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VENICE |
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DELVAUX Paul
Paul Delvaux was born on September 23, 1897, in Antheit, Belgium. At the
Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels he studied architecture from 1916
to 1917 and decorative painting from 1918 to 1919. During the early 1920s he
was influenced by James Ensor and Gustave De Smet. In 1936 Delvaux shared an
exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels with René Magritte, a
fellow member of the Belgian group Les Compagnons de l’Art.
Delvaux was given solo exhibitions in 1938 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts,
Brussels, and the London Gallery, the latter organized by E. L. T. Mesens
and Roland Penrose. That same year he participated in the Exposition
internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris,
organized by André Breton and Paul Eluard, and an exhibition of the same
title at the Galerie Robert in Amsterdam. The artist visited Italy in 1938
and 1939. His first retrospective was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in
Brussels in 1944–45. Delvaux executed stage designs for Jean Genet’s Adame
Miroire in 1947 and collaborated with Eluard on the book Poèmes, peintures
et dessins, published in Geneva and Paris the next year. After a brief
sojourn in France in 1949, the following year he was appointed professor at
the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et d’Architecture in Brussels, a position he
retained until 1962. From the early 1950s he executed a number of mural
commissions in Belgium. About the middle of the decade Delvaux settled in
Boitsfort, and in 1956 he traveled to Greece.
From 1965 to 1966 Delvaux served as president and director of the Académie
Royale des Beaux-Arts of Belgium, and about this time he produced his first
lithographs. Retrospectives of his work were held at the Palais des
Beaux-Arts in Lille in 1965, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in
1969, and at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1973. Also in
1973 he was awarded the Rembrandt Prize of the Johann Wolfgang Stiftung. A
Delvaux retrospective was shown at the National Museum of Modern Art in
Tokyo and the National Museum of Modern Art of Kyoto in 1975. In 1977 he
became an associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of France.
Delvaux died in Veurne, Belgium, on July 20, 1994.
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