Just a few days before the Brauner retrospective in Timișoara/Temesvár, some early works by Brauner were on display in Sfântu Gheorghe/Sepsiszentgyörgy, in an exhibition based on the Ádám Kovács collection, a dedicated art collector from Budapest, with an interest in avant-garde and surrealist art.
Among the exhibited works by Brauner, the most famous is certainly The Poet Geo Bogza Shows His Head to the Landscape with Oil Wells (1929). The painting, as the poet Geo Bogza himself recounted on several occasions, documents their friendship that came to an end after Brauner’s relocation to Paris. While working on the painting, Brauner stayed for a whole month in Bogza’s home in Buștenari.
An early work by Brauner, with a specific surrealist humour, the painting opened up new horizons in Brauner’s surrealist endeavours. In 1932, the painting became part of Sașa Pană’s collection, as it is mentioned in some of the recent works discussing Brauner’s works (Emil Nicolae, Victor Brauner și însoțitorii, 2013; Camille Morando, Victor Brauner 1903-1966, 2019).
Another work documents Brauner’s friendship with Ilarie Voronca, a poet with whom he “invented” the genre of pictopoetry in the journal 75HP.
Margaret Montagne discusses this work in connection with Brauner’s premonitory obsession with torn-off eyes: “The artist has stained black ink in his eye, as if to blind him. In addition to the fact that the act of destroying vision is premonitory in Victor Brauner, we must link this personal obsession of the artist to the question posed towards the end of the 1920s: must we destroy our sight to go beyond appearances, from reality to surreality?” (Victor Brauner, Victor-Victorios: Desene, gravuri, obiecte, evenimente, Veillant, București, 2019)
Two more works are connected to Brauner’s activity as an author who cooperated with Romanian avant-garde magazines like Unu or Integral. One of them is an untitled illustration published in Unu.
The other is Puk Taylor and Hiras Kreach (1926), which was published in the January 1927 issue of Integral, as an illustration to a text by Stephan Roll, and was initially part of Roll’s collection.
This work also featured in the 2019 Bucharest exhibition in Dada Gallery.
Brauner’s works keep migrating from collection to collection, and in this case they help articulating the surrealist dimensions of the Kovács collection, that includes besides Brauner’s works, paintings by André Masson, Marc Chagall, Lajos Vajda, Corneille and others, many of them associated with avant-garde and surrealism.
(Avant-garde and surrealism. The Ádám Kovács Collection. Transylvanian Art Centre, Sepsiszentgyörgy / Sfântu Gheorghe, 16.12.2022 ‒ 25.02.2023.)
Balázs Imre József
Szürrealizmus 