Paul Delvaux

Biography

In 1932, at the Midi Fair in Brussels, Delvaux went into the Spitzner Museum, a fairground cabinet of medical curiosities. In a window with red velvet curtains stood skeletons and a mechanical Venus that imitated breathing. These images stayed with him for decades.

He was born on 23 September 1897 in Antheit (now part of Wanze), in the province of Liège. His parents lived in Brussels, and his mother went to her own mother’s house to give birth. His father, Jean Delvaux, was a barrister at the Court of Appeal; his mother, the musician Laure Jamotte, was a domineering figure whose influence on her son was felt for a long time. From 1910 to 1916 he studied Classics at the Athénée of Saint-Gilles in Brussels and read Jules Verne and the Odyssey. His parents found him a job with a shipping company, but he showed no aptitude for business or law.

He was grudgingly allowed to study architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. In 1916 he began with the basics of architecture and perspective, but because of his weakness in mathematics he was disqualified and left after the first year. While he passed the time copying postcards, his mother advised him to paint from nature, and in 1919 he made his first watercolours of scenic views. That summer, in Zeebrugge, the painter Franz Courtens saw them and told the parents that their son had talent and a great future. The parents gave way, and in 1919 Delvaux returned to the Académie, this time to study painting: his teachers were the decorative painter Constant Montald and the Symbolist Jean Delville. In 1920–1921 he did his military service as a logistics clerk.

His first works were post-Impressionist, sombre landscapes and urban scenes such as “Railroad Workers of Luxembourg Station” (1922). Between 1920 and 1925 he completed about eighty paintings. In 1924 he set up a studio in his parents’ house on Rue d’Écosse, and in 1925 his first solo exhibition was held in Brussels. In the late 1920s nudes in landscapes appeared on his canvases, under the influence of the Flemish Expressionists Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet and Frits Van den Berghe, and of the palette of James Ensor. Little survives: he destroyed fifty canvases in order to reuse the stretchers.

In 1929 he met Anne-Marie de Maertelaere, whom he called Tam. His mother made him promise never to see her again, and his paintings took on a lonelier, more detached tone. His mother died on 31 December 1932, his father in January 1937. In July 1937 Delvaux married Suzanne Purnal; he later said it had been a marriage of convenience.

The decisive year was 1934: at the exhibition “Minotaure” at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels he saw works by Giorgio de Chirico, whom he had first encountered in 1926 or 1927. He later said of de Chirico that with him he understood what the climate could be: silent streets with the shadows of people who cannot be seen. He also took over a few things from René Magritte, with whom he kept a respectful but uneasy relationship. In 1936 they had separate shows at the same palace. In 1938 Delvaux took part in the International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris. He did not consider himself “a Surrealist in the scholastic sense of the word”, and he never officially joined the movement. His mature style took shape between 1937 and 1941: idealised women, with himself beside them, skeletons and characters from Verne.

In 1940, when the Germans invaded Belgium, Delvaux went to Pas-de-Calais for eight days with his aunts, then returned to Brussels. He spent the war years at home working and exhibited nothing in Belgium. The painting “The Anxious City” (1941) conveys both the chaos of those years and their uncanny routine. He went to the Museum of Natural Sciences to draw skeletons, and in 1943 the first of a series of skeletons posed in lifelike stances appeared. In January 1945 a major retrospective of 57 large canvases was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts; the response was divided between admiration and incomprehension. In 1947 the Julien Levy Gallery in New York showed his work, but customs seized two paintings as obscene, and one was damaged.

In August 1947 he met Tam by chance at a newsstand in Saint-Idesbald. A year later he divorced his first wife, in 1951 the couple built a house with a studio in the dunes, and on 25 October 1952 they married. From 1950 to 1962 Delvaux taught monumental painting (murals for public buildings) at La Cambre. In 1952, with Emile Salkin and three students, he painted a wall mural with a mermaid for the gaming room of the Kursaal in Ostend. In 1954 he showed religious scenes enacted by skeletons at the Venice Biennale, but the show was censored on the orders of Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII. In 1956 he visited Greece. For Expo 58 he painted “Literary Map of Belgium” with his students; since 1976 it has hung in a hall of the Royal Library. Then came “Earthly Paradise” (1959) at the Palais des Congrès in Brussels, “Genesis” (1960) at the Institute of Zoology of the University of Liège, and “Our Old Brussels Trams” (1978) at the Bourse metro station.

In 1956 he was elected a correspondent of the Royal Academy of Belgium, and in 1958 a member; in 1965 he became its president. From 1966, for seventeen years, he drew from the model Danielle Caneel, but he almost never gave her face in finished paintings. In 1969 he moved to Veurne, while keeping his studio in Saint-Idesbald. In 1981 Andy Warhol met him in Brussels and made a series of portraits. The Paul Delvaux Museum opened in Saint-Idesbald on 26 June 1982.

His eyesight weakened, his brushwork grew freer and his colours brighter. His last canvas, “Calypso”, is dated 1986; after that there were drawings, some of them large.

Tam died on 21 December 1989, and he stopped working altogether. Delvaux died in Veurne on 20 July 1994 and was buried there beside his wife.