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.