Art: Poetic Shock

From the outside, the small whitewashed house, surrounded by tiny birch and fir trees, looks as if it might belong to a mousy little spinster who would never do anything that would cause talk among the neighbors. But the house on the outskirts of Brussels belongs to Paul Delvaux, a grey-maned, sad-faced man of 65 who, next to René Magritte, is Belgium’s top surrealist and can sometimes be seen standing in his studio wearing blue jeans and sandals, slowly filling a huge canvas with vacant-eyed female nudes. Against one wall stands a row of skulls, and near them are several sets of toy trains. This is Paul Delvaux’s world, and not even he, nervously wringing his hands and moving about his little house in agonizingly slow motion, can quite explain why it is what it is.

Until he was nearly 40, he painted heavy landscapes that rarely showed a human being. His style was a Flemish variation of the German and Scandinavian expressionism. Then in 1936 he discovered the surrealist work of Italy’s Giorgio de Chirico (“I was haunted by his poetry of silence and obsession”) and Belgium’s René Magritte. “They were the springboard that brought me into my own world,” he says. Delvaux destroyed almost every painting he had ever done and began anew.

The Unexpected Way. His goal from then on was to “produce poetic shock by putting heterogeneous but real things together in an unexpected way.” Unlike Salvador Dali, he did not want to paint objects that did not exist in nature; nor did he want to tell stories or bear messages through the use of symbols. And always he was determined to remain loyal to what he felt to be the dictates of composition. One of his pictures, for instance, started out as a painting of a chandelier. It then became a painting of a nude reclining under a chandelier surrounded by nude female attendants “because this is how I saw the composition.”

A psychoanalyst could obviously find all sorts of sexual obsessions in Delvaux’s work. In one canvas, a female nude walks through a garden past a group of fully clothed scholars, and, like the sad little figure in the ads entitled “In Philadelphia nearly everybody reads the Bulletin,” is wholly ignored. And Delvaux’s trains could be a Freudian symbol for the male sex drive or an occult reference to death. But Delvaux ignores all that sort of speculation. He paints trains, he says, probably because they remind him of happy trips he took during his childhood. As for his nudes, they are not live actors; they are “extras”—forms in a “poetic composition.”

The Ultimate Aloneness. Last week Manhattan’s Staempfli Gallery opened an exhibition of Delvaux paintings, each of which casts a spell completely independent of sexual connotation. What at first might look like salacious humor turns out to be powerfully suggestive in a wholly different way. In Nocturne (opposite), the viewer’s eye sweeps past the two somnambulant nudes, is carried across a terrace that is as desolate as the moon, ends up on a lonely mountaintop that looms against an empty sky. In Delvaux’s enigmatic world, a street can turn into a maze leading to no one knows where; the manholes that often appear suggest a secret world beneath; a mirror on a sidewalk reflects a world that cannot be seen. Even Delvaux’s people seem locked in other worlds and held there in solitary confinement—the ultimate in aloneness. As purely “poetic compositions,” Delvaux’s paintings can delight; but they are all so full of chilling secrets that they rarely fail to haunt.