Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner is one of the most prominent figures of the surrealist art movement in Romania. Over time, he asserted himself as a painter, sculptor, and poet. A free spirit, although he attended several institutions (he completed primary school in Vienna, high school in Brăila, and attended courses at the School of Fine Arts and the Free Academy of Painting in Bucharest), he never fully completed them, relying more on his own vocation. He was drawn to Dadaism, abstract art, and expressionism, with the foundations of his knowledge cultivated within his own family (he is the brother of ethnomusicologist Harry Brauner and photographer Teddy Brauner). In Romania, he forged friendships with renowned personalities such as Gellu Naum, Gherasim Luca, Sașa Pană, Ion Minulescu, and Ilarie Voronca; with the latter, he founded the magazine "75 HP", where he first presented the concept of "picto-poetry". Victor Brauner also collaborated with other national avant-garde magazines, such as "Contimporanul" or "Unu". He settled in Paris in 1930, where he met Brâncuși. His first solo exhibition in the French capital was presented by André Breton. Also in Paris, he met Alberto Giacometti and Yves Tanguy. Famous for his premonitory painting, as the artist himself would testify referring to his 1931 self-portrait, Brauner would take over his father's passion for spiritualism and convert it into a distinct type of magic that he would imprint on his work.