Quick, Your Favorite Painting Is?

Paul Delvaux, artist, The Village of the Mermaids

In response to the question, quick, don't think, don't hesitate, "What's your favorite painting, Nancy?", here it is. It is in the Art Institute of Chicago, which is where I took Saturday classes in high school, wandering through the galleries of the place. For a while the painting was shelved in abeyance of the construction of the modern wing, where it now resides. I visit it every time I'm in the museum. I can't explain why it fascinates me, but it has for many, many years.

The women in long skirts are sitting mute, puissant, lonely perhaps, bathed in the light of an ocean sun, down the path is a man in formal attire, maybe holding a stopwatch, behind which mermaids take to the sea from a beach. Where are they, why do they seem so sad, and the man with the stopwatch is?

I've just heard from Catgirl, her favorite is Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, of which a total of three versions exist, one in the Art Institute of Chicago, one at the D'Orsay in Paris and a third in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

This video treats the Van Gogh Museum's efforts to deal with discoloration over the years.

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.