Article: Het groen van Delvaux.(Brief Article)

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Paul Delvaux, my favorite modern Belgian painter and also a favorite artist of the present Belgian queen Paola. Blind during the last decade of his life, Delvaux died in July 1994. One of his peerless nudes adorns the jacket of Het groen van Delvaux. Scattered throughout the novel, references to reproductions of the master's art serve as metaphors for the deprivation in the lives of Willem Brakman's principals and reflect also the ever-hesitant union of woman and man: "Delvaux, his doll-stare women, wrapped in the powdering white of their melancholic skin, captive of the mirrored walls of their manic self-contemplation, ...