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Lot Essay
The semi-clothed female protagonist of Paul Delvaux’s Femme assise (La lampe) is caught in a moment of quiet thought that seems at odds with the intense drama imparted by the exaggerated perspective and bold tones of both the room and the view that stretches beyond the open door. Combining Delvaux’s love of the Italian Renaissance with his own distinctive, mystery-infused form of Surrealism, this work encompasses the defining motifs of his oeuvre.
Delvaux painted Femme assise (La lampe) in October 1945. Though in the years following the Second World War Delvaux felt suffocated by the ennui of daily life in Brussels, and isolated from the prevailing mood of liberation that pervaded many of the former Occupied countries of Europe, the works he created in this post-war period are considered amongst the finest pictorial creations of his career.
Alongside his multiple depictions of well-known religious and mythological female figures including Venus and the Virgin Mary, Delvaux’s work of the mid-1940s frequently also featured both anonymous nude and semi-nude women. Set within a domestic environment, the present work is infused with a sense of eroticism. Here, the woman sits in contemplation; her body is exposed but her thoughts remain private. She sits on the threshold, too, of interior and exterior space, a compositional device that Delvaux frequently explored at this time, revelling in the boundary between the private and public realms.
Languidly reclining amid a seemingly domestic environment and clad in black draperies, the nude figure appears as if a classical goddess. Indeed, this merging of the antique and the modern was a technique Delvaux frequently used. The furniture and accoutrements of this setting were likely inspired by fragments from the artist’s memory. ‘There are all those lamps which recall the ones that decorated the house where he was born or the house of his aunts,’ Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque has written, ‘there are the couches – again, those of his childhood but placed in strange situations’ (Paul Delvaux, 1897-1994, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 1997, p. 25).
With its union of elements from a range of sources, as well as the strange sense of stillness and silence that pervades, Femme assise (La lampe) echoes the art of Giorgio de Chirico. In 1934, Delvaux saw the artist’s work in the Minotaure exhibition, held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. This proved to be a revelatory experience that left a powerful impression on him. Alongside the works of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, among others, it was De Chirico’s use of uncanny combinations of everyday objects in the creation of surreal situations that proved a catalyst for the development of Delvaux’s painting, opening his eyes to a new means of creating art and setting him on his own distinct path of Surrealism. ‘I was influenced by all those artists I admired,’ he later said of his initial inspiration from the early Italian Renaissance, ‘but they did not satisfy me completely. I wanted to find something else, but I did not know exactly what that could be. It was then that I discovered Giorgio de Chirico, who immediately put me onto my path’ (quoted in ibid., p. 17).
Delvaux painted Femme assise (La lampe) in October 1945. Though in the years following the Second World War Delvaux felt suffocated by the ennui of daily life in Brussels, and isolated from the prevailing mood of liberation that pervaded many of the former Occupied countries of Europe, the works he created in this post-war period are considered amongst the finest pictorial creations of his career.
Alongside his multiple depictions of well-known religious and mythological female figures including Venus and the Virgin Mary, Delvaux’s work of the mid-1940s frequently also featured both anonymous nude and semi-nude women. Set within a domestic environment, the present work is infused with a sense of eroticism. Here, the woman sits in contemplation; her body is exposed but her thoughts remain private. She sits on the threshold, too, of interior and exterior space, a compositional device that Delvaux frequently explored at this time, revelling in the boundary between the private and public realms.
Languidly reclining amid a seemingly domestic environment and clad in black draperies, the nude figure appears as if a classical goddess. Indeed, this merging of the antique and the modern was a technique Delvaux frequently used. The furniture and accoutrements of this setting were likely inspired by fragments from the artist’s memory. ‘There are all those lamps which recall the ones that decorated the house where he was born or the house of his aunts,’ Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque has written, ‘there are the couches – again, those of his childhood but placed in strange situations’ (Paul Delvaux, 1897-1994, exh. cat., Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, 1997, p. 25).
With its union of elements from a range of sources, as well as the strange sense of stillness and silence that pervades, Femme assise (La lampe) echoes the art of Giorgio de Chirico. In 1934, Delvaux saw the artist’s work in the Minotaure exhibition, held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. This proved to be a revelatory experience that left a powerful impression on him. Alongside the works of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, among others, it was De Chirico’s use of uncanny combinations of everyday objects in the creation of surreal situations that proved a catalyst for the development of Delvaux’s painting, opening his eyes to a new means of creating art and setting him on his own distinct path of Surrealism. ‘I was influenced by all those artists I admired,’ he later said of his initial inspiration from the early Italian Renaissance, ‘but they did not satisfy me completely. I wanted to find something else, but I did not know exactly what that could be. It was then that I discovered Giorgio de Chirico, who immediately put me onto my path’ (quoted in ibid., p. 17).