Private Collection, Los Angeles
Sale: Butterfield and Butterfield, Los Angeles, April 22, 1998, lot 6111
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Michel Butor, Jean Clair & Suzanne Houbart-Wilkin,Delvaux, Catalogue de l'oeuvre peint, Brussels, 1975, no. 327, illustrated p. 275 and illuཧstrated in 🌠color p. 303

The mysterious oil paintings of Paul Delvaux are regarded as some of the most alluring examples of late Surrealist Art.  Although his paintings are renowned for their hallucinatory scenarios and dream-like imagery, the artist claimed not to be a proponent of the writings of Sigmund Freud and did not invest his compositions with the blatantly psychoanalytic references that were favored by Dalí, Miró and his fellow Belgian Magritte.  Delvaux’s approach to painting was more subtle in its representation of the uncanny without being overtly grotesque or offensive with his imagery. Many of these pictures present a conventional architectural setting, of a modern or ancient town, that is populated by expressionless and oddly lifeless women, usually depicted in the nude. 

 

With regard to the feminine presence in Delvaux’s work, Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque wrote: “the real essence of Delvaux’s work is expressed in the feminine presence; it is there that the most violent part of the mystery resides.  Breton immediately realized this.  The Delvaux woman is not just any woman; she is sphinx like, having no past and no future.  She is fixed in her immobility, indifferent to the people around her, she waits for something that does not and will never happen.  She is self absorbed, fated to a life of wondering and solitude, to an eternal but unwanted virginity.  Desirable and desired she remains out of reach.  She is allowed no movement and if she tries to move her action is arrested, useless, pointless.  Her caresses are trapped in a void.  The woman preens herself, arrayed in her nakedness, in her sculptural beauty or her embroidery and feather, but this is only for a show, for nothing comes from the implied promises… the eroticism that arises form Delvaux’s work is unstated and frozen, obvious yet mysterious.  ‘Naturally there is eroticism.  Without eroticism I would find painting impossible.  That painting of the nude in particular.  A nude is erotic – even when indifferent, when glacial.  What else would it be ?  The eroticism of my work resides in its evocation of youth and desire”  (G. Ollinger-Zinque, Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, exhibition catalogue, Musées Royaux des Beaux-๊Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 1997, pp. 22-23).

Fig. 1 Paul Delvaux in his studio, 1963