Victor Brauner - Exiles

Exiles

In 1938 he returned to France. On August 28 he lost his left eye in a violent argument between Oscar Domínguez and Esteban Frances. Brauner attempted to protect Esteban and was hit by a glass thrown by Domínguez: the premonition became true.

That same year, he met Jaqueline Abraham, who was to become his wife. He created a series of paintings called lycanthropic or sometimes chimeras.

He left Paris during Nazi Germany's invasion of France in 1940, together with Pierre Mabille. He lived for a while in Perpignan, at Robert Rius', then at Cant-Blage, in the Eastern Pyrenees and at Saint Feliu d'Amont, where he was forcibly secluded. However, he kept in touch with the Surrealists that had taken refuge in Marseille. In 1941, he was granted the permission to settle in Marseille. Seriously ill, he was hospitalized at the "Paradis" clinic.

He painted "Prelude to a civilization" in 1954, now in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is in encaustic on Masonite. After the war, he took part in the Venice Biennale, and traveled to Italy.

In 1959, he settled in the workshop on Lepic St. In 1961 he traveled to Italy again. In the same year, New York City's Bodley Gallery mounted a solo exhibition of Brauner's work. He settled in Varengeville in Normandy, where he spent most of his time working.

In 1965 he created an ensemble of object-paintings full of inventiveness and vivacity, grouped under the titles Mythologie and Fêtes des mères. The themes are connected to the mythology of the modern world, where man is depicted with humor, tenderness and pessimism, alienated by his new "mothers" - L’automoma and L'aeroplapa. Criticism or acceptance of this world, that once seemed "so terrifying" and in which "reality became an extremely harmful thing", but which actual life made more acceptable. It is undeniable that these paintings, made in Varengeville and in Athanor (1964), where Brauner retreated, are the visions full of humor and imagination of a future world that he wanted to leave to us as a gift. This Mythology includes the last foretelling painting, La fin et le debut (made in 1965), which reminds us that "when the painter's life ends, his work starts living" (Dominique Bozo in Le petit journal des grandes Expositions - Victor Brauner - au Musée National de l'Art moderne - Paris du 2 juin au 28 septembre 1977).

In 1966 he was chosen to represent France at the biannual exhibition in Venice, where an entire hall was dedicated to him.

He died in Paris as a result of a prolonged illness. The epitaph on his tomb from the Montmartre cemetery is a phrase from his notebooks: "Peindre, c'est la vie, la vraie vie, ma vie" ("Painting is life, the real life, my life").

The painter’s notebooks with private notes, which he handed to Max Pol Fouchet, partly enclose the "key" of his creation: "Each painting that I make is projected from the deepest sources of my anxiety..."

Victor Brauner's brother, Harry Brauner, was a folklorist who later married Lena Constante.