Dali House

What happens when a painting’s title forgets its place and crawls all over the canvas? Too ambitious to loiter meekly in the little sign card next to the frame, the words decide they’re just as important as the picture, and the next thing you know you have anarchy, graffiti run amok, images and text forming a labour union and subverting the millennia-old conventions governing visual representation.

A detail of Georges Braque’s “Pedestal Table” from 1913.

Pop art made words in paintings commonplace, but its grandfather, cubism, was a sucker for shards of text blowing through the scenery, and its crazy old great-uncle, surrealism, kept scrapbooks of every flitting message scrap, quite sure they would one day all make sense.

Andre Derain’s “Portrait of a Man with a Newspaper” from about 1912.

Pictures and words are natural enough collaborators, of course, both being central to the fine arts, but traditionally they never appeared onstage together. I really don’t want to dig too deeply into this, because there are websites that are quite happy to take you on very long and not particularly interesting strolls along Semiotics Street, returning by way of Semantics Boulevard. In the case of Rene Magritte the University of Washington has an especially heavy-breathing thesis online, but do watch out for words like “intersubstitutability” — you could injure yourself.

Then there’s David Scott’s 2005 essay for Image & Narrative, “the Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative” about the words found in Paul Delvaux’s art, which I found a bit more intesting since Delvaux is a bit more interesting, not least because he was forever painting naked women sleepwalking around train stations. (He also painted a fine “Leda” in 1948, a subject I’ve lately been rattling on about.)

Dali House has also joined the wool-minders pondering the meaning of “Et in Arcadia ego” in Nicolas Poussin’s “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, but that was hardly on the same level as Magritte’s patient experimenting with what exactly it is that words and pictures do, how they do it and how you can pull the rug out from under them.

“This is Not a Pipe”, from 1929, and it’s still not a pipe today. Magritte did a string of variations on this picture over the decades in a bid to expose “the Treachery of Imagery”, ultimately putting the words on a bolted-down plaque so it looked as though the affirmation could never be removed. I think of the image every time I hear David Byrne sing, “This is not my beautiful wife!”

What was Magritte on about? Michel Foucault found a litany of layered possible interpretations in a 1973 book about the pipe picture, one cancelling out another. This picture of a pipe doesn’t make the pipe a pipe, of course, but there’s much more. This painting is not a pipe? Art is not a pipe? If you focus on the words and realise this sentence is not a pipe, suddenly a picture reclaims its dominance over the written word.

Magritte and his little cubicles! Frames within frames, partitioning off components that sometimes took turns telling the story, like chapters in a book, and sometimes tossed out a riddle of comparison, as in “The Man With The Newspaper” from 1928. It’s like a page from a comic book, comics fans love to notice. He borrowed the illustration from a health manual, in fact.

There’s the man with the paper, then he’s gone, leaving us alone with his table and stools looking out the window and wondering if he’ll be back. Meanwhile we gaze at the plaque and the landscape on the wall and sniff the flowers, maybe poke at the stove. The light doesn’t change, though, so perhaps time has come to a standstill — or reversed: Maybe the man hasn’t been here yet. Maybe he was never here at all. Maybe he was here and saw something alarming in the newspaper and evacuated the city. Maybe we should too. Let’s go find something of our own to read.

Oklahoma’s Edward Ruscha loved cartoons so much as a child that he’d cut them out and paste them into his own sketchbooks. As a grown-up in 1965 he was still pretty much doing the same thing, but by then his paintings like “Annie” were bowling people over. In a pop-art seizure, he’d scalped the title of the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie” and placed it in a fresh context — on the wall of an art gallery. Your daily chuckle became formal art, virually in and of itself.

Ruscha went from there to photographing words, using gunpowder as a drawing medium, and painting with Pepto-Bismol and ketchup. In 1970 he wallpered a room with 360 sheets of chocolate paper on which visitors could write with wet fingers.

More recently still, Joseph Grigely — deaf since age 10 — has conducted “visual conversations” in his installations based on other people’s handwritten notes. For 1999’s “Fireside Talk #2″ he got family and friends to write down their thoughts as they chatted around the fireplace after dinner. His documented evidence of a real conversation speaks loudly, whether you’re hearing-impaired or not.

Let’s move on to Paul Delvaux, because you don’t want to keep an old man waiting, and he did hang around a long time — 97 years. Possibly eroticism isn’t so much an aphrodisiac as it is an embalming fluid.

Delvaux was born a lawyer’s son in 1897 in Antheit, Belgium, and actually studied music, though his lessons took place in the biology lab with human skeletons watching, so life began having a visual impact on him early on. The skeletons never left him, and nor did his love of the classics he picked up studying Greek and Latin. Hence all the bones and the balustrades in his paintings.

His other early influence was my old hero Jules Verne. “A Journey to the Centre of the Earth” and “Around the World in Eighty Days” were his favourites, and although Edouard Rion’s engravings were the key for him, the characters of Otto Lidenbrock, the geologist, and Palmyrin Rosette, the astronomer, appear frequently in his work. The latter is notable in “Phases of the Moon”, below. His drawings of mythology had science fiction in them from the start.

Delvaux grew up on rue de l’Arbre and rue d’Ecosse in Brussels, but when he married Anne-Marie, known as “Tam”, they lived on the Avenue des Campanules, and he’d often trudge three kilometres from home to paint at the place shown above in a Google Earth image, the Rouge-Cloître on the edge of the Forêt de Soignes. Some of his landscapes still live there.

With encouragement from established Belgian artists and none from his parents, Delvaux pursued art studies and completed 80 paintings between 1920 and 1925 and then held his first solo exhibition. The hypnotised, gesturing nudes started populating the landscapes in the following decade, first with expressionist flair, then with de Chirico’s metaphysics incorporated.

When Pierre Spitzner’s travelling Grand Museum of Anatomy and Hygiene rolled into Brussels’ Midi Fair in 1932, Delvaux saw medical curiosities, congenital deformities and a wax female figure in a glass case called the Sleeping Venus that captivated him. The torso opened up for a peek at the organs. There’s a great post about this on Jessica Palmer’s Bioephemera blog. Spitzner’s scary collection is now part of the Musées d’Anatomie Delmas-Orfila-rouvière & Spitzner-Roussel UCLAF on the rue des Saints-Pères in Paris.

Delvaux’s pictorial recollection, “The Sleeping Venus” from 1944.

And at the same time, fellow Belgian Rene Magritte was showing Delvaux how bizarre the ordinary is, and vice versa. Delvaux was 37 when he attended a Dali-Chirico-Magritte exhibition in Brussels in 1934. He followed the first two into the romantic and theatrically mysterious end of the business and left Magritte to muddle over his “material tokens of the freedom of thought”, whatever that meant.

Delvaux got to know most of the surrealists and took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition organised by André Breton and Paul Eluard at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Eluard dedicated the poem “Exile” to Delvaux. But Delvaux, for all his Chirico-style neo-classical façades and moonlit streets rendered bizarre by their bleary-eyed dreamers, watched by gentlemen in suits and bowler hats (usually Delvaux himself), didn’t actually consider himself a surrealist.

His goal was the “poetic shock” that comes with seeing ordinary things where they shouldn’t be. That would explain the somnambulant women “unabashedly unself-conscious in their dishabille”, as one museum puts it. Not really erotic at all, they’re rather frightening — in a seductive way, of course.

Apart from some experiments with perspective in the mid-1940s, he maintained one distinctive style throughout his life, not so much surrealistic as hallucinatory. He took part in the competition to come up with a painting of the Temptation of St Anthony for a Hollywood film, but lost to Max Ernst, as did Dali. Dali House has a post on the contest here. Below is “Village of Mermaids” from 1942.

Delvaux’s one-man show at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York was a hit with the critics but not the federal government: two paintings were seized for being obscene and a third was damaged during the customs inspection. Then in 1954 Delvaux took part in the Venice Biennial, the theme of which was “The Fantastic in Art”. The religious figures in his works were all skeletons, and the local Catholic patriarch nearly flipped his beanie. That was Cardinal Roncalli, soon to become Pope John XXIII.

Belgium loved Delvaux, though, and damn the nudity. He was named director of the Académie royale des Beaux-arts in 1965, and then In 1982 — just after he’d met Andy Warhol in Brussels and had his portrait done — the Paul Delvaux Museum opened in Saint-Idesbald.

Now then, about these words.

“In Delvaux’s paintings,” writes David Scott, “the word or fragment of text brings with it a feeling of the uncanny that signals the return of an obsession or a repressed memory.” He is pulling away the exterior, like a coroner in the case of the human figures and an archaeologist among the old Greek ruins, to find the deeper truth. In doing so, Scott points out, he is also deconstructing artistic conventions.

Giving a painting a title “implies a certain repression of the textual element within the pictorial”, so Delvaux enables “certain traces – textual or other – like dreams or fantasies underlying the painting, to break through to the surface.”

So the titles would show up inside his paintings, sometimes in their own frames, and sometimes there were even large chunks of Paul Eluard’s poems in his illustrations, perhaps superimposed on bodies. He included notices and announcements, maps, shop signs, the names of newspapers, and books with their titles showing. Sometimes they helped explain the artwork, sometimes they did just the opposite.

In his engraving “Le Laid”, the title is prominent, but leaves the viewer searching for what exactly it is that’s so ugly in the picture. Scott wonders whether Delvaux is showing language’s contrariness, its ability to express contradiction, but, with a nod to Freud’s dream interpretations, he also sees significance in the phrase’s appearance on a picture album, “signalling the return to the origin of the visual image in a book”.

In 1940’s “L’Entre de la Ville”, a map — half words and half pictures — is consulted on arrival in Pompei, and Scott suggests the traveller is semi-nude because he’s “in the process of entering into the ideal world of the past with its perfectly naked inhabitants, whereas the man in the bowler hat [not shown in this detail] notices nothing of this, being deeply absorbed in a newspaper, a document which relates only the events of current everyday life”.

Also in 1940 Delvaux painted “L’Homme de la Rue” (again, detail only here) with the same oblivious newspaper reader, now in the midst of naked women. Since only the initial article in the paper’s name is shown – “La” – is there a puzzle on offer? “Is this man,” asks Scott, “seeking a certain tone (chercher le la)? – his newspaper seems to be advertising female underwear. Or is he seeking a woman (chercher la femme)?”

Here, says Scott, “the man seeks in reading it rather to find an opening to his private dreams and fantasies, for one notices that the pages … are covered with erotic images of corsets and other suggestive items of feminine apparel with, in addition, images of female nudity.” Alternatively, he adds, the paper could be a red herring if the man isn’t reading it at all, but ogling the ladies around him.

It could be the same newspaper that cropped up eight years later in “La Voix Publique”, shown below, whose title is the paper’s name fully revealed, The Public Voice. The paper is well to one side here, far from the painting’s main focus: a nude in the path of an oncoming tram. Scott surmises that, read in different ways, the title could allude to “the public way” (la voie publique), the pubic way (la voie pubienne), to see her in public (la voir publique), to have her in public (l’avoir publique) or public wash-house (lavoir public).

It’s all too much for me, this guesswork, but knowing a bit more about why words worm their way into the frame does add a new dimension to art.

The Internet is miserly when it comes to decent-sized Delvaux images, but ModernArt is pretty good. LeninImports.com has an array of good images but they’re, ironically enough, not titled. The official Delvaux website is too busy with its Flash (and Java) to be of any use at all.