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拍品专文
Bathed in pearlescent moonlight, Paul Delvaux’s La ville endormie is a dreamy conjuring of nude and semi-clothed figures amid the ruins of a city, where the artist’s likeness lingers in a shadowy doorway. Painted in May 1938, the large-scale composition was created at a time when Delvaux was perfecting his mature style. A sense of mystery and theatricality abounds in this canvas, as phantasmagorical figures interact in a multitude of highly detailed vignettes, and the dramatic essence of the cityscape is enhanced by the artist’s masterful manipulation of perspective. The crumbling buildings of the city, along with the colossal mountains that tower above them, appear like a stage set. Grassy and arid cliffs plummet behind edifices, porticoes and arches pile on top of each other, while beckoning passageways disappear into darkness, their destinations unknown. The architectural precision of the buildings, which stand in various states of ruin, contrasts with the anachronistic layering of the monuments and structures. The present work is a vision of a city as defined by its landmarks, and the practicalities of navigating it are hidden from the viewer, who, like Delvaux’s own figure in the left doorway, can gaze into this beguiling world, but remains on the threshold of it.
Delvaux’s dreamlike approach to perspective is derived from the città ideale paintings of the Italian Renaissance, where physical reality is suspended and idealised beauty and order reign supreme. Yet Delvaux also took inspiration from more contemporary sources, such as the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, as well as his fellow countryman, René Magritte, whose works he had seen in the 1934 Surrealist exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, which favoured Neoclassical architecture, made a lasting impression on the artist’s imagination and over the ensuing years, Delvaux honed and developed his own characteristic style. Although Delvaux felt aligned with the aesthetic tenets of the Surrealist movement, he never became an official member, preferring to pursue independently his sense of the unreal and the enigmatic.
As a schoolboy, Delvaux had been especially passionate in his studies of the Classical subjects, and the artist was greatly influenced by history and literature throughout his career. Aged twenty, he continued his education at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, as an architecture student. Although he never completed his training, the teaching he received was formative for his style, and Delvaux’s oeuvre is permeated with precise architectural structures and skilled draughtsmanship. In this period of his career, it was Classical and Neoclassical architecture that particularly fascinated Delvaux, capturing his imagination and dominating the backdrops of his paintings. For the artist, who had long admired Greco-Roman antiquity, the presence of these architectural forms in his works revealed the convergence of his schooling with his enthusiasm about the ancient world.
While travelling in Italy at the end of the 1930s, Delvaux visited Pompeii and Herculaneum and was awed by the archaeological sites, reflecting that there ‘antiquity is present and is still alive: you can see it and feel it’ (quoted in B. Emerson, Delvaux, Antwerp, 1985, p. 93). Ruined civilisations were a favoured feature in his compositions, and, among the buildings of La ville endormie the legacies of myriad cultures and epochs are woven together. There are porticoes of Classical Greek temples, some supported with columns, others with stony caryatids, while Hellenistic, Assyrian, and ancient Persian edifices emerge from among the interlaced buildings. Ancient Roman arches and colonnades are juxtaposed with later Renaissance styles at the heart of the city, and, high on the ridge of the left mountain, Neolithic monuments rise up against the dark swathes of cloudless sky. To the right of the composition, the corner of a Neoclassical style building juts out, a typical example of the eighteenth-century Brussels architecture Delvaux saw each day, while the stone doorway that the artist himself stands in appears to date from the Twentieth Century. This juxtaposition of anachronistic architecture also adds a Surrealistic element, as the background of the composition unveils an impossible reality.
In this way, Delvaux evokes a realm beyond time, where different eras co-exist harmoniously, and histories intertwine. Yet, despite this sense of timelessness which exudes from La ville endormie, the city’s deteriorating state also offers a poignant remembrance of the very idea of the past. For, to be in ruins, this city must once have stood in all its splendour, and, at the same time, its continued existence, albeit in atrophy, means it is unbound by time. It is, to use Delvaux’s own words, ‘still alive.’
Intertwined with La ville endormie’s enduring city are reminders of time’s relentless passing – the branchless trees, perhaps caught in winter, perhaps dead, and the skull, which, lying just left of the composition’s centre, rings with the echo of the memento mori paintings of the Renaissance. The question of temporality, and the tension between time and timelessness is further amplified by the contemporary dress of Delvaux’s self-portrait. His quotidian clothing offers a deliberately stark contrast to the fantastical appearances of the other figures who populate the city, who, mostly female, appear in varying states and styles of dress. Some are nude, some partially dressed in swathes of rippling fabric, while others have more historically recognisable costumes; two women sport the guise of Roman centurions, and one nude wears a lavish late eighteenth-century style headdress, topped with white doves. Among such company, a conventionally dressed gentleman from the 1930s is an unexpected alien, and Delvaux continues to accentuate the distinction between himself and these otherworldly figures through their physicality. The artist’s likeness is verisimilar and naturalistic, reflecting his individual facial features and revealing the wrinkles on his brow, and round his mouth. The occupants of the city, however, all embody an imagined physical ideal. Ageless and unblemished, they both facially and corporeally resemble one another, possessing a supernatural, mystical quality, befitting of the ethereal dreamworld they reside in.
Conscious of his ability to infuse his work with mystery and shock, the artist knew that this sense of the unexpected arose from the juxtaposition of nude and semi-clothed men and women – the coalescence of the familiar and the foreign. La ville endormie is deeply evocative, thrumming with enigmatic potential, and the composition’s mysteriousness is particularly heightened by the female figures in the foreground. One figure is cloaked in a sumptuous red fabric, her head completely veiled, while her nude body is exposed. Another is entwined in a clambering ivy that encompasses her like a dress, climbing up over her shoulder to crown her in a headdress of foliage. A third, the most prominent character in the composition, also sports a leafy coronet as she leans on a large piece of rubble, her chin resting demurely on her hand. With her hair stylishly coiffed beneath the chaplet, three-quarter profile, and in her composed stance, she emanates a glamorous, Old Hollywood elegance. It is she who stands in the line of Delvaux’s gaze, yet she is oblivious to his attention. Her enlarged eyes with their dilated pupils have a distant, trancelike quality, as if she is lost in a dream herself. Through this figure, Delvaux explores the mysterious elision of dreams and reality, hinting at her earthly physicality with the thin blue veins in her left hand, a contrast to her otherwise ethereal, idealised appearance.
Delvaux continuously sought to imbue his art with the poetic, rejecting the idea of linear narratives. The female nudes that permeated his paintings ‘participate purely as presences, without any particular role,’ he explained, ‘they have no mission in the picture beyond that of the poetic’ (quoted in J. Meuris, Sept Dialogues avec Paul Delvaux, Paris, 1971, p. 22). The spirit of poetry was what Delvaux had so admired about De Chirico, and it was the lyrical purpose of his own figures which he felt differentiated his work from conventional history painting of the preceding centuries, such as the celebrated paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jacques-Louis David. With his adoption of Neoclassical forms and figures, Delvaux was able to use an established visual vocabulary to create his enchanting dreamworld, a remarkable process of ‘surrealizing academicism’ (D. Scott, Surrealizing the Nude, London, 1992, p. 65).
As well as receiving significant scholarly attention, La ville endormie has been extensively exhibited throughout its lifetime, including in three key exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels through the late 1930s and 1940s. The composition was at one point owned by the director of exhibitions at that museum, Robert Giron. An influential figure in Belgium’s art scene, Giron had attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts alongside Delvaux and Magritte, and was an Expressionistic painter in his own right. La ville endormie also featured in the 1968 Venice Biennale, where the Belgian Pavilion offered a celebratory retrospective of Delvaux’s works.
Delvaux’s dreamlike approach to perspective is derived from the città ideale paintings of the Italian Renaissance, where physical reality is suspended and idealised beauty and order reign supreme. Yet Delvaux also took inspiration from more contemporary sources, such as the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, as well as his fellow countryman, René Magritte, whose works he had seen in the 1934 Surrealist exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, which favoured Neoclassical architecture, made a lasting impression on the artist’s imagination and over the ensuing years, Delvaux honed and developed his own characteristic style. Although Delvaux felt aligned with the aesthetic tenets of the Surrealist movement, he never became an official member, preferring to pursue independently his sense of the unreal and the enigmatic.
As a schoolboy, Delvaux had been especially passionate in his studies of the Classical subjects, and the artist was greatly influenced by history and literature throughout his career. Aged twenty, he continued his education at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, as an architecture student. Although he never completed his training, the teaching he received was formative for his style, and Delvaux’s oeuvre is permeated with precise architectural structures and skilled draughtsmanship. In this period of his career, it was Classical and Neoclassical architecture that particularly fascinated Delvaux, capturing his imagination and dominating the backdrops of his paintings. For the artist, who had long admired Greco-Roman antiquity, the presence of these architectural forms in his works revealed the convergence of his schooling with his enthusiasm about the ancient world.
While travelling in Italy at the end of the 1930s, Delvaux visited Pompeii and Herculaneum and was awed by the archaeological sites, reflecting that there ‘antiquity is present and is still alive: you can see it and feel it’ (quoted in B. Emerson, Delvaux, Antwerp, 1985, p. 93). Ruined civilisations were a favoured feature in his compositions, and, among the buildings of La ville endormie the legacies of myriad cultures and epochs are woven together. There are porticoes of Classical Greek temples, some supported with columns, others with stony caryatids, while Hellenistic, Assyrian, and ancient Persian edifices emerge from among the interlaced buildings. Ancient Roman arches and colonnades are juxtaposed with later Renaissance styles at the heart of the city, and, high on the ridge of the left mountain, Neolithic monuments rise up against the dark swathes of cloudless sky. To the right of the composition, the corner of a Neoclassical style building juts out, a typical example of the eighteenth-century Brussels architecture Delvaux saw each day, while the stone doorway that the artist himself stands in appears to date from the Twentieth Century. This juxtaposition of anachronistic architecture also adds a Surrealistic element, as the background of the composition unveils an impossible reality.
In this way, Delvaux evokes a realm beyond time, where different eras co-exist harmoniously, and histories intertwine. Yet, despite this sense of timelessness which exudes from La ville endormie, the city’s deteriorating state also offers a poignant remembrance of the very idea of the past. For, to be in ruins, this city must once have stood in all its splendour, and, at the same time, its continued existence, albeit in atrophy, means it is unbound by time. It is, to use Delvaux’s own words, ‘still alive.’
Intertwined with La ville endormie’s enduring city are reminders of time’s relentless passing – the branchless trees, perhaps caught in winter, perhaps dead, and the skull, which, lying just left of the composition’s centre, rings with the echo of the memento mori paintings of the Renaissance. The question of temporality, and the tension between time and timelessness is further amplified by the contemporary dress of Delvaux’s self-portrait. His quotidian clothing offers a deliberately stark contrast to the fantastical appearances of the other figures who populate the city, who, mostly female, appear in varying states and styles of dress. Some are nude, some partially dressed in swathes of rippling fabric, while others have more historically recognisable costumes; two women sport the guise of Roman centurions, and one nude wears a lavish late eighteenth-century style headdress, topped with white doves. Among such company, a conventionally dressed gentleman from the 1930s is an unexpected alien, and Delvaux continues to accentuate the distinction between himself and these otherworldly figures through their physicality. The artist’s likeness is verisimilar and naturalistic, reflecting his individual facial features and revealing the wrinkles on his brow, and round his mouth. The occupants of the city, however, all embody an imagined physical ideal. Ageless and unblemished, they both facially and corporeally resemble one another, possessing a supernatural, mystical quality, befitting of the ethereal dreamworld they reside in.
Conscious of his ability to infuse his work with mystery and shock, the artist knew that this sense of the unexpected arose from the juxtaposition of nude and semi-clothed men and women – the coalescence of the familiar and the foreign. La ville endormie is deeply evocative, thrumming with enigmatic potential, and the composition’s mysteriousness is particularly heightened by the female figures in the foreground. One figure is cloaked in a sumptuous red fabric, her head completely veiled, while her nude body is exposed. Another is entwined in a clambering ivy that encompasses her like a dress, climbing up over her shoulder to crown her in a headdress of foliage. A third, the most prominent character in the composition, also sports a leafy coronet as she leans on a large piece of rubble, her chin resting demurely on her hand. With her hair stylishly coiffed beneath the chaplet, three-quarter profile, and in her composed stance, she emanates a glamorous, Old Hollywood elegance. It is she who stands in the line of Delvaux’s gaze, yet she is oblivious to his attention. Her enlarged eyes with their dilated pupils have a distant, trancelike quality, as if she is lost in a dream herself. Through this figure, Delvaux explores the mysterious elision of dreams and reality, hinting at her earthly physicality with the thin blue veins in her left hand, a contrast to her otherwise ethereal, idealised appearance.
Delvaux continuously sought to imbue his art with the poetic, rejecting the idea of linear narratives. The female nudes that permeated his paintings ‘participate purely as presences, without any particular role,’ he explained, ‘they have no mission in the picture beyond that of the poetic’ (quoted in J. Meuris, Sept Dialogues avec Paul Delvaux, Paris, 1971, p. 22). The spirit of poetry was what Delvaux had so admired about De Chirico, and it was the lyrical purpose of his own figures which he felt differentiated his work from conventional history painting of the preceding centuries, such as the celebrated paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jacques-Louis David. With his adoption of Neoclassical forms and figures, Delvaux was able to use an established visual vocabulary to create his enchanting dreamworld, a remarkable process of ‘surrealizing academicism’ (D. Scott, Surrealizing the Nude, London, 1992, p. 65).
As well as receiving significant scholarly attention, La ville endormie has been extensively exhibited throughout its lifetime, including in three key exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels through the late 1930s and 1940s. The composition was at one point owned by the director of exhibitions at that museum, Robert Giron. An influential figure in Belgium’s art scene, Giron had attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts alongside Delvaux and Magritte, and was an Expressionistic painter in his own right. La ville endormie also featured in the 1968 Venice Biennale, where the Belgian Pavilion offered a celebratory retrospective of Delvaux’s works.