« Hommage à Paul Delvaux », Cat. d'exposition, Liège, Musée Saint-Georges, 1977
« Delvaux », catalogue d'exposition, Martigny, Fondation Pierre Giannada, 1987
« L'aube sur la ville », J. Meuris, Isy Brachot Editeur, 1990
« P. Delvaux, sa vie », Guy Carels, Fondation P. Delvaux, Sint-Idesbald, 2004
To read from the artist :
« De l'animal à l'homme. Rencontre avec Delvaux », G. Lippert, Ed. Blondé, 1997
Catalogue(s) raisonné(s)
*« Paul Delvaux, l'oeuvre gravé », Mira Jacob, Ed. A. Sauret, Monaco, 1967 *« Das Graphische Werk », Mira Jacob, Ed. A. Sauret, Monaco, 1976 *« Catalogue de l'oeuvre peint », M. Butor et autres, Ed. La Bibliothèque des Arts, Bruxelles, 1975
SURREALISM/1924-1969 / Oscar Dominguez, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, etc. MAGIC REALISM/1935-1980 / Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, Albert Carel Willink, Grant Wood, etc.
Paul Delvaux was born in Antheit-lès-Huy (Belgium) in 1897. He studied to the Beaux Arts Academy of Brussels from 1920 to 1924 (in Constant Montald’s atelier). He received there the impressionist and expressionist movement influences. Paul Delvaux was early interested in the drawing and the study of the music. He exhibited, in 1924, with “the Sillon”, group gathering impressionists artists.
In 1934, he discovered with a new interest the Surrealism with works of Magritte, Ernst, Dali and Giorgio de Chirico exhibited in the Palais des Beaux arts of Brussels in the exhibition “Minotaure”. In the Thirties, Paul Delvaux was one of the most regarded artists of this movement. Surrealism represented for him the spirit of freedom. He began to set up a personal iconography, undoubtedly autobiographical, which he developped throughout his work. The artist painted male dressed figures and, in opposition to naked or very undressed young women. He set up his figures, true effigies, in ancient decorations of ruins or in architectonic gardens. In this fiction world, he added components: columns, nodes, craniums, skeletons, trees or mirrors; Delvaux felt a fascination for mysterious objects which he painted in a worrying universe.
The strange universe created by Paul Delvaux was poetic and erotic, a universe of “magic realism” where the desire made the law. He also painted compositions of religious inspiration. From 1965 to 1966, Paul Delvaux was the president and the director of the Beaux Arts Royal Academy of Belgium; at this time, the artist carried out his first lithographs. The Delvaux Foundation was created in 1980; two years later, a museum was opened in Saint-Idesbald, gathering works of all his artist life.
He died in 1994 in Furnes (Belgium), where he settled down in 1969.
The strange universe created by Paul Delvaux was poetic and erotic, a universe of “