Victor Brauner

Biography

In 1931 Victor Brauner painted a self-portrait in which his left eye has been torn out. He had suffered no injury to the eye at that time. On 28 August 1938 in Paris, during a quarrel between Oscar Domínguez and Esteban Francés, Brauner tried to protect Francés, and a glass thrown by Domínguez put out his left eye. The Surrealists saw in this a prophecy fulfilled; Pierre Mabille wrote an essay on the incident, “The Painter’s Eye”.

Brauner was born in Piatra Neamț. By one account his father was a timber manufacturer and the family moved to Vienna for several years, where the boy started school; by another, he was born in Bucharest. In 1914 the family returned to Romania, and he studied in Brăila and was interested in zoology. Later he entered the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest and the private painting school of Horia Igiroșanu, and painted landscapes in the manner of Cézanne. From the early 1920s he published in Romanian avant-garde periodicals, among them the magazine unu. He held his first solo exhibition in Bucharest on 26 September 1924, and in the same year, together with the poet Ilarie Voronca, he founded the magazine 75HP (by some accounts Tristan Tzara was also involved). It carried his manifesto “Pictopoetry”, in which words and verse became an element of the painting itself. By his own account he returned to putting this idea into practice only after the war.

He first went to Paris in 1925, returned to Romania, and settled permanently in the French capital in 1930. There he was received by Constantin Brâncuși, who, among other things, taught him the methods of art photography. Yves Tanguy introduced him to the Surrealist circle, and in 1932 he became a formal member of the group. In 1934 his first Paris solo exhibition took place at the Pierre Gallery; André Breton wrote the introduction to the catalogue. The theme of the eye runs through many works of those years, for example “Mr. K’s Power of Concentration”.

In 1935 Brauner went back to Bucharest and briefly joined the Romanian Communist Party, which was then underground. Together with the visiting Surrealists Mary Stanley Low and Juan Ramón Breá he campaigned for the party. On 7 April 1935 he opened an exhibition at the Mozart Galleries, and in 1937, after the Moscow show trials, he left the party. In autumn 1938 he was in Paris again, and in the same year he met Jaqueline Abraham, his future wife. After the loss of his eye came his “chimera” and “lycanthropic” paintings, dark and peopled with half-beasts.

When Germany invaded France in 1940 he left Paris together with Pierre Mabille. He lived in Perpignan, at Canet-Plage, in the Eastern Pyrenees, and at Saint-Féliu-d’Amont, where he was in effect kept under supervision, without the right to leave. He stayed in touch with the Surrealists in Marseille, and in 1941 he received permission to settle there. Besides painting, he made “Surrealist objects”; the best known, “Wolf-Table”, is a small stool with a wolf’s jaws on one side and a tail curled inward on the other. By his own account, he was trying in this way to rid himself of an obsessive fear of catastrophe.

After the liberation of Paris he returned to the capital and took part in the international Surrealist exhibition of 1947. In 1948 Breton expelled him from the group for “factional activity”. By the more widespread explanation, the occasion was Brauner’s refusal to support a campaign against Roberto Matta, who was accused of involvement in the suicide of Arshile Gorky. In 1948–1950 he made the autobiographical cycles “Onomatomanies” and “Rétractés”. In the 1950s he worked with Matta on several paintings, for example “Interlooking” (1955). In 1954 he painted “Prelude to a Civilization”, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He took part in the Venice Biennale. In 1959 the Surrealists, with Breton’s consent, readmitted him to the group, together with Matta.

In 1959 Brauner settled in a studio on rue Lepic in Montmartre, and in 1961 the Bodley Gallery in New York held a solo exhibition of his work. He worked a great deal at Varengeville in Normandy. The early 1960s brought the “Bestiary” cycle and the works “Fête des mères”, “Taming of the Piglets” and “Planet of Beasts”: the tension of earlier years eases in them, and animal imagery and an ornament close to the primitive predominate. Motifs from the Maya, the Aztecs and the Native peoples of America had been visible in his work already in the 1940s. He received French citizenship in 1963, and in 1966 he was chosen to represent France at the Venice Biennale, where a whole room was given to him.

Brauner died in Paris on 12 March 1966. He is buried in Montmartre Cemetery.

The inscription on his tomb is taken from his notebook: “Peindre, c’est la vie, la vraie vie, ma vie” (“Painting is life, real life, my life”).