Paul Delvaux (1897-1994) - Le sommeil

Technique: Lithography
Support: Papier Arches
Page numbering: 74/75
Signature: Handwritten signature
Sheet size: 90x62 cm
Very good condition

Authentication: Sold with gallery certificate of authenticity. Published by Ed. Le Bateau Lavoir. Jacob 45.

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Paul Delvaux (1897–1994) occupies a unique place in the history of modern painting. Not quite surrealist, nor merely symbolist, he is one of those rare 20th-century artists whose universe belongs only to him: a theater of nude or draped female figures, isolated in deserted architectural landscapes, within empty train stations, ruined Greek temples, closed rooms bathed in a moonlit light. Initially influenced by Flemish expressionists, Delvaux moved away from realism after his discovery of Giorgio de Chirico in 1934, a visual and existential shock. He retains from Chirico the empty perspective, the long shadow, architecture as a theater of waiting, but swaps the tragic for a form of dreamy, melancholic nostalgia, without harshness. From then on, his work opens to a dreamlike dimension that would unfold until his death: a world frozen in silence, where the characters seem both present and absent, as if caught in a dream from which they would never wake."

His apparent link to Surrealism, strengthened by his proximity to Magritte and by his exhibitions in André Breton’s circles, must not mislead: Delvaux does not seek subversion, nor unconscious provocation. He pursues, on the contrary, an eminently personal vision, where the repetition of motifs—the train, the skeleton, the naked woman, the ancient city, the oil lamp—forms a kind of poetic liturgy, a visual ritual without end. To the violence of the unconscious, he prefers the whisper of memory, the glimmers of childhood, the distant echoes of a vanished world. His universe is not one of scandal, but of mystery. One enters there as into a lucid dream: eyes open to the sweet strangeness of familiar things.

Today, the market does not miss it: Paul Delvaux’s large canvases regularly reach peaks in major international sales, crossing the symbolic thresholds of 3, 5, or even 8 million euros. He stands alongside the major figures of European modernism, and his results at auction attest to a stable and rising recognition, rare for an artist as singular. But beyond the auctions, it is the very coherence of his work, its ability to traverse time without ever diluting into fashion, that attracts discerning collectors. His name, at the crossroads of surrealists and metaphysicians, embodies an aesthetic in its own right, immediately identifiable, and yet inexhaustible. Acquiring a Delvaux work, even in the realm of editions, is thus to inscribe oneself in a deep history of 20th‑century painting, a history that is recognized, exhibited, priced, and always in motion.