Michel Delacroix
Hotel Bellevue, 1984
Original lithograph
Hand signed in pencil lower right
Edition E.A. lower left
Published by Lublin Graphics

classic paris street scene with bicycle, cafes and shops. Michel Delacroix master of the Naïf (Folk Art or Naive) the most popular and successful artists in the world today. A self-styled "painter of dreams and of the poetic past," Delacroix has devoted five decades to painting a city he calls "the Paris of then," the magical place where he was born, where he spent his boyhood, and where he continues to live to this day.

But the Paris Delacroix paints is not the urban metropolis of the present. It is the dream-like place the city became in the 1940's, during the Occupation, when "we suddenly jumped fifty years into the past. No more cars in the streets, very few lights. Paris suddenly became very quiet, very dark, and, though people were afraid, there was a brotherhood and spirit that was very delightful."