The Delvaux Mystery: Painting, the Nouveau Roman, and Art History

Meant to signal in its parodic title both the causal, deductive conventions of academic art history and those of the detective story, this essay looks at the work of the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux (1897–1994), and discusses the uses to which that œuvre has been put by several of the pioneers of the twentieth-century novel, such as Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Julio Cortázar, and J.G. Ballard. It goes on to speculate as to why so many French novelists from the 1950s who interrogated specifically narrative form, together with those inspired by their example, responded to Delvaux's work in their writing. Asking whether any gain can be made in art history's knowledge and understanding of art by viewing it back through the fiction or poetry generated by it, the essay suggests that fiction and poetry might inflect academic art history at the level of style, asking what the genre implications of such writing might be for a discipline in which writing and style have had such well-defined boundaries and limitations.