Victor Brauner - Romanian (1903-1966)

Romanian-born painter, printmaker, and sculptor Victor Brauner was indisputably the headman of the avant-garde movement in his native country. In the interwar years, he went through all the artistic stages – Dadaism, Abstractionism, and Expressionism. Having contributed to various avant-garde circles, he finally settled in Surrealism. His multi-media works often drew inspirations from such distinct symbolic systems as Egyptian hieroglyphics, ancient Mexican texts, and the tarot. Through these intricate matrices of signs and connotations, his paintings synthesized biomorphic and naturalistic forms, and explored the innermost angst of the human psyche, indeed as he described, “each painting that I make is projected from the deepest sources of my anxiety.” He asserted that all of his paintings were autobiographical in some way, perhaps none more uncannily premonitory than his 1931 painting Self-portrait with a Plucked Eye – he would indeed lose his left eye in an accident 7 years after.