17

PAUL DELVAUX (1897-1994) La Vénus endormie signed and dated “P. DELVAUX 10-43” (lower right) oil...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,500,000.00 - 2,000,000.00 USD
PAUL DELVAUX (1897-1994) La Vénus endormie signed and dated “P. DELVAUX 10-43” (lower right) oil...

PAUL DELVAUX

(1897-1994)

La Vénus endormie

signed and dated “P. DELVAUX 10-43” (lower right)

oil on canvas

74 x 158 cm (29 1⁄8 x 62 1⁄8 in.)

painted in 1943

Estimate: £1,000,000–1,400,000

$1,500,000–2,000,000





Provenance

Robert Giron, Brussels

Roger Vanthournout, Belgium (by 1973)

Acquired from the above by the present owner




Exhibited

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Delvaux Rétrospective, December 16, 1944-January 14, 1945, no. 36

Charleroi, Salle de la Bourse, XXXIe Salon du Cercle royal Artistique et Littéraire de Charleroi: Rétrospective Paul Delvaux, March 23-April 11, 1957, no. 47
Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Exposition rétrospective des oeuvres de Paul Delvaux, November 9-December 31, 1966, no. 18 (illustrated; dated 1944)

Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Paul Delvaux, April 13-June 17, 1973, pp. 16-17, no. 29 (illustrated, pp. 67 and 131)

Knokke-Heist, Casino, Retrospective Paul Delvaux, June 23-September 2, 1973, pp. 21 and 125, no. 23 (illustrated)

Ostend, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, From Ensor to Delvaux, May 10, 1996-February 2, 1997, p. 66 (illustrated in colour, p. 352)

Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, March 21-July 27, 1997, p. 25, no. 52 (illustrated in colour, p. 109)

Himeji, Himeji City Museum of Art; Sakura, Sakura City Museum of Art; Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art; Osaka, Daimaru Museum, and Okazaki, Okazaki City Museum, From Ensor to Delvaux, October 7, 2000-April 22, 2001, pp. 156-157, no. 69 (illustrated)





Literature

Armand Eggermont, “Les Arts Plastiques,” Le Thyrse, Brussels, February 15, 1945, p. 53

René Gaffé, Paul Delvaux ou les rêves éveillés, Brussels, 1945, p. 34 (illustrated, pl. 18)

Claude L. Spaak, Paul Delvaux, Monographies de l’art belge, Antwerp, 1948, pp. 5 and 10 (illustrated, pl. 11)

XXXVe Salon du Cercle royal Artistique et Littéraire de Charleroi, exh. cat., Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, 1961 (illustrated)

Rétrospective Paul Delvaux, exh. cat., Galerie Krugier, Geneva, September-October 1966 (illustrated)

Paul-Aloïse De Bock, Paul Delvaux. L’Homme.

Le Peintre. Psychologie d’un Art,Brussels, 1967, p. 292, no. 58 (illustrated, p. 120)

José Vovelle, Le Surréalisme en Belgique, Brussels, 1972, p. 188

Peter Sager, “Paul Delvaux,” Das Kunstwerk, Stuttgart, May 1973, vol. XXVI, p. 41

“Ausstellungen: Paul Delvaux tentoonstelling 14 april-17 juni,” Bulletin Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1973, p. 26

Michel Butor, Jean Clair, and Suzanne Houbart-Wilkin, Delvaux, Catalogue de l’oeuvre peint, Brussels, 1975, pp. 201-202, no. 131 (illustrated, p. 202)

Barbara Emerson, Delvaux, Paris, 1985, p. 119 (illustrated in colour, p. 118)

Marc Rombaut, Paul Delvaux, New York, 1990, p. 126, no. 46 (illustrated in colour)

Jacques Sojcher, Paul Delvaux ou la passion puérile, Paris, 1991 p. 46 (illustrated)
<p>Distinguished by the serene sensuality of its subject and classicizing forms and motifs, La Vénus endormie conveys a tangible dream world that is characteristic of Delvaux’s most sophisticated paintings. The goddess of the present work lies passively suspended before the viewer beneath a canopy of cabled columns on a luxuriously carved antique bed. The frozen gestures and lifeless stares of her three attendants in Grecian attire echo the marble statuary in the distant courtyard and contrast with the luminous eroticism of the nude asleep in her private boudoir. Behind her smoothly modeled form, a vanishing perspective leads to an ancient urban landscape, revealing spatial and temporal incongruities that disrupt the plausibility of the scene. The viewer/spectator registers only the pictorial effects of stillness, expectation, and a circulating desire.
In the Spring of 1943, amidst the turmoil of Nazi-occupied Belgium, Delvaux retreated to his studio and produced three versions of La Vénus endormie that count among the most successful paintings of his career (see fig. 1 and La Vénus endormie, 1944, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam). Having absorbed the academic and surrealist influences of the previous decade, the artist synthesized his love of pictorial illusionism and the plastic beauty of forms with mysterious and disquieting effects, heralding an artistic maturity masterfully conveyed in the present work.
The most influential event in the formation of Delvaux's surrealist sensibilities was his 1930 discovery of the Spitzner Museum of Anatomy and Hygiene at the Brussels World Fair. Among the museum's holdings were human skeletons and anatomical models that chronicled the horrors of disease and deformity, while the wax model of a reclining Venus equipped with a mechanical respirator gave the appearance of life. Delvaux confided in his later years of the lasting impression of this encounter: “…The discovery of the Spitzner Museum completely changed my conception of painting. I found then that there was a drama that could be expressed by painting, even if it remained plastic. Above all there was the contrast between the drama, the pseudo-science of the Spitzner Museum, the sleazy strange uneasy side too and the things that surrounded it on that fairground with its stalls, its merry-go-rounds and music which created a false gaiety…” (Delvaux quoted in From Ensor to Delvaux, op. cit., pp. 17-18).
The intermingling of beauty, death, and the spectacle of the fair provided direct inspiration for the present picture. The artist explains: “All of the pictures of Sleeping Venus that I have done come from there, even the one in London at the Tate Gallery. It is an exact copy of the Sleeping Venus in the Spitzner Museum, but with Greek temples and dummies, whatever you want. It is different but as for deep sentiment, the understanding is the same” (Delvaux ibid., p. 65). Delvaux painted several versions of La Vénus endormie in 1932, but was unable to capture this “contradictory feeling” he had experienced beyond documentary form and destroyed much of his work a few years later (see fig. 2).
It was Delvaux’s exposure to the work of the Surrealists in the landmark Minotaure exhibition of 1934 that proved especially liberating. De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, in particular, “suggested that poem of silence and absence” so in tune with Delvaux’s own pictorial aims to “combine the poetic, plastic or dramatic contents which inhabit a painting and permeate life” (Delvaux quoted in ibid., p. 19; see fig. 3). Filling the empty squares, cast shadows, and classical architecture with his own ‘theatre of figures’, Delvaux created displacements and juxtapositions that evoked for the artist, “ …the unusual in the interior of things” (ibid, p. 67). Central to his staging was a procession of women, clothed and unclothed, who functioned “purely as presences, without any particular role. They form part of the pictorial structure…. active only in the lyrical sense: they have no mission in the picture beyond that of the poetic” (quoted in David Scott, Paul Delvaux: Surrealizing the Nude, London, 1992, pp. 75-76).
Despite his affinities with the Surrealists, Delvaux denied any formal connection with the movement. He chose to define himself as a “naturalist…attempting to approach Nature without any naturalistic representation” (Delvaux quoted in Marc Rombaut, op cit., p. 11). Indeed, the hallucinatory quality of his surrealist vision relied upon the illusion of verisimilitude, precise draughtsmanship and a strict adherence to local colour. The perspectival views of the urban landscape in the present work recall Perugino and Raphael, artists Delvaux had seen and admired during his trips to Italy in 1938 and 1939. Equally, the smooth modeling, meticulous detail and expressive play of light recall the French classicism of Ingres, whose “dangerous side… extraordinary freshness and serenity” profoundly influenced the artist throughout his maturity (quoted in David Scott, op cit., p. 70). La Vénus endormie clearly relates to Ingres’s Odalisque à l’esclave, both in her erotic pose and in the “mystery” she evokes as an object of desire which, as David Scott observes, is here transposed from Orientalist fantasy to Surrealist frisson (ibid., p. 68; fig. 4).
In spite of Delvaux's essentially conservative pictorial language, his originality as an artist lay paradoxically in this ability to distract attention from his painting procedures by submerging the viewer in his disquieting vision. As Marc Rombaut offers: “…Silence, absence, emptiness: these key words are crucial… they form a meaningful group of values when we examine the artist’s portrayal of women. Because its meaning lies beyond appearances: the work incites the desire of the spectator, the critic, and the writer, to participate in the spectacle that it offers… the day appears as a dream and silence announces the absence of characters in a real world installed on the threshold of the unreal… Delvaux’s work embraces mythology, the mystery of things and the world, the silence of beings, strange encounters and the truth of dreams which erupt on our visual landscape, passing out of the real and creating another time, outside of the time of the world, in Time” (Marc Rombaut op cit., p. 12).