Robert Detheux (1932-2010) - Le téléphone – 1957

Robert Detheux (1932-2010) – The Telephone – 1957 Artist: Robert Detheux (Brussels, 1932 – Tournai, 2010) Title of the work: The Telephone Date: 1957 Signature: Signed and sealed on the back with the artist's seal. Technique: Watercolor and ink on paper. Black ink for the line drawing and hatching, watercolor for the pink-violet background and the dark lower part. Dimensions: 46 × 33 cm Condition: Very good overall condition. The material is held, the drawing is sharp, the watercolor is luminous. Some handling marks on the margins, without impact on the figure or subject. Sold unframed. Provenance: Artist’s studio collection (acquired directly). Description: Work from 1957. Detheux was twenty-five years old. He had just received the Belgian Young Painter Prize. The drawing is already very personal, graphical and surreal. On the right, a male head in profile, resting on a pedestal or rectangular box. The face is built with tight hatching, eyes half-closed, mouth closed, expression impassive. On the left, an old dial telephone, drawn with the same ink precision, the handset off the hook. The two objects sit on a horizon line, isolated in a pink-violet watercolor background, with a dark lower area. Nothing explicitly links the head and the telephone, and that is precisely the point. The figure is silent, the telephone awaits. We are in a state of impossible communication, a charged silence. The pink-violet background does not depict any place: it isolates the two elements and reinforces their mutual strangeness. This is an early drawing but already fully in Detheux's language: surreal juxtaposition, precision of line, hatching, a human figure reduced to a mute presence. The work belongs to his formative and recognition years, before the major feminine and spectral periods of the following decades. Signed on the back, in good format and using a rare technique (watercolor and ink) in the collection: a significant piece from the 1950s for lovers of Belgian drawing and graphic surrealism. Artist Biography: Born in Brussels in 1932 and passed away in Tournai in 2010, Robert Detheux is a singular figure in 20th-century Belgian art. A graduate of the Saint-Luc Institute in Fine Arts in Brussels, he taught graphic expression at the Academy of Tournai until 1996, while pursuing a personal body of work of great coherence. From the 1950s, he established himself with a very personal surrealist and graphical language. He received the Belgian Young Painter Prize in 1953, 1954 and 1971. The following decades deepen the same territory. 1970s: body and female face, hybrid figures, textures. 1980s-1990s: grotesque, eroticism, black humor. 2000s-2010: spectral portraits, appearances, creatures. This work belongs to his youthful years and his first recognition. Little exhibited during his life, Detheux worked freely. The discovery of his studio fund (nearly 1,500 works) made this coherence visible. His drawing, demanding and immediately recognizable, now attracts collectors of Belgian surrealism, in Belgium, Spain and Europe.

Estimate:£168.96

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