Background
Brauner was born in Piatra Neamt, Romania, on June 15, 1903. He was the son of a Jewish timber manufacturer who settled in Vienna with his family for several years. He was the third of six children in the family.
Calea Griviței 28, București 010702, Romania
Brauner studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest from 1916 to 1918.
Brauner and his work on a 2018 stamp sheet.
Brauner in his Paris studio.
Gellu Naum and Victor Brauner in the 1930s.
Victor Brauner.
Victor Brauner in 1946 in his workshop.
Victor Brauner in his late years.
Victor Brauner.
Brauner was born in Piatra Neamt, Romania, on June 15, 1903. He was the son of a Jewish timber manufacturer who settled in Vienna with his family for several years. He was the third of six children in the family.
Initially, Victor Brauner attended elementary school. When his family moved back from Vienna to Romania in 1914, he continued his education at the Lutheran school in Brăila. He was particularly interested in zoology during that period. Brauner studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest from 1916 to 1918.
Later Brauner studied at the Horia Igiroşanu private school of painting. He painted landscapes in the style of Paul Cézanne. The artist was expelled from the school for "misbehavior and anti-conformist painting."
Brauner travelled throughout Romania visiting Fălticeni and Balchik. During this time he experimented with Dadaism, Abstractionism, and Expressionism. On 26 September 1924, he had his first one-man exhibition, displaying paintings in an Expressionist style. The same year he co-founded the Dadaist-Constructivist review 75 HP with poet Ilarie Voronca, where he published a number of picto-poems, combinations of writing and images. It was in this magazine that he published the manifesto The Pictopoetry and the article The Surrationalism.
Victor Brauner was also associated with the Dadaist review UNU. It published reproductions of several of his artworks. In 1925 the artist taught at the Constructivist arts workshop Integral. While his works later came to be more closely connected with Surrealism, he maintained his ties to Dadaism through his involvement with these publications. Brauner also used the Dadaist's readymades in some of his artworks, including Wolf-Table (1939-1947), and the Dadaist techniques of collage and assemblage.
In 1925 he undertook his first journey to Paris. There he lived on Moulin Vert Street in the same building with Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss sculptor, painter, and printmaker, and Yves Tanguy, a French Surrealist painter, who introduced Brauner to the Surrealists. It was also in this city, that Victor Brauner befriended Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian sculptor, painter, and photographer, who taught him the methods of art photography. Besides, he made friends with Romanian poets Gellu Naum and Benjamin Fondane, as well as artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Jacques Hérold, and Man Ray.
Brauner settled in Paris more permanently in 1930. In 1931 he created one of his most famous paintings, Self-Portrait with Plucked Eye. This work became prophetic, as, on August 28, 1938, Victor Brauner lost his left eye when a violent argument broke out between Spanish Surrealist painters Oscar Domínguez and Esteban Francés. He attempted to defend Francés but was hit by a glass thrown by Domínguez.
Victor Brauner's first personal Paris show took place at the Galerie Pierre in 1934. It was not well-received and Brauner decided to return to Bucharest in 1935. During this period he ceased painting and instead created a number of caricatures and illustrations, such as the Anatomy of Desire series (1935-1936). In 1938 he moved back to Paris.
When the Second World War broke out, he was forced to flee to Southern France. He first lived with writer Robert Rius in Perpignan, then went to Cant-Blame, in the Eastern Pyrenees, and finally resided in Saint Feliu d'Amont. Throughout this period he managed to stay in touch with other Surrealists in Marseilles. In 1941 he joined them, having been given official permission to settle there. Around this time, he also tried, unsuccessfully, to receive a visa to go to the United States.
In the winter of 1940-1941, the Surrealists produced a number of collective artworks, one of the most prominent were Tarot. To create it, each contributor selected the names of two personalities to represent on their cards. Victor Brauner chose the philosopher Hegel and the famous medium Helen Smith, depicting both as hybrid human-animal forms. Brauner really enjoyed these sorts of playful collaborative activities in which the Surrealists engaged.
By the end of the war, Brauner had moved to Switzerland trying to escape the increasing Nazi persecution of Romanians. Because of his constant resettlements, he had to reduce the size of his canvases, so that he could easily put them into his luggage if he needed to travel suddenly. While in Switzerland, Brauner became interested in M. A. Sèchehaye's writings on Schizophrenia. They influenced his later paintings.
In 1945 Victor Brauner returned to Paris where his work was included in the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Galerie Maeght in 1947. However, Brauner was discarded from the Surrealists by Breton in 1948 after he refused to support the expulsion of prominent member Roberto Matta. From this point onwards, he shifted away from Surrealism-proper and started to work more with drawing on paper, and thin oil paint on boards, creating more stylized, and more abstracted pieces.
He moved into a studio in Montmartre at 72 Rue Lepic in 1959. In 1961, he went to Italy, and then settled in Varengeville in Normandy. The same year New York City's Bodley Gallery organized a solo exhibition of his work. In 1965 the artist created an ensemble of object-paintings full of inventiveness and vivacity, grouped under the titles Mythologie and Fêtes des mères. In 1966 he was offered to represent France at the Venice Biennale. In his later years he suffered from a prolonged illness.
Sans titre (Personnages)
Gemini
Portrait of Claude Sernet
Talisman
Femme regardant au loin
Hypergenese de la reapparition
Mythologie des Arcanes
L'animal Manuel
Portrait of Ilarie Voronca
Plants and Animals
Cosmogonie d'un visage
Crepuscular Swimmer
The City I Dream
Hypnotic Rupture
Dancing Girl
Irschou
Composition surréaliste
Coup of Doubt
Theo Brauner
Self-Portrait
La clef blanche
Reconstruction de l'Être aime
Untitled
Origin of Poetry
Dédoublement spatial d'une forme humaine
Chimera
Portrait of André Breton
Mutation de la Natalie
Provocation
Portrait du côté miroir
Expulsion reintegration
La Passivite Comblee
Le Grand Voyage
Septième sens
Head
Animaux claniques hominisés
Le lien secret
Masques
Woman Worker
Head and two boxers
The Turning Point of Thirst
Painted from Nature
Exercise prénuptial
Demonocratic Soul
Eventail du poete
L'homme oiseau
Untitled
Les arbres
The Inner Life (Nude and Spectral Still Life)
The Fisherman
Illustration for L’extrême-Occidentale by Ghérasim Luca
Poet in Exil
The Poet Geo Bogza Shows His Head to the Landscape with Drills
Objet subjectivité
Horizon intérieur
Mythotony
Visage
Personnage hiéroglyphe
A Tribal Figure/A Cat/A Whale
Tatonnement de la conscience
Interior
Antithesis
La machine à privilèges
Espace de L'Esprit
The Complete Woman (Project C)
The Carpathian Woman
The Surrealist
Additivitée spatiale
Codex d'un Visage
Courteous Passivity
Composition with Portrait
Consciousness of Shock
L'arrière chat - grand chat
The Philosopher's Stone
La bretonne
La pétrification de la papesse
Self-portrait with a Plucked Eye
Portrait
Poupée flacon
Mimetism Antropomorphe de la Conscience Collective
La Fiancée Heliotropique
Vegetal Doubling
Détermination d'un espace
Fascination
Gros Plan Fixe D'Une Metamorphose
Portrait aux fleurs
Jardiniers
Eclaircissement
Suicide at Dawn
The Blue Flame
Fleurs
Trio
Anagogy
Oiseau fantastique
La relation I
Progression Pantaculaire
The Boyar
The Fiancée of the Night
The Strange Case of Monsieur K
The Arch-Cat
Double Head
Arbre de la volupté
There
Conspiration
Firebird (Nietzschean Complex)
Le déserteur
Mitsi
Les deux forces
Initiation Into Liberty
Totem of Blessed Subjectivity II
Dobrudjan Landscape
Knight, White Horse and Snake
Autobiographical Painting - Biosensible Ultrapainting
Portrait of Sașa Pană (To My Dear Sașa Pană)
Les préliminaires d'unité
Prelude to a Civilization
Paysage
Personnages sur la plage
Tapis vert
Terre lumière
Endotête
Village
Adam & Eve
Animal
Brauner half-heartedly participated in the Romanian Communist party.
Quotations:
"My painting is autobiographical, it tells the story of my life. And my life is exemplary because it is universal."
"I am my own diver…I pass through daily exterior superficial life of appearance to the deep mysterious and unknown inner life."
"Each painting that I make is projected from the deepest sources of my anxiety..."
In 1930 Victor Brauner married Margit Kosch, whom he divorced nine years later. In 1938 he met Jaqueline Abraham while in Paris. She became his second wife in 1946.