (and Belgian Foreign Minister) Paul-Henri Spaak. By careful culling, the show bared no pubic hairs, was guaranteed not to rouse the same censorship problems that harried Delvaux's recently imported painting, Temptation of St. Anthony (TIME, Sept...
...self-portraits which now & then appeared in Delvaux's canvases looked even more out of place than the nudes; they exhibited the frozen face and faintly old-fashioned garb of a latter-day Buster Keaton, stalking gloomily amidst his dream harem or lifting his hat to a bare-backed girl friend, as in The Meeting...
...Delvaux, 49, who really does look like Keaton (and poses before a mirror as his own model), lives and works in solid comfort on Brussels' conservative Rue d'Ecosse. He is a dreamer who reads little, belongs to no church, no political party. The tables and cupboards in his studio are cluttered with seven human skulls, and the walls are banked with huge, infinitely complicated paintings. (A recent one, called Unrest in the City, includes some 1,200 figures.) Says he: "I work patiently and minutely like the Flemish primitives, Van Eyck and Memling." He paints on plywood...
Frequently classified as a Surrealist, Delvaux says he is not, but he admits that "dreams play a great part in my inspiration-not necessarily my own dreams, though. For instance, my Village of Mermaids, on exhibition in New York, is the result of a dream my wife had. She dreamed she saw women sitting in gilded chairs in the village street and diving like mermaids into the sea." Delvaux sometimes paints his wife's wide-eyed, classic face but nothing more; his nudes are painted from two professional models: a Swede and a Russian...