Paul Paun was a Romanian-Israeli avant-garde poet and visual artist, who wrote in Romanian and French and produced surrealist and abstract drawings. He was also a medical doctor and surgeon.
Background
Paul Paun (born Zaharia Herșcovici, and who later in life changed his legal name to Zaharia Zaharia) was born on September 5, 1915 in Bucharest, Romania. He was the youngest of two children of the Moldavian Jewish couple Helena and Rudolf Herşcovici.
His paternal grandfather, Zaharia, was an observant Jew from the Russian Empire who had escaped the draft and was living incognito in Romania; his first name was passed on to his grandson, Zaharia. He chose the pseudonym Paul Paun while still in high school.
Paun, his parents, and his older sister Nini lived in a suburb area just south of Dealul Mitropoliei.
Education
In early 1940, Paun graduated from the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Medicine.
After completing his studies of medicine and surgery, Paul Paun was made to work in forced labour camps for Russian prisoners of war during the Second World War.
Known mainly as a poet, Paul Paun was also a fascinating draftsman. Although he was entirely self-taught, he mastered drawing technique in a surprising way, and his line had the precision of a trained professional. His drawings are either Surrealist, with haunted spaces and fragments of faces and bodies, or abstract. In 1945, Paun had a solo exhibition of figurative Surrealist ink drawings, followed in 1946 by a group exhibition.
After a failed attempt to leave Romania illegally in 1948, and after his first two applications to emigrate to Israel were rejected, Paun finally received an exit permit in 1961. Settling in Haifa, he resumed his medical practice and his work as an artist. He remained active until the 1990s, producing ever larger ink and pencil drawings.
A final, self-published, volume of his poetic prose, called "La Rose parallèle" ("The Parallel Rose"), came out in Haifa in 1975.
Paun continued to exhibit his surrealist drawings in Israel and France. In 1985, he had a show of "Infra-noir Drawings" in Paris. A year later, his work was featured in the international exhibition "La Planète affolée: Surréalisme, dispersion et influences, 1938-1947", Marseille. But it is in Paris that Paun had his last exhibition while still alive, in autumn 1989.
Illustration for Gellu Naum's „Teribilul Interzis”
Invitation for Exhibition (Prometeu Gallery, February 1945)
1943?
Infra-Black Drawing
Portret of the Artist in the Black Window
Untitled
Infra-Black Drawing
Lovaj
Infra-Black Drawing
Views
Quotations:
"What do the Alge writers want, after all? They are sick to their stomachs, to their tongues, after all the sweets they have been fed by the poets. By those who go for things of beauty, not things of experience. We write because life leaves us hopeless."
"A modernist can be allowed not to be a modernist."
Membership
In 1930, aged 15, Paun became a member of the avant-garde group Alge.
Alge
1930
Connections
Paun was married to Reni Zaharia who would also eventually become a painter of decalcomania.