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Indepth Arts News:
"Victor Brauner: Surrealist Hieroglyphs"
2001-10-26 until 2002-01-26
Menil Collection
Houston, TX,
USA
As an early adherent of the Surrealist movement, Victor
Brauner actively explored the realm of dreams and the
unconscious, with an emphasis on the occult and
mystical. Both in content and in style, his art represents a
remarkably fertile fusion of wide-ranging world cultures,
mythologies, and religious beliefs, from Egyptian to
Aztec, Native American to Oceanic, Jewish to Hindu, to
name only a few.
The exhibition brings together over 65
prime examples of Brauner’s work drawn from the core
holdings of The Menil Collection and an international
roster of loans. Victor Brauner: Surrealist Hieroglyphs is
the first museum exhibition of Brauner’s work to take
place outside of Europe.
The work of Brauner and its position in the history of art
comprise a story replete with paradox. He was a
respected and integral member of both the 1920s
Romanian avant-garde and, beginning in the 1930s, the
Paris Surrealist circle. Yet the history of modernist art
often minimizes or neglects his idiosyncratic approach to
Surrealism. An erudite man of high intellect, Brauner
made paintings that often have a naïve, folk art quality.Primarily focusing on figuration—whether human, animal,
occult, or mythological beings—his works conversely are
often realized in boldly colored abstract shapes and
decorative patterning. An undeterred experimenter, he
employed wax and encaustic media techniques of his
own invention. While his paintings often seem
thematically simple, even invoking images from a child’s
storybook, they are in fact underpinned by an intricate
lexicon of symbolism and archetypes. Bringing to mind
the cave drawings of Lascaux, the pictograms of North
American cliff dwellers, or the carvings in Mayan ruins,
Brauner’s work was propelled by a search for a
universality of spirit.
IMAGE:
Victor Brauner
La Bas
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