The Temple (painting)

The Belgian painter Paul Delvaux made The Temple in 1949 during his nine-month stay at his art dealer Claude Spaak's house in Choisel outside Paris. The period was important in Delvaux's personal life and career, as he lived there with his lover and future wife Tam, on her savings and with little financial resources. In addition to The Temple, Delvaux's more prominent paintings from this period include Woman at the Temple, The Annunciation and Ecce Homo.[1]

The Temple is painted in oil and has the dimensions 113.7 cm × 146 cm (44.8 in × 57.5 in).[1] It depicts a classical temple building seen from the front in moonlight. The intact temple has a frieze and pediment decorated with sculptures. Its cella—the inner temple room—is lit up and features a large female cult statue at the back.[2]

In the foreground is a wooden crate. On top of it, to the left, is a sculpted woman's head, wearing a tiara and a bridal veil. The head is severed at the neck and there is a brooch pin close to it. To the right on top of the box is a burning modern oil lamp. Nearby is a purple bow with three hatpins. In the background is the sea, also illuminated by the moon.[3]

Many of Delvaux's most famous paintings were made in the late 1940s and they often combine depictions of women with classical architecture, creating an irrational encounter between classical antiquity and the modern world. Important influences here include the painter Giorgio de Chirico's evocations of his childhood in Greece and the ancient Mediterranean region, and the Surrealist celebration of the chance encounter between unrelated objects.[1] The art historian Adrienne Dumas says the combination of classical fragments and modern objects in The Temple is reminiscent of Le Rêve Transformé (1913) and The Song of Love (1914) by Chirico. According to Dumas, The Temple is similar to many Chirico paintings in that it portrays a "strange or disjunctive antiquity", which creates a sense of crisis in a disjointed contemporary world, and simultaneously evokes "lyrical mystery and enduring power" that connect the past and the present.[1] The philosopher Marcel Paquet highlights the deliberate anachronism in The Temple and compares it to the rejection of "empirical vision" in Cubism.[4] He says the way Pablo Picasso "transcends the space-plane" is similar to how Delvaux "transcends the linearity of history".[4]

Oil lamps are a recurring motif in Delvaux's paintings. In addition to The Temple, they appear in an ancient setting in The Lamps (1937), outside an abandoned train station in Horizons (1960), paving a walkway in All the Lights (1962),[5] and carried by women in The Cortege (1963), The Acropolis (1966) and Chrysis (1967).[6] Delvaux said they were part of his original break with rationalism: "When I dared paint a Roman triumphal arch with, on the ground, lighted lamps, the decisive step had been taken. ... Painting could, I realised, have a meaning of its own, it confirmed in a very special way its capacity to play a major emotional role."[1] The art historian and archaeologist Philippe Jockey says The Temple, like Delvaux's paintings in general, has no direct message to decipher, but it does have a "network of signifiers" associated with classical sculpture.[2] He says it is significant that the temple, its decorations and cult statue are intact. Although the head in the foreground has been severed from the body, "it lives from the brilliance of its intact colours".[2] Jockey contrasts this with an earlier painting by Delvaux, The Ruined Palace (1935), which shows a toppled and damaged female statue surrounded by stone fragments, and highlights the absence of melancholy and longing for the past in The Temple.[7]

The art critic Xavier Marret used The Temple as an example of how Delvaux created dreamlike and anxious environments by engaging viewers in thoughts as they look at the painting's setting, metallic blue sky, moonlight and image composition.[8] The art historian René Passeron called it "one of the most powerful of Delvaux's nocturnal visions".[9] The art historian Virginie Devillers likens the crate to an altar and says the painting expresses the beauty and enchantment of light, especially moonlight. She says it uses juxtaposition to turn familiar objects into matters of poetry and to connect them to the temple, a "monumental, absolute apparition".[10]

The Temple was initially bought by Jean–Louis Merckx in Brussels. It was next sold through the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, which exhibited and catalogued it in June 1951. By 1969, it belonged to Mrs Robiliart in Brussels, and after that a private collector in Geneva. From 1990 to 2004 it was owned by the Gallery Ueda in Tokyo. A private collector who purchased it from the Gallery Ueda sold it through Christie's on 20 June 2012 for 1,609,250 pounds sterling.[1] It has been part of Delvaux retrospectives held at Ostend's Museum of Fine Arts in 1962, Brussels' Museum of Ixelles in 1967, Paris' Musée des Arts décoratifs in 1969 and Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in 1973.[1]