Arturo Schwarz lived in Milan, was one of the major collectors of Dada and Surrealist art, and ran an art gallery in Milan, on Via del Gesú 17, between 1961 and 1975. Before 1961, the gallery space functioned initially as a bookstore, where the first small-scale art exhibitions took place.

A large part of his collection, around 700 pieces, ended up as a donation in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Many of these works were displayed at the Dada and Surrealism exhibition in Budapest, 2014, including some works by Victor Brauner.

In March 1962, Brauner had a personal show at the Milanese gallery, most of the exhibited works being created during the 1950s, with some notable exceptions dating from the late 1930s and the 1940s.

A 16-page catalogue was issued to document this exhibition, with a text written by art critic Enrico Crispolti.

The strategy of Crispolti was to rely on extensive quotations and references related to Brauner’s works. The artist’s self-interpretations set the framework of the analysis, along with some previous interpretations by Sarane Alexandrian, Alain Jouffroy, and the views on Surrealism expressed by Paul Éluard and Ferdinand Alquié.

The main thesis of Crispolti’s text, based on Brauner’s own view is that “artistic experience has an initiatory-revelatory character, and is a form of knowing of greater penetration than mere rational investigation” ‒ so art offers an alternative route to get to know the world.

Neoarchaism, narrative character ‒ these are some of the keywords that define Brauner’s works in Crispolti’s description.

The works reproduced in the catalogue mostly obey archetypal geometries ‒ with the notable exception of Passage à travers les zones magiques, from 1939, that adopts the language of Brauner’s haunting chimères.

More than 60 years after the exhibition, we can clearly identify the pictural language of the late Brauner: no evident masterpieces reproduced in the catalogue, but a document of an early and fruitful cooperation between curator and artist ‒ Schwarz and Brauner.

Balázs Imre József