Pygmalion1.0180_Delvaux

Pygmalion1.0180_Delvaux

OGCMA s.v. "Pygmalion"
Classical Sources:
Ovid Met. 10.243-98
Apollodorus Libr. 3.14.3

Paul Delvaux, b. 1897, "Pygmalion" (in reverse — a woman embracing a male statue), surrealistic painting, 1939, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts (Musée d'Art Moderne), Brussels, inv. 7544.

Martin (Moog-Gruenewald p. 584) see Delvaux's work as a "decisive break with the illustrative tradition. Although contemporary art only very seldom still refers explicitly to the myth of P[ygmalion]... the story frequently remains present at least by association through its central themes of the vivification of inanimate matter, the genesis of artificial life and the highly-charged competition between life and art."

Surreal painting of a naked woman embracing a bust, with other figures in a barren, dreamlike landscape

(Moog-Gruenewald s.v. "Pygmalion" 584)

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled forThe Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.