International

It was interesting to see how Delvaux's strangely frozen paintings married so well with the 18th century freso decoration of Palazzo Corsini's splendid gallery rooms. The architectural capricci on the walls echoed the moonlit classical palaces of Delvaux's painted stages. Classical statues populated both the walls of the gallery and the eerie world of Delvaux's painted dreams.

Breathing steam and mystery throughout the rooms were the black steam engines and carriages that became a lifelong obssession for this most original and prolific artist. Born in Belgium at the close of the last century, Delvaux's iconography was decided early on in his career. He was still painting the same subjects in 1969; naked women, trains and train stations, dead trees, skeletons and tombs, as he was in 1929.

I expect books and books have been written about the psychological impetus behind such thematic material, but the first time observer need not consult them to discern that Delvaux was a man haunted by a blonde woman and fascinated with death.

The exhibition allows the viewer to plot the splendid epic of this obssession from 1929's large and powerful "Nude Girl in the Countryside" through to a swift change in style circa. 1940 where his figures lose their relationship with nature and become more glacial and remote with mask-like faces.

The only visitors to the exhibition on that day were women. The viewers at Palazzo Corsini being drawn from a certain well-dressed ilk of middle-aged Tucans. There is a latent undercurrent of lesbianism running through Delvaux's work. In several paintings typically entitled "Two Friends" or "Two Girls" physical love between two women is the obvious theme. The unusual thing is that instead of the hackneyed male voyeuristic interpretation, the subject is always approached with intimacy and sensitivity as if Paul Delvaux too were a woman. Whether it was simply the artist's famous name and the prestige of a Palazzo Corsini location that drew these women to the exhibition or whether it was an attraction to these erotic women in the paintings, even a narcissistic attraction, it would be interesting to analyse.

Editor, Firenze

Village of the Mermaids

Woman with a Rose 1936

Woman in a Cave 1936

The Phases of the Moon I 1939

Entry into the City 1940

Nocturnal Garden 1942

The Sleeping Venus  1944

The Public Voice 1948

Ecce Homo 1949

Solitude1955

At the door
 

Wise Virgins 1965

The Garden 1971

The Dialogue 1974