Victor Brauner- “Signe” 1942- Mounted on his tomb in Montmartre
Painting is life, the real life, my life.
—Victor Brauner, epitaph on his grave in Paris
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The sculpted piece above is part, along with the quote above, of the Montmartre tomb of Victor Brauner, a Romanian Jewish painter/sculptor who lived from 1903 to 1966, spending most of his life in France. It depicts the heads he often portrayed in his Surrealistic paintings.
I can’t quite remember how I first came across the work of Brauner. I think it might have been in an article that had anti-Nazi art from the 1930’s. He had painted a couple of paintings in 1934 and 1935 during Hitler’s rise, one depicting a fantasy portrait of Hitler with his head being pierced with all sorts of implements. A knife in the eye , for example. The other depicted a German military figure standing atop a swastika that is crushing the bodies under it. Both are powerful propaganda images and are shown below.
But I stumbled across his other work apart from these images and they caught my attention on their own. They are surreal images that often have a Paul Klee-like mysticism in them that I am drawn to. Maybe I also identify with something Brauner once wrote in his notebooks: Each painting that I make is projected from the deepest sources of my anxiety…
Whatever the case, I find them interesting, something more to delve into. Take a look.
Victor Brauner- The Surrealist 1947
Victor Brauner- Hitler 1934
Victor Brauner- Untitled 1935
Victor Brauner- La Petrification de la Papesse
Victor Brauner- Prelude to a Civilization 1954
Victor Brauner- Consciousness of Shock 1951
Victor Brauner- Antithesis 1937
Victor Brauner- The Triumph of Doubt 1946
Redtree Times 