Art: Nudes Out of Place

Of all the things to paint, Belgian Paul Delvaux liked nothing better than painting naked, big-breasted women on windy beaches, crowded streets and moonlit terraces, among Greek ruins and in Empire ballrooms. Sometimes he showed them stooping to pluck a rose from the floor or from under a passing trolley.

Delvaux's mysteriously out-of-place nudes earned him a growing reputation as one of Europe's finest fantasists, sold almost as fast as he could paint them. Last week the first full-dress U.S. exhibition of his buff-bare ladies was on display at a Manhattan gallery, sponsored by well-clothed U.N. General Assembly President (and Belgian Foreign Minister) Paul-Henri Spaak. By careful culling, the show bared no pubic hairs, was guaranteed not to rouse the same censorship problems that harried Delvaux's recently imported painting, Temptation of St. Anthony (TIME, Sept. 30).

The self-portraits which now & then appeared in Delvaux's canvases looked even more out of place than the nudes; they exhibited the frozen face and faintly old-fashioned garb of a latter-day Buster Keaton, stalking gloomily amidst his dream harem or lifting his hat to a bare-backed girl friend, as in The Meeting (see cut).

Delvaux, 49, who really does look like Keaton (and poses before a mirror as his own model), lives and works in solid comfort on Brussels' conservative Rue d'Ecosse. He is a dreamer who reads little, belongs to no church, no political party. The tables and cupboards in his studio are cluttered with seven human skulls, and the walls are banked with huge, infinitely complicated paintings. (A recent one, called Unrest in the City, includes some 1,200 figures.) Says he: "I work patiently and minutely like the Flemish primitives, Van Eyck and Memling." He paints on plywood made especially for him by a Belgian manufacturer of matchboxes.

Frequently classified as a Surrealist, Delvaux says he is not, but he admits that "dreams play a great part in my inspiration—not necessarily my own dreams, though. For instance, my Village of Mermaids, on exhibition in New York, is the result of a dream my wife had. She dreamed she saw women sitting in gilded chairs in the village street and diving like mermaids into the sea." Delvaux sometimes paints his wife's wide-eyed, classic face but nothing more; his nudes are painted from two professional models: a Swede and a Russian.