Paul Delvaux Exhibition: Starting Points
The unifying thread followed by the designers of this exhibition was to show the numerous influences exercised by Belgian and European painters on the work of Paul Delvaux, and how this finally allowed him to acquire, step by step, influence after influence, practically stroke by stroke, his very specific style, marked by surrealism and poetry.
"After numerous hesitations and transformations, little by little I succeeded in finding my way. I suffered from numerous influences like all young people taken by storm: it is necessary, inasmuch as possible, to try to resist, to keep oneself afloat to acquire one’s own personality."
These words by the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) close this exhibition, a true voyage through the numerous pictorial propensities that Delvaux tried out.
The intention here is to show how an artist ends up finding his way. Delvaux himself, incidentally, never made a mystery of the attraction exercised on him by works by other artists, going so far as to leave numerous letters about them. Therefore here the artist’s lesser known works are proposed, always in dialogue with the paintings of his ‘influencers’.
A return to the sources
Here, therefore, one goes back to the source of his life, of his work, in order to follow with astonishment and amusement the multiple enrichments, about-turns and evolutions. Here you will see Delvaux’s surprising path, from the first realistic canvases of forest landscapes, to the strange places inspired by De Chirico, including the glimmering colours of his Meuse landscapes which one might imagine in Provence rather than along the banks of the River Meuse; and the discovery of women’s sensuality, of mythified, idealised women by this man who devoted a large part of his work to them.
A constant dialogue
Intelligently and with verve, the exhibition proposes a dialogue between canvases by Delvaux and those by artists who influenced him. Nonetheless, Delvaux truly appropriated for himself these diverse influences, taking from them what interested him and leaving the rest, without which he would have been nothing but a skilful copyist.
For that matter, he always registered a certain delay in relation to the trends by which he was inspired, evolving at his own pace in a childlike universe, a good boy and above all never political or gloomy. His universe, which he created stroke by stroke, expanding his palette little by little, sometimes repudiating certain works, going so far as to destroy them …
If the adventure sounds tempting to you, you can experience it at the Musée d’Ixelles until 16 January 2011.
© Fondation Paul Delvaux, Sint-Idesbald, Belgique