PAUL DELVAUX

PAUL DELVAUX

The Girl at the Train Station: The Paintings of Paul Delvaux The Belgian’s paintings profoundly reflect his own psyche and emotions many are familiar with, from being trapped in a loveless marriage, to feelings of impermanence and inherent anxiety. Benjamin Blake Evemy / MutualArt Dec 17, 2021 Delvaux was born in the Belgian province of Liège in September 1897, the son of a wealthy barrister father and musician mother. The latter was extremely controlling and domineering and would go on to become a repressive force on Delvaux’s childhood and adolescent desires. He showed an interest in art at a young age, yearning to become a painter. Instead, he began to study architecture in 1916 at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but due to a weakness in mathematics was soon disqualified, and subsequently dropped out in only his first year. The first watershed moment of his artistic career came when he was on holiday with his family in 1919 and he met the Belgian painter Franz Courtens. The young artist showed Courtens some of his watercolors, causing him to remark to Delvaux’s parents that their son had talent and a great future ahead of him. His parents begrudgingly let him return to the Académie to study painting. He set up his first studio proper in his parents’ house in 1924, and by the following year saw his first solo exhibition come to fruition. He began to paint nudes in the late ‘20s, but few survived, as the artist destroyed fifty or so of his canvases in order to re-use the frames. 1929 marked another event of great significance for Delvaux, not in his artistic life directly, but in his personal one. That year was the first time he met Anne-Marie de Maertelaere, whom he fondly nicknamed “Tam.” The pair fell deeply in love, but Delvaux’s domineering mother intervened on the burgeoning romance, and forced him to promise to never see her again, leaving the man to wallow in the throes of lovelorn misery. This can be found reflected in Delvaux’s paintings created during this period, where the tone is one more detached, more forlorn, more isolated. recherche EXP research GESICHTSBUCH