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History of art in a personal theatre: seminal Paul Delvaux’s retrospective at the Musée D’Ixelles

 

Taking inspiration from what the introductory flyer suggests, we decided to visit the recent exhibition of Paul Delvaux at Musée D’Ixelles, Brussels, following our personal path and looking for how allusions to previous art histories are appropriated by the artist in the ninety artworks in the show, which are mostly lent by the Royal Museums of Fine Art of Belgium and two of the most important collectors of Delvaux’s oeuvre: Pierre and Nicole Ghêne.

 

Despite the fact that important moments in the artist’s biography such as his experience with the neo-impressionist circle Le Sillon, the discovery of the cabinet of curiosities in the Spitzer Museum, the meeting with James Ensor, the first view of De Chirico’s paintings, are all crucial milestones to understand the history of his styles and themes, the exhibition is set up to avoid a chronological exposition of the artworks in the space of the museum. Instead, the curators decided to group them according to six categories: femininity, mystery, dreams, escape, solitude and theatre.

 

Not surprisingly, our hunt for the artist’s utilize of previous art histories managed to take us through all these themes and drove us across the complexity of Delvaux’s work.

 

Starting from Le Rideau Rouge (1934), in which the painter seems to give life to his personal vision of  Modigliani’s Margherita (portrait made by the Italian artist in 1916) that is the iconological pensive woman whose reveries are inaccessible secrets to the artist’s brush.

 

 

Or continuing with Les Courtisans (1944) and La Terrasse (1979), we could do nothing but see these paintings as the materialization of scenes from Delvaux’s personal play of art history. In the former for example, elements of Roman architecture are spatially composed as in Piero Della Francesca’s sets and figures of women, whose appearance brings back Jan Van Eyck’s Eve in the Ghent altarpiece or a Monet’s bourgeosie adorned with late 19th century accessories move on exotic Persian rugs from rich interiors. In this picture, the painter perfectly combines a sensation of déjà-vu with the typical situation where real life experiences come back in our dreams.

 

We carried on unmasking other of the eclectic allusions Delvaux seems to expose in his paintings in a way that already reminds of the post-modern attitude of past appropriation. Though what struck us the most in the exhibition at Musee D’Ixelles is when Delvaux was able to transform these allusions into simple iconographic motif by mean of new formal languages.

 

We refer in particular to La Danse (1934), a watercolour on paper in which the reference to previous dances such as Botticelli’s Three Graces or Blake’s Oberon, Titania And Puck With Fairies disappear thanks to the roughness and undefined marks of the artist’s personal use of watercolour technique. As opposed to his indexical use of oil painting, Delvaux’s watercolours seem to be speaking about a different stage of his research, one in which dreams are interpreted and showed at the same time.

November 11, 2014