Victor Brauner was born in the small town of Piatra Neamt, Romania, on June 15, 1903. Later, his family decided to move to the capital, Bucharest. It was during this period that the young Victor Brauner, in 1919, at the age of sixteen, was enrolled in the city's School of Fine Arts, but already his aesthetic and pictorial considerations collided with the official canons of the time. His works were considered scandalous and he interrupted his artistic studies. Nevertheless, this did not discourage him, because a few years later, in 1924, his first personal exhibition was organized. On this occasion, Victor Brauner took the opportunity to publish in the magazine 75 HP, his Manifesto of Picto-poetry, thus sealing the inseparable union between painting and poetry. This magazine, which appeared for only one issue, was founded by Brauner himself and Ilarie Vornca, a Romanian poet. 75 HP is the only Romanian avant-garde magazine that appeared at that time. This allows us to shed light on the artist's first great period in connection with the world of the avant-garde in which he actively participated, particularly the Dada movement.

The painter's first stay in Paris and first encounters

As part of his avant-garde explorations, Victor Brauner decided to make a trip to Paris. He went to the capital in 1930 and on this occasion, he met André Breton and the Surrealist movement. Breton prefaced the catalog of his first Parisian exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre Loeb. Very quickly, Breton drew the contours of Brauner's art. An art that, he sensed, would eventually separate itself from surrealism and its representatives. Victor Brauner is a silent being, a contemplative, attentive to the world that surrounds him and that he often judges threatening. It is in this silence that he nourishes his mental universe, populated with representations and feelings that he throws on the canvas as a warning. Victor Brauner instinctively distrusted the aura of some of these groups, which he sometimes considered to be a hindrance to creation.

Brauner's return to Romania, the struggle and exile

In the mid-1930s, after his stay in Paris, Victor Brauner returned to Romania, his country of origin. But things had changed and Brauner was faced with the rise of fascism and the persecution of the Jews. He collaborates for a time with several newspapers that also stand against the rise of this totalitarianism, but the repression is fierce. In desperation and knowing he was being hunted down, he decided to return to France in 1938.

The artist's final return to France, the inner exile

It was at this time that several founding events occurred for the artist, in particular the loss of his eye during a fight in 1938. This accident reinforced his almost messianic quest for representation in the broadest sense of the term. This mutilation marked the beginning of metaphorical works based on dreams, on the border between the real and the unreal, the famous "somnambulistic" images. This effervescence is also nourished by the artists he meets in Paris. Victor Brauner was Giacometti's studio neighbor and he continued to maintain relations with the Surrealist group, to which he officially belonged in 1934.
Then the war caught up with him and forced him into exile once again. He left for the free zone in 1940, hidden by a poet friend. Successively, he took refuge in the Eastern Pyrenees, in Marseille and in the Hautes Alpes. This period is nevertheless conducive to new creations; having little means during the war years, Brauner paints, draws and produces with what surrounds him, objects of all kinds, collage, wax, coffee ... In 1945, the year of his return to Paris, Victor Brauner moved into a new studio, the former Douanier Rousseau studio. The artist saw this as a sign, an omen, which confirmed that he was in the right place to create. He continued to create and paint after the war and among these works we can cite Dessin médiumnique in 1945 and Victor semivictorescent in 1949.

The break with surrealism

The years 1948 and 1949 mark a break between Victor Brauner and the surrealists among whom, at that time, we can mention Joan Miro, André Masson or Max Ernst. A year earlier, in 1947, he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Maeght Gallery before leaving the group the following year. We also know that it was on Giacometti's advice that Max Ernst began sculpting, and that Miro also exhibited at the Loeb gallery, as did Brauner; in short, they all knew each other, exchanged ideas and painted together. It is through this promiscuity that the most sensitive variations within their painting are revealed, and if Miro was considered by André Breton as the most surrealist of all, Victor Brauner seems to take a different path than them. Indeed, as Breton had sensed years before, Brauner is looking for a new way, a new path that has not yet been taken. This move away from surrealism is also intimately linked to Brauner's conception of creation. He considers that to think, sufficiently, fully, it is necessary to be alone, undone of any external constraint. Conversely, notoriety is a danger to the independence of the mind, so independence is the rule to leave room for expression. From these years, Victor Brauner takes refuge in a moment that is his own, composed of anthropomorphic beings, between the object and the animal. He also took up one of his favorite themes, echoing the loss of his eye, with the work Divinité protectrice, which he produced in 1953.

The last dream

Until his death in 1966, Victor Brauner never stopped cultivating his mental universe, always adding new thoughts, new visions, regenerating himself as much as possible. But, in the autumn of his life, the days seem long and the artist has the impression of being left at the mercy of an abysmal void that engulfs everything in its path, the disease not helping. Nevertheless, here as during the occupation, Brauner takes the opposite side of a reality that does not prove satisfactory. He launches into the realization of several "paintings-objects" that he will group under the title "Mythology and Mother's Day". These works left almost as a testament, show an amused and pessimistic look on the modern world, the one that was and the one to come, as the last trace of a man who cultivated all his life a so personal and so interior look on the world.