Nymphs Bathing 1938

Paul Delvaux’s Nymphs Bathing is an oil painting, but it feels like a dreamscape more than anything fixed or real. It’s a process of layering dark color that gives it that quality. Check out the texture in the water. There are some swift, directional marks around each nymph's body. The water looks almost solid, but with this kind of energetic movement. The paint isn’t too thick, but it is applied in a way that really highlights this tension. The artist is playing with the boundary between abstraction and representation, and it’s this tension that makes the image so gripping. The slightly odd color palette, all darkened hues, adds to the dreamlike quality. It makes me think of other painters who play with strange arrangements of figures, like Philip Guston, though of course Delvaux has his own vision. His is a world of ambiguous and mysterious interactions, of bodies and structures caught in the half-light.