Publisher's Synopsis
David Scott identifies Delvaux's most characteristic contribution to twentieth-century art as that of problematizing academic history painting by surrealizing it. He concentrates on recurrent themes in Delvaux's art, notably his continuing, indeed unremitting, focus on the nude, and on the question of the "legibility" of the works, given the contradictory pictorial codes - academic and Surrealist - that Delvaux adopts in them.