Paul Delvaux and the Ancient World

Paul Delvaux was one of the Belgian surrealists best known for his Sleeping Venus pictures and his railway stations. He was for a long time resident in our part of Brussels (Watermael-Boitsfort) and you can sometimes see a background to his paintings as you go around the commune. He was particularly fond of Watermael station which turns up in several works. A small exhibition at the Musee Royale in Brussels is devoted to the influence on him from antiquity. He studied (as many young Belgians still do) Latin and Greek at school and he testifies to the impact the Iliad and the Odyssey made on him. He visited Italy and Greece in the late thirties and then in the fifties when travel to such exotic places was not easy. The open spaces of Pompeii and Herculaneum appear often as backgrounds to the moonlit settings of his female nudes, giving them dream-like quality. His female figures (often recalling the waxwork Sleeping Venus he saw exhibited in Brussels) are inspired by classical sculpture in their simple elegance but are unnervingly modern in their just not quite realistic depiction. Placing a porcelain-skinned female nude before a deserted Greek temple at night he achieves a disturbing nightmarish quality. He makes use of the figure of Venus as a signature to many paintings, but he also uses mythology in, for example, his Pygmalion which reverses the usual story. This use of the ancient world for visual inspiration from the material remains seems to anticipate one of our modern approaches to Classics: Delvaux discovered the power of the stories in school, and then he then went on trips to most rewarding sites to see for himself. In the exhibition there are sketches he did on site from Paestum, Pompeii and Herculaneum, and also from Olympia and Athens. He made sketches of the sculptures from the temple of Zeus at Olympia when they were scarcely known to a wider public. All these influences consequently find their way into his surrealist images transformed by his imagination into an entirely new vision of what are now familiar images. His view of the classical world is not the philological, text-based image often portrayed in critical comment by administrators wishing to show off their modernity by dismissing Classics: this is how the early introduction to the ancient world can work on the imagination of a creative artist who can absorb these ideas and aspects to change the way we look at ourselves.