Paul Delvaux

Suzanne Bertouille, Brussels (acquired by descent from the artist)

Bernard Giron, Brussels 

Acquired from the above by 1975 by the present owner

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 65, p. 122, illustrated in color

Sarane Alexandrian, Dictionnaire de la peinture surréaliste, Paris, 1973, pp. 18-19, illustrated in color

Michael Butor, Jean Clair and Suzanne Houbart-Wilkin, Delvaux, Lausanne and Paris, 1975, no. 165, p. 215, illustrated (with incorrect dimensions)

Jacques Baron, Anthologie plastique du surréalisme, Paris, 1980, p. 89, illustrated in color

Painted on an epic scale, Composition is an erotic, hallucinatory vision, dating from the height of the artist's career in 1945, the year of his first solo exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. This haunting nocturnal scene depicts a group of statuesque nudes in a Greco-Roman dreamscape—a theme that preoccupied Delvaux throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The mysterious figures in Composition do not engage with one another, but rather move through space in isolation, as if sleepwalking. Measuring nearly seven by eight feet, this monumental canvas is the largest painting by the artist to appear at auction for over 25 years.

Delvaux's youthful obsession with Greece and Rome was reaffirmed when he visited the ruins of the Acropolis, Olympia and Pompeii in the late 1930s later declaring: "Antiquity is present and is still alive: you can see it and feel it" (quoted in Barbara Emerson, Delvaux, Antwerp, 1985, p. 93). Delvaux was well-suited to reimagine an ancient city, having initially studied architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He retained a meticulous sense of draftsmanship, perspective and structure, as well as an eye for detail. The present cityscape features triumphal arches, Ionic column capitals, and a polychrome Doric temple. Aware of the unsettling power of juxtaposition, the interior incorporates elements from a variety of periods—imperial purple walls, wood panelling, and stucco dentil cornicing, while the thick emerald green curtain and absence of ceiling lend a theatrical framing to the composition. The three voluptuous female figures foreground the scene with a grace that similarly evokes a Classical era and the serenity of Botticelli’s passive muses. Each woman wears thick black fabric draped over her arms and legs, leaving her breasts and torso exposed, a sartorial device Delvaux used to mimic limbless Greco-Roman sculptures.

Delvaux delighted in ambiguities, playing with the viewer’s perceptions, shifting between imaginary worlds. Alongside his challenges to the laws of optics, physics and perspective— evident here in the impossible light sources and multiple vanishing points—another favorite trope of his was duplicates and mirror images, reflections that disturbingly diverge from reality. In the background of Composition, he reiterates the image of a reclining nude in marble and flesh,one reclining on a black-and-gold kline couch directly beneath her inanimate counterpart in stone in the cityscape beyond. The pairing invokes the myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who became so enamored of his own idealized statue that Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, brought her to life.

Another characteristic visual puzzle is presented by the nude on the right-hand side of the composition, separated from the others by a framed portal, perhaps a doorway, window, mirror, or the glazed surface of a painting. Is she part of Delvaux's dreamscape, a painted image within an image, or a disembodied reflection? As Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque wrote on mirrors in Delvaux’s work, the device becomes a form of hidden, unspoken second sight: “At times one doubts whether it is a mirror at all and not, rather, an opening, a doorway to the world of the unseen? The person who is mirrored sees himself differently and that uncertain view adds to his expressive force since if the phenomenon were logical the “sense of its mystery would be destroyed” (Exh. Cat., Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 1997, p. 25).

Delvaux has often been associated with the Surrealists, who viewed visual art as a tool to explore the hidden depths of the subconscious. Delvaux saw himself as independent from this movement, but he certainly drew inspiration from the work of other modern European artists, including his Belgian contemporary, René Magritte, and Giorgio de Chirico, whose visions of depopulated classicized spaces and ancient sculpture were an important source for Composition. In the words of art critic Ronny Cohen, "De Chirico and Surrealism helped Delvaux to liberate his own imagination, to pursue his fascination for classicism, to free the modern metaphors deep within himself and let them soar...His distinctively dramatic approach won him the admiration of André Breton and Paul Éluard, and a place in the Surrealist pantheon" ("Paul Delvaux's Imagination," Artforum, February 1985, p. 56).

Composition was executed in the wake of Delvaux's stimulating encounters with Metaphysical and Surrealist art, but also in the traumatic aftermath of World War II. Delvaux remained in Belgium throughout the war, despite the Nazi occupation and the mass exodus of many of his contemporaries to the United States. For Delvaux, the anxiety generated by this geopolitical turmoil found artistic expression in complex, irrational allegories like Composition, which represents a rejection of the material conditions of modern life. Ironically, the 1940s were also a surprising period of creative energy and professional success for Delvaux. In 1945, for example, the same year that Composition was painted, Delvaux's first retrospective exhibition was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

The multi-figural scene on the reverse of the present canvas is stylistically comparable to others produced in the early 1930s, such as L'Homme orchestre (1932) and La Kermesse (1933), both of which are recorded as destroyed in the artist's catalogue raisonné.  At some point, Delvaux must have abandoned the composition, covered it with a thin layer of white paint and later repurposed the other side for Composition—much as he had done in 1941, when he painted Le Congrès (Belfius Bank, Brussels) on the verso of a neglected composition from the 1930s.

The first owner of this painting was Delvaux's first wife, Suzanne Bertouille (née Purnal), whom the artist married in 1937 and divorced in 1948. Several critics have argued that the physical and psychological isolation within Delvaux's paintings of this period mirrored the emotional estrangement between the artist and his wife in the final years of their marriage. In 1975, Composition was acquired from Bernard Giron, the son of the Robert Giron (for whom Bertouille worked at the Palais des Beaux-Art in Brussels), and later featured in the 1999 exhibition, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.