Beauty of the week: “Women of the gallant life” by Paul Delvaux

An artistic and intellectual avant-garde of the 20th century, surrealism left a legacy and an aesthetic that transcended its circle of supporters. Among the many enthusiasts who have drawn on this heritage is the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), contemporary of André Breton and other members of the group, who came to participate in the International Exhibition of Surrealism held in Paris in 1938 and other salons, although he remained far from the point of effervescence of his ideas. Although he shared the method of bringing together figures and objects in contexts that did not belong to them, he never felt part of the movement. “Poetry brings me closer to the surrealists, theory sends me back,” he once explained.

Coming from a family of lawyers, Delvaux he must convince his father to allow him access to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. There he began his studies in architecture, although he eventually decided to study decorative painting. During this stage of formation, he had a certain affinity with the group of landscape painters The groove, who have sworn never to paint a figure in their paintings. But soon after, he will receive the influence of expressionists such as Constant Permeke there Gustave de Smet, which constituted the Belgian avant-garde of the time. This early contact with expressionism led him to take an interest in the representation of the human being, in particular in the figure of the woman, a feature that will remain constant throughout his work.

It was in the mid-1930s that Delvaux turned his attention to surrealism, from the impression that the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and the work of René Magritte. This observation prompted him to transgress the rationalist logic in which his academic training had confined him. This is how his work begins to outline a style in which realistic features coexist with a disturbing dreamlike world of figures who seem to sleepwalk, mostly naked women. Raised in a puritan environment and pampered by his mother who instilled in him the fear of women, Delvaux he avenged himself by painting. However, far from suggesting a carnal eroticism, these silent and introspective figures tend to remain on another plane, in stark contrast to the environment around them.

In gallant women (140 x 122 cm, oil on canvas), painting produced in 1962, we observe three female bodies in secret, in the open air of a hostile night scene for the nudity they present. They are, as defined Paul Eluard in a poem he dedicated to Delvaux“tall motionless women, left to their destiny: knowing nothing but themselves”. The defined urban environment, in which the architecture of Brussels can be recognized, contrasts with the dreamlike impression of the characters, an effect reinforced by the painter by the disturbing interplay of long shadows and cold light that an abnormally large moon casts on the buildings. brick.

The gaze of the spectator occupies a central place in his paintings, often modulated by unusual points of view and multiple vanishing points, windows or openings, mirrors. Lines, whether straight or artificial, are often more important than the muted color palette. Such characteristics reveal the debt of Delvaux with his compatriot Magritte and with Chiricowho also explored the train as a theme and symbol in his work. gallant women It belongs to the personal collection of the Colombian painter Fernando Botero and can be visited at the Botero Museum in Bogotá. The piece coexists in its rooms with others of a surrealist style that influenced the work of the Latin American artist, such as some of De Chirico, Magritte there Max Ernst. As Botero, Delvaux it also has its own museum in the commune of Saint-Idesbald.

Although he exhibited his works in the main cities of the northern hemisphere, the art of Delvaux it was largely incomprehensible to the public. It was only after mid-century that his reputation began to grow, with the decades of the 1960s and 1970s as the heights of his productivity. In the 1980s his eyesight began to deteriorate and his brushwork became less precise and more impressionistic. His late paintings, with brighter and more brilliant colors, testify to a more meditative painting, in which less isolated figures stand out than in his best-known works.

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