DELVAUX, PAUL

born Sept. 23, 1897, Antheit, Lige, Belg. died July 20, 1994, Veurne Belgian Surrealist painter, whose canvases portray transfixed humans in a mysterious time and place. Delvaux studied first architecture, then painting at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. His early work, in the 1920s, was influenced by Postimpressionism and Expressionism. Impressed by the Spaniard Salvador Dal, the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, and later his fellow Belgian Ren Magritte, he joined their Surrealist ranks in the mid-1930s. When touring Italy before World War II, he was influenced by its classic architecture (as de Chirico had been) and by the early-16th-century Mannerist paintings, which took liberties with form and space. A representative Delvaux painting is The Echo (1943), in which three somnambulistic nudes walk in tandem past dead temples, as if walking through time. In Entombment (1951), skeletons bury fellow skeletons. Major exhibitions of his work have been held in North and South America and Africa as well as at many places in Europe; important awards have come to him from Italy and Belgium. From 1950 to 1962 he was a professor of painting in Brussels.