To gain a deeper understanding of the Belgian surrealist artist (he denied belonging to this movement) Paul Delvaux, one must take in the air and atmosphere of the North Sea town of St. Idesbald by visiting the Foundation Paul Delvaux. What we did, led by art historian and guide Tatiana Avtsina, who explored the life of one of her favorite artists from the A to Z. She quoted Delvaux’s letters to his wife and friends, refuted clichés and told stories from his life found in research over the years.
In St. Idesbald pol Delvaux spent the best years of his life. He met the love of his life Tam in a newspaper stall (his mother had prevented him from marrying her 17 years before this chance meeting), not to be separated until her death. We saw dozens of portraits of the woman so fiercely loved by the artist. The bed of the terminally ill there he carried to his studio to write paintings in her presence.
On the advice of his favorite nephew Charles Van Deun, Paul Delvaux bought this hotel in St. Idesbald and was the first guide of his own Fondation-Museum, opened in 1982. You enter the elegant yet democratic atmosphere of an town on the Belgian coast near the French border. Here, even today, the French language can still be heard more often on the streets between luxurious villas. One of the House’s first roles was as an art residence for artists, a place that has been mothballed. Today, in a thousand square meters (the hotel was completed at the expense of underground halls) stored the largest collection of sketches and paintings by Paul Delvaux.
In any museum or gallery in the world, we immediately recognize the works of “the artist who loved trains”. But at the Foundation Paul Delvaux we saw his striking impressionist landscapes, his Belgian Expressionist portraits of women, and his light urban sketches in the style of the Montmartre painters – a rich palette of the artist’s work. Paintings that we would never attribute to “the brush of Paul Delvaux”. That ones we liked mostly as a discovery of the new in his legacy. We made a privileged trip to a prestigious North Sea seaside resort with exclusive guide Tatiana Avtsina!
