Victor Brauner

Galleria Gissi, Turin
Le Point, Galerie d'Art Moderne, Monte Carlo
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1984

Milan, Galleria del Naviglio, Da una collezione a Milano: omaggio a Carlo Cardazzo, 1968

Paolo Levi, Giulio Bolaffi & Luigi Carluccio, Catalogo internazionale Bolaffi d'arte moderna, Turin, 1971, illustrated in colour p. 22

The canvas is not lined. UV examination reveals a few small spots of retouching in places to the white pigment, which relate to small pigment losses. There is a loss (approximately 2cm. long) towards the right part of the lower edge and four further losses to the reddish brown pigment in the upper left part of the composition. There are fine lines of entirely stable craquelure throughout the white pigment. This work is in overall good condition.
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The present work is a wonderful example of Victor Brauner’s iconic artistic elements. His œuvre is characterised by an intrinsic ambience of mystery and naivety that came from his lifelong fascination for primitive art, particularly that of Egypt and Africa. Alain Jouffroy has argued that his primitive aesthetic was not simply ‘an aesthetic and formal borrowing’ but that it also corresponded to ‘a desire to overcome European traditions’ (Alain Jouffroy, ‘Victor Brauner: Beyond Surrealism’ in Victor Brauner (exhibition catalogue), Didier Imbert Fine Art, Paris, 1990, p. 24).

Brauner was particularly interested in the ritual and symbolic qualities inherent in primitive art, qualities which he successfully transferred to the present work, challenging our understanding of the human, animal and material qualities and their own boundaries. Hybrids are a recurrent motif in Brauner’s œuvre and indeed animals play a particularly symbolic role. Through its dissonance of elements Hominisation et contrehominisation d’une forme humaine tâtonnant son dedans challenge the conception of the human form veering towards abstraction and geometry. The matte aspect of the worked surface, perhaps as a gesture of rejection of a third dimension, contributes to a stark schematisation characteristic of the artist's mature work. The reduction of the figure to its most essential form give this work an intrinsic universality, a quality which unifies much of the artist’s oeuvre. Remarking upon Brauner’s art in general, Alain Jouffroy has argued that ‘by its connections with the symbolic systems of various civilizations, it went beyond the traditional dichotomies between the old and the new, the West and the East, spontaneous dreams and reasoned criticism and […] “the abstract” and “the figurative”’ (op. cit., Alain Jouffroy, 1990, p. 8).