Accession Number
1997/1.73

Title
Les Amours du poète (The Loves of the Poet)

Artist(s)
Paul Delvaux

Object Creation Date
circa 1940

Medium & Support
pen and brown ink on cream wove paper mounted on thin board

Dimensions
5 1/16 in. x 6 7/8 in. ( 12.9 cm x 17.5 cm )

Credit Line
Gift of the Lannan Foundation in Honor of the Pelham Family

Label copy
The date assigned to the work, ca. 1940, is derived from its connection to the 1940 painting, L'homme de la rue, reproduced in Butor (p. 186).
The incongruity of a bowler-hatted man amid nude women frequently recurs in the art of Delvaux in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The opposition of clothed male and unclothed female has a tradition going back to Manet and well beyond. But with Delvaux the shock factor is heightened by the mundane quality of the man’s actions—here he reads a newspaper. The conventionally clad hat-wearer, a figure dear also to Magritte, is a symbol of the artist.
This drawing relates to a painting of 1940, The Man in the Street, now in the Musée d’Art wallon, Liège.
Label copy from exhibition "Dreamscapes: The Surrealist Impulse," August 22 - October 25, 1998

Primary Object Classification
Drawing

Collection Area
Modern and Contemporary

Rights
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Keywords
Architecture
Figures
buildings
clothed
flowers
half-length
males
nudes
reading
temples (buildings)
trees
vines
women