PAUL DELVAUX (1897-1994) D'après nature au musée... Lot 118

PAUL DELVAUX (1897-1994) D'après nature au musée d'Histoire naturelle PAUL DELVAUX (1897-1994) From nature at the Museum of Natural History signed, inscribed and dated 'P. Delvaux, D'après nature au Musée d'histoire naturelle Juillet - Août 1942' (lower right) gouache, watercolor, ink and wash on paper Executed between July and August 1942 signed, inscribed and dated 'P. Delvaux, D'après nature au Musée d'histoire naturelle Juillet - Août 1942' (lower right) gouache, watercolour, ink and wash on paper Executed between July and August 1942 98 x 68cm (38 9/16 x 26 3/4in). Footnotes: The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Paul Delvaux Foundation. Provenance Private collection, Belgium (acquired in the 1980s). Private collection, Belgium (by descent). Exhibition Ferrara, Gallerie Civiche d'Arte Moderna, Paul Delvaux, 20 April - 22 June 1986, no. 57 (titled and dated La Conversation 1942). In 1952, the future Pope John XXIII was so outraged by Paul Delvaux's skeletons during his visit to the 26th Venice Biennale that he immediately forbade the entire clergy to attend. The theme of the Biennale was 'The Fantastic in Art' and Delvaux exhibited a series of paintings depicting the Passion of Christ. However, the protagonists of Delvaux's works had become skeletons, which had offended the sensibilities of the future Pope, who saw it as a macabre and morbid representation. However, for the artist, this iconographic motif, which had become emblematic in his work, was the very embodiment of human life and vitality. Thus, after having been frightened by skeletons since childhood, Paul Delvaux reappropriated this motif and reversed the fear and morbid evocation attached to it, because he "always thought of it as something expressive, alive, intense" (Paul Delvaux, in Paul Delvaux, the Sleepwalker of Saint Idesbald, a film by Adrian Maben, 1987). Paul Delvaux was born in 1897 in Belgium into a bourgeois family. While his parents hoped that he would follow a legal career, like his father, Delvaux was more interested in literature and music. He eventually began studying architecture, which allowed him to learn drawing, before continuing on to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. It was after an exhibition of Giorgio de Chirico that had fascinated him in 1926 that Delvaux became interested in some of the artists of the Surrealist group, founded by André Breton in 1924. Among them, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst proved to be major influences on Paul Delvaux, and allowed him to break out of the expressionist style he had adopted. Delvaux exhibited alongside them at the Minotaur exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1934 and at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris in 1938. Despite this, he never joined the group and although he always readily admitted the source of his influences, repeating that 'de Chirico and Magritte were a revelation for [him]' (Marc Rombaut, Paul Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, p. 14), he refused to be affiliated with any artistic group. Delvaux always recalled that it was his childhood that remained the primary source of his inspiration and that gave rhythm and guidance to his artistic work (Marc Rombaut, Paul Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, p. 14). Between 1933 and 1936 this surrealist awakening of Paul Delvaux was also accompanied by the decisive discovery of the Spitzner Museum, an anatomical museum opened to visitors during the Brussels Fair, which marked and shocked by its morbid and monstrous character. This cabinet of medical curiosities preserved human skeletons, flayed bodies, human wax models, and other examples of human deformities and deformities. It had such an impact on Paul Delvaux that it inspired his eponymous work: The Spitzner Museum (1943). During the Second World War, in the years 1940-1944, the skeleton became a recurring theme in Paul Delvaux's work: after regularly visiting the Spitzner Museum, Paul Delvaux observed and studied skeletons at the Brussels Museum of Natural History. The present work, entitled D'après nature au Musée d'Histoire naturelle and dated July-August 1942, is part of this group of studies. In it, Delvaux depicts three adult-sized human skeletons in a bare interior. On the floor, the lines of the parquet floor accentuate the perspective of the room, whose back wall can be seen through the woodwork. The skeletons are aligned and depicted with scientific accuracy: from a distance, this study could have appeared to be a photograph. It could be the same static skeleton, but Delvaux seems to be slipping in clues that confirm his perception of the skeleton as a living, individualized element. In fact, despite their apparent similarity, these skeletons are distinct: in their position, the orientation of the hands, the shape of the