2. Artists & stock
3. Victor Brauner
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Victor Brauner was born in Pietra Neamtz (Moldavie, Romania) in 1903. His father is a follower of spiritism and the child is marked by the atmosphere of “the small town at the edge of the river”. He assists, hidden, at spiritistic meetings organized by his father. In 1907, violent country riots cause the fled of the Brauner family in Hamburg. At the beginning of the war of Balkans (1912), the family exiles in Vienna. In 1914, they return in Romania by the Danube.
The young boy starts to paint in 1917, at that moment he follows the courses of evangelic school of Braïla and begins to be interested in zoology in that period. Two years later, he attends the Art School in Bucharest; his work, considered scandalous, causes him to be expulsed. Victor Brauner follows the courses of the Public Academy of Bucharest. He remains on the edges of the Black Sea, where he paints “cézanniens landscapes”. In 1924, Brauner founds (with, among others, the poet Ilarie Voronca with whom he collaborates a long time) the review “75 H.P.” in which he publishes proclamation of “Picto-poetry”, then the review “Punct”. The “house of art” of Bucharest organizes his very first personal exhibition in 1924.
Brauner accomplishes his first voyage to Paris in 1925, where he spends two years; he discovers there in particular works of Giorgio de Chirico. Returned in Bucharest, he collaborates in “Unu”, dadaïst and surrealist review in which his paintings and his drawings are published. In 1928 Victor Brauner tends in a more decisive way towards surrealism; his paintings describe a worrying world, inhabited by strange characters among whom the animals, benevolent or threatening, occupy an important place.

In 1930, the artist settles in Paris; he meets Brancusi who initiates him to photography, befriends with the Rumanian poet Benjamin Fondane, then with Yves Tanguy. In 1932, Victor Brauner adheres to surrealism and meets André Breton and Rene Char the following year; the artist undertakes a caricature-like satire of the bourgeoisie represented by the monstrous features of a “Monsieur K.". His first Parisian exhibition, which André Breton foreword, is organized at the Gallery Pierre (Loeb) in 1934; many other exhibitions follow in a regular way. A topic, which becomes obsessional in the work of Brauner, appears in 1931: “The enucleated eye”. In his canvas, his drafts, his drawings, from now on, the eye is frequently represented bored, transpierced by horns, thrown on the ground or posed on the hollow of the hand. Premonition, in 1938 Victor Brauner loses his left eye during a violent argument between Oscar Dominguez and Esteban Frances!
Unable to survive in Paris, Brauner returns to Bucharest in 1935, until 1938 when he comes back to Paris. He lives with Tanguy, then in the Falguière City. Between 1939 and the beginning of the war, the work of Brauner crosses the period of the “Chimères” (Dreams) or the “Crépuscules" (Twilights). Being sick, Brauner takes refuge in the Low-Alps, there he experiments with the process of wax painting, and his disposition to the chroma, incites him to reject the third dimension; this period can be regarded as capital in his evolution, because it conditions all his work to come. This technique represents for the artist an alchemical and esoteric value and he sets up the repertory of hieratic imagined characters to tell the episodes of his personal mythology. Proclaiming himself “emperor of the kingdom of the personal myth”, Brauner starts in 1947 the autobiographical cycle of the “Onomathomanies”, period marked by doubts and pain. In 1965, Brauner will carry out the famous series “Mythology” and “Mother's Day” which offer, contrarily, the vision of a fabulous, merry and whimsical universe. He exhibits in Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam at the end of the year.

In 1966, Victor Brauner was chosen to represent France at the biannual exhibition in Venice The artist dies in Paris in March of the same year.

“If one has to hide into something, better be in a dog, because one says: it’s a dog and it’s finished, so there is no problem.” Victor Brauner

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