Les Amours du poète (The Loves of the Poet)

Description

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