Paul Delvaux was born on September 23, 1987, in Anheit, Blegium near Liege. His father was a successful barrister at the Court of Appeals in Belgium . As a young man , Delvaux attended the Ecole Primarie de Saint Gilles in Brussels, where he studied music. We became fascinated at the school by a human skeleton that hung in the school museum , an image that would become an almost obsessive fixation in his art. In 1907, the young artist first became familiar with Jules Verne's novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Edoard Riou's illustrations of the character of Professor Otto Lindenbrock, who would become an icon of scientific rationality in his later work.
In 1919, Delvaux met painter Frans (Baron ) Courtens, who helped to convince Delvaux's's parents to let him pursue a career as an artist. He then enrolled in Constant Montald's art classes, where he impressed the faculty by rendering some very lofty subjects, including large scale illustrations of Gustave Flaubert's 1862 historical novel "Salammbo." He continued his art classes during his military service in 1920-21 at the Brussels Academie under academic painter Jean Deliville, who suggested a similarity between Delvaux's's drawing style and that of post-Impressionist classicist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
In 1922, Delvuax began executing his first paintings of railway scenes, an interest of his since childhood. In 1924, he set up his studio in his parent's home, and had his first exhibition by 1925. Early paintings included "The Couple" (1929) and "Young Woman Dreaming" (1930), both nude studies. In 1932, he saw the Musee Spitzner at the Brussels Fair, a travelling show that included wax models of women, skeletons and deformities that would have a lasting impression on his art.
In 1934, Delvaux saw an exhibition of the works of Giorgio De Chirico organized by the surrealist review "Minotaure," and he found them a revelation. Soon after, Delvaux began to place all his elements - the nudes, the railway stations, the classical palaces, the skeletons - together in a dreamlike landscape of perspective that recalled de Chirico as well as fellow Belgian and surrealist Rene Magritte.
Go To Page: 1 2
