Delvaux, Paul

Known for staging his very particular dream worlds, Belgian artist Paul Delvaux studied drawing and decorative painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Depending on his current influences, his early paintings were alternately Post-Impressionist, Expressionist, and, according to some, Surrealist. Throughout his life he was said to belong to the last mentioned movement, but although he drew much inspiration from it, he never joined Surrealism. By the late 1920s, he was still searching for himself and eventually destroyed almost fifty paintings from that period. In the early 1930s, however, he finally found himself, and the motifs that would later make him renowned began to appear in his works.
 

Paul Delvaux's paintings are recognizable at first glance. Whether you see a woman, a train and a station, temples, skeletons or scientists (his favorite subjects), his dreamlike and peaceful creations with Renaissance decorations all exude a poetic atmosphere. The theatricalized scenes depicted are stories in themselves, unique in their kind. Incidentally, this theatrical aspect is also found in his etchings, where the absence of colors does not detract from the poetic dimension, but even enhances it. A catalog raisonné of Delvaux's etchings was published by André Sauret in 1976, but it covers only the period from 1966 to 1976.
 

Since the early 1930s, Paul Delvaux's fame gained momentum and has not diminished since. In 1991 Paris dedicated a major retrospective to him, and since 1982 a private museum in Saint-Idesbald has been showing his works, where one can still find the most important collection related to the artist. Until the death of his wife, the love of his life, Delvaux never stopped painting, thanks to his imagination, which he demonstrated until his death at the age of 96.