Victor Brauner valuation
Romanian Surrealist who painted a self-portrait with an eye put out, then lost his own.
Victor Brauner was born at Piatra Neamț, Romania, in 1903, the son of a Jewish timber manufacturer.
What a work by Victor Brauner is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Victor Brauner was born at Piatra Neamț, Romania, in 1903, the son of a Jewish timber manufacturer. He had his first exhibition at the Mozart Galleries in Bucharest in 1924, published the review 75HP with the poet Ilarie Voronca, and contributed to the avant-garde magazine unu. He settled in Paris in 1930, where Brancusi taught him photography and Yves Tanguy, who lived in the same building, brought him to the Surrealists. In those years he painted Self-Portrait with Enucleated Eye. In August 1938 he lost his left eye to a glass thrown by Óscar Domínguez during a fight with Esteban Francés. He spent the war in the south of France, became a French citizen in 1963 and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1966, the year he died in Paris.
The work runs from the eye pictures of the 1930s through hybrid figures and talismanic signs to flat, emblematic late compositions, and there are a great many drawings. The museum of modern art at Saint-Étienne holds a large collection of drawings from his studio, and the Centre Pompidou has published a catalogue of the works in its own collection. A buyer looks for exhibition history and a provenance back to the artist or his widow, Jacqueline.
The Galerie Pierre, Marseille and Venice
His first Paris exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre in 1934, had a catalogue preface by André Breton. After the fall of France in 1940 he joined Breton, Max Ernst and Wifredo Lam at the Villa Air-Bel in Marseille, hoping for a visa to leave, and drew figures for the Surrealists' card deck, the Jeu de Marseille.
Prelude to a Civilization, painted in encaustic on Masonite in 1954, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the 1966 Biennale a whole room was given to his work.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
