Two Women

Drawing on the formative experiences of his youth, Paul Delvaux’s shadowy, dream-like paintings convey a profound sense of curiosity and unease. In the Surrealist tradition of “poetic shock,” Delvaux’s art combines a bizarre set of recurring visual motifs to create eerie, disquieting scenes: nude women wander transfixed through darkened railway stations, grimacing skeletons peer from the shadows and puzzled scientists confer in long corridors. While he did not formally align himself with the Surrealists, Delvaux was distinctly indebted to artists like Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, and the hallucinatory quality of his paintings was admired by the movement’s founder, André Breton.

Veurne, Belgium