Untitled

The Romanian artist Victor Brauner used simple colors and geometries to construct this pictographic image of an animal with vegetal, leaf-like aspects. The distilled form recalls abstract depictions of constellations and “celestial script”; Brauner appropriated representational systems sourced from a variety of divinatory traditions throughout his engagement with the Parisian surrealist movement. The rough white background wash is reminiscent of the candle-wax that the artist employed in his paintings during a period of deprivation during World War II. It gives this image the appearance of cave-painting, and indeed the recently discovered Paleolithic paintings at Lascaux were at the forefront of the French imagination after their opening to the public in 1948. Brauner’s desire to link modern-day painting to this pre-history of image-making was shared by other surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and Joan Miró. According to André Breton, however, Brauner’s primary contribution was his insistence on portraying “the powers of the self” in a period dominated by totalitarianism.