Thursday, August 2, 2012

Artist of the Day: Paul Delvaux

I grew up in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum. I'll write about my Field Museum experience in another post. The Belgian artist Paul Delvaux is one of my favorites, which is strange to me because in general the Surrealists mostly leave me cold but there is a haunting, ambiguous eroticism in Delvaux's work that has always mystified and enchanted me.
Paul Delvaux, artist
Paul Delvaux, artist
Paul Delvaux, artist, The Village of the Mermaids


Here's a reference to Delvaux's The Village of the Mermaids, which I used to stare at, seemingly for hours, a poem by Lisel Mueller.

I still don't know what to make of those strange doe eyed mostly naked women wandering ethereally, that's a word isn't it, ethereally, in sylvan glades, ruins, near oceans. with strange clothed men looking on and walking away. I should add that the Mermaids painting disappeared from view for a number of years while the Modern Wing of the Art Institute was being built. When I saw the painting again after some number of years, it was like seeing an old friend.




Paul Delvaux: The Village of the Mermaids
Oil on canvas, 1942
Lisel Mueller

Who is that man in black, walking
away from us into the distance?
The painter, they say, took a long time
finding his vision of the world.
The mermaids, if that is what they are
under their full-length skirts,
sit facing each other
all down the street, more of an alley,
in front of their gray row houses.
They all look the same, like a fair-haired
order of nuns, or like prostitutes
with chaste, identical faces.
How calm they are, with their vacant eyes,
their hands in laps that betray nothing.
Only one has scales on her dusky dress.
It is 1942; it is Europe,
and nothing fits. The one familiar figure
is the man in black approaching the sea,
and he is small and walking away from us.

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