Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner: Inventions and Magic

Timișoara National Museum of Art, Romania

On the occasion of the opening of the cultural program “Timișoara 2023: European Capital of Culture,” the Timișoara National Museum of Art is hosting the most important and comprehensive exhibition in Eastern Europe dedicated to the surrealist artist of Romanian origin Victor Brauner.

The Official Opening of the exhibition is on February 17, 2023 at 16:00 in the Baroque Hall of the National Museum of Art Timișoara.

One hundred and twenty years after the birth of Victor Brauner in the Kingdom of Romania and curated by Camille Morando, this retrospective exhibition aims to pay tribute to a central figure of Surrealism, an artist little known until now in his country of origin. The curator has selected over 100 paintings, drawings, sculptures, illustrations, and documents covering Brauner’s entire artistic career, from Bucharest to Paris, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. All these invaluable works are brought together for the first time in a retrospective exhibition with a design signed by the architect Attila Kim.

“Victor Brauner: Inventions and Magic,” the most important retrospective exhibition in Eastern Europe dedicated to the surrealist artist of Romanian origin is financed by the Timiș County Council and is co-organised in the European Capital of Culture by the Centre Pompidou, the Timișoara National Museum of Art, the Art Encounters Foundation, and the French Institute in Romania–Timișoara branch, with the support of Comité Brauner and Fondation du Judaïsme Français.

The exhibition is open to the public between February 17 and May 28 2023.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual catalog (Romanian/English) co-edited by the Arta Grafica printing house and the Art Encounters Foundation. Coordinated by Camille Morando, the exhibition’s curator, this catalog includes texts signed by prominent names of the cultural scene, such as Cătălin Davidescu, Catherine Hansen, Radu Stern, Bernard Blistène, Irina Cărăbaș, Andreea Foanene, Diana Marincu, as well as a Victor Brauner biography and old photographs selected by the editor.

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Surrealism Beyond Borders

The Met Museum

A telephone receiver that morphs into a lobster. A miniature train that rushes from a fireplace.

These are just a few of the familiar images associated with Surrealism, a revolutionary idea sparked in Paris around 1924 that asserted the unconscious and dreams over the familiar and every day. While Surrealism could generate often poetic and even humorous works, it was also taken up as a far more serious weapon in the struggle for political, social, and personal freedom, and by many more artists around the world.

Nearly from its inception, Surrealism has had an international scope, but knowledge of the movement has been formed primarily through a Western European focus. This exhibition reconsiders the true “movement” of Surrealism across boundaries of geography and chronology—and within networks that span Eastern Europe to the Caribbean, Asia to North Africa, and Australia to Latin America. Including almost eight decades of work produced across 45 countries, Surrealism Beyond Borders offers a fresh appraisal of these collective concerns and exchanges—as well as historical, national, and local distinctions—that will recast appreciation of this most revolutionary and globe-spanning movement.

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Victor Brauner

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

For its exhibition dedicated to that singular Surrealist Victor Brauner (1903–1966), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is publishing a monograph containing over a hundred paintings and drawings, some of them on show for the first time since the last Paris retrospective, at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1972. The presentation sequence runs as follows: Beginnings in Romania (1920–1925); Paris and the shock of Surrealism (1925–1932); The Surrealist adventure (1933–1939); The «black frontiers» of the war (1939–1945); The Conglomeros (1941-1945); After the War (1946–1948); Beyond Surrealism (1949–1966).

Born in Romania, Victor Brauner knew at first hand the artistic ferment of 1920s Bucharest and the avant-gardes – Expressionism, Constructivism, Dada – whose radicalism so closely matched his independent spirit. From 1925 onwards regular stays in Paris, where he would settle definitively in 1938, saw his painting gradually shift towards Surrealism. By 1933 he had joined the movement and continued to take part in its activities until his exclusion by André Breton in 1948.

The loss of an eye in 1938 made his Self-portrait of seven years earlier a premonitory illustration of Surrealism’s theories and his painting a form of magic. Unable to migrate to the United States when war broke out, he had no choice – as a Jew, an undocumented foreigner and an opponent of all forms of fascist and totalitarian oppression – but to go underground in the South of France, where he sought to ward off constant danger via the esoteric doctrines of the tarot, alchemy, spiritism and the kabbala. In this dream world where reality no longer held sway, his work took on a mystery all its own. Paradoxically this time of fear and utter destitution was also one of great technical inventiveness, typified by his resort to wax and salvaged materials, and formal innovation.

The postwar period was marked by an exploratory succession of styles, attributable to his new-found liberty but powerless against the anguish and torment ambient events inspired in him. Other influences ranging from psychoanalysis to «primitive» thought made themselves felt in cycles – the Victors of his Onomatomania series, Les Rétractés («The Withdrawn»), Mythologies, Mothers’ Days – in which a newly invented language conveyed not reality but the invisible forces that drive the world.

The catalogue casts fresh light on Victor Brauner in contributions from writers and art historians including Georges Sebbag, Fabrice Flahutez, Radu Stern, Sophie Krebs, Camille Morando and Jeanne Brun.
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is proud to announce that the catalog of the Victor Brauner exhibition ” Je suis le rêve. Je suis l’inspiration” has received the special mention of the Prix CatalPa 2020, awarded by the association Les Arpenteurs d’Expositions.

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