ART STORIA

L’Oubli des Passions (1913) by Jean Delville

Jean Delville (1867–1953) was a Belgian Symbolist painter and writer known for combining art with mysticism, philosophy, and spiritual ideas. Unlike many artists of his time who focused on realism or modern life, Delville used idealized figures and dramatic compositions to explore themes like transcendence, desire, and the conflict between the material and spiritual worlds.

In L’Oubli des Passions (“The Forgetting of Passions”), intertwined n**e figures appear suspended in darkness, detached from any clear physical setting. Rather than depicting a narrative scene, Delville creates a symbolic meditation on emotional detachment and spiritual release. The glowing bodies contrasted against the dark background give the painting an atmosphere that is calm, unsettling, and intensely introspective at the same time.

— Denise K. McTighe, ASAG Journal

Begegnung (The Encounter) (1935) by Edgar Ende

Edgar Ende (1901–1965) was a German Surrealist whose work occupies a singular space as a kind of inner psychological theatre. Living through the rise of the N**i regime, his visionary paintings were condemned as “degenerate,” and a devastating portion of his work was destroyed during the Allied bombings of Munich in 1944. What remains is only a fragment of a much larger, lost world—a body of “inner pictures” that privileges dream-logic over the rigid realism of his time. This suspended, uncanny stillness would later influence the imaginative landscape of his son, Michael Ende.

In Begegnung (The Encounter) (1935), Ende presents a barren, desert-like landscape stripped to its essentials. At the center, a draped figure recoils in a sharp, almost theatrical arc, leaning away from a massive geometric wall. From the dense stone, three human forms emerge as though fused with the structure itself: one raises a palm in a silent command to halt, while another extends a pale, unrolled scroll. The surrounding space is minimal, punctuated only by a wind-bent tree and a fallen column—suggesting the ruins of a civilization, or perhaps a mind turned inward upon itself.

Rather than depicting a literal meeting, Ende constructs a psychological threshold. The painting becomes a meditation on the encounter between the individual and the buried voices embedded within the structures we inhabit. The figures within the wall suggest that history and memory are never fully erased; they persist, absorbed into the very foundations of our reality. Through muted earth tones and elongated, austere shadows, the work moves away from narrative toward a distilled, symbolic unease. In this stillness, the painting shifts from representation to presence, offering not a story, but a lingering confrontation with the unknown.

— Denise K. McTighe, ASAG Journal