Word: delvaux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From the outside, the small whitewashed house, surrounded by tiny birch and fir trees, looks as if it might belong to a mousy little spinster who would never do anything that would cause talk among the neighbors. But the house on the outskirts of Brussels belongs to Paul Delvaux, a grey-maned, sad-faced man of 65 who, next to René Magritte, is Belgium's top surrealist and can sometimes be seen standing in his studio wearing blue jeans and sandals, slowly filling a huge canvas with vacant-eyed female nudes. Against one wall stands...
...German and Scandinavian expressionism. Then in 1936 he discovered the surrealist work of Italy's Giorgio de Chirico ("I was haunted by his poetry of silence and obsession") and Belgium's René Magritte. "They were the springboard that brought me into my own world," he says. Delvaux destroyed almost every painting he had ever done and began anew...
...psychoanalyst could obviously find all sorts of sexual obsessions in Delvaux's work. In one canvas, a female nude walks through a garden past a group of fully clothed scholars, and, like the sad little figure in the ads entitled "In Philadelphia nearly everybody reads the Bulletin," is wholly ignored. And Delvaux's trains could be a Freudian symbol for the male sex drive or an occult reference to death. But Delvaux ignores all that sort of speculation. He paints trains, he says, probably because they remind him of happy trips he took during his childhood...
...Ultimate Aloneness. Last week Manhattan's Staempfli Gallery opened an exhibition of Delvaux paintings, each of which casts a spell completely independent of sexual connotation. What at first might look like salacious humor turns out to be powerfully suggestive in a wholly different way. In Nocturne (opposite), the viewer's eye sweeps past the two somnambulant nudes, is carried across a terrace that is as desolate as the moon, ends up on a lonely mountaintop that looms against an empty sky. In Delvaux's enigmatic world, a street can turn into a maze leading...