Faubourg

Among Paul Delvaux’s earliest memories were the sounds of tramcars rolling along the streets of Brussels. ‘As a child,’ he recalled to Jacques Meuris, ‘I liked trains and this nostalgia has stayed with me... I paint the trains of my childhood, and consequently, that childhood itself’ (P. Delvaux quoted in M. Rombaut, Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, p. 22). He imagined becoming a stationmaster, and even as those dreams reoriented towards the arts, trains remained foundational: Some of his earliest pictorial subjects were the railway lines that traversed the Gare du Quartier Léopold in Brussels before the construction of a new station, today the Gare de Bruxelles-Luxembourg, altered the city’s infrastructure. ‘I remember the Station of the Léopold Quarter when I was 4-5 years old,’ Delvaux said, ‘seeing the waiting rooms of the second and third class, and through the windows I could see the old cars of the times, the old cars that were in use around 1903, the old copper cars’ (P. Delvaux quoted in Z. Barthelman & J. van Deun, Paul Delvaux: Odyssey of a Dream, Saint-Idesbal, 2007, p. 16). The faint hum of these cars heading towards the Gare du Quartier Léopold can almost be heard in the background of Faubourg, 1956.
In addition to his childhood recollections, Delvaux drew inspiration from the semi-obscured trains that run along the horizon of many of Giorgio de Chirico’s compositions, his favourite modern painter, whom he called the ‘poet of emptiness...because he suggested that poem of silence and absence’ (P. Delvaux quoted in M. Rombaut, op. cit., p. 14). The carriages Delvaux preferred to depict, as seen in de Chirico’s paintings as well as the present work, are not electric but rather those that date the turn of the century. Explaining this predilection, he said, ‘The old steam machines had something human, when they started with their power. I believe that the steam machine fits a painting much better. I believe it has a certain ‘oldness’ and this ‘oldness’ has become customary in my work’ (P. Delvaux quoted in Z. Barthelman and J. van Deun, op. cit., 2007, p. 45).
On the surface, Faubourg may seem to represent a quotidian scene – the suburban district that the title references – but the work is uncanny, infused with the an atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty. Like de Chirico, Delvaux too sought to establish a visual idiom in which crisply defined architectural environments could invoke feelings of solitude, nostalgia, or even danger. Yet the manner in which he structured his scenes looks further back in time, to the perspectival geometry of early Renaissance art, such as Giotto’s arrangements in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. Delvaux came into contact with the Quattrocento during a trip to Italy towards the end of the 1930s. The classical monuments and frescoes he encountered while travelling through Florence, Naples, and Rome presented a wellspring of inspiration for the young artist.
Indeed, set at the edges of a city, Faubourg presents an enigmatic world in which time has been halted. A sliver of moon illuminates a row of houses in front of which a train passes. In the foreground, three small trees grow incongruously within a vacant lot. Light spills out in spite of the dark. This is a world on the edge but of what has yet to be revealed. ‘I returned to the tranquil railway stations…where antique engines pull the trains of our grandparents time,’ Delvaux said of works such as Faubourg (P. Delvaux quoted in B. Emerson, Delvaux, Antwerp, 1985, p. 163). ‘The childhood impressions return’ he said of these paintings, ‘they are not unhappy ones – and they touch me deeply, bathed as they are in mystery’ (ibid.). Drawing from a precise catalogue of meticulously rendered imagery, Delvaux constructed his own inscrutable universe, offering a view onto a world that exists only within his mind.