Afternoon Mass 1937

Paul Delvaux painted *Afternoon Mass* at a point in his career when he was really hitting his stride. Delvaux’s painting is so strange, and yet so classical. It’s like he’s inventing a new kind of history painting. Delvaux really knew his classical art history. You can see the influence of the old masters in his modelling of the figures. The flesh tones are very carefully rendered, but the paint handling is quite smooth, almost like a fresco. It’s as though he’s trying to make a painting that looks like it’s been there forever. The figure is caught between this real-world brickwork that's crumbling and this totally illusory space beyond. The painting reminds me of Giorgio de Chirico, who was doing similarly strange and dreamlike paintings in the early twentieth century. But Delvaux’s work is even more unsettling, I think, because it’s so precisely rendered and yet so utterly bizarre. And like all good art, it resists any easy interpretation.