Signifying the global reach of the movement, the NGV’s growing collection of Surrealism is enhanced by a recent addition made possible through the Estate of Ian and Judith Gardiner, Auxerre, 1937, a rare collage by Victor Brauner, a Romanian artist who played a key role in Surrealist circles in Paris as well as his native Bucharest.
Brauner was born in 1903 in north-eastern Romania and studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest in the early 1920s. During his student years he began painting Cezannesque landscapes and quickly familiarised himself with European avant-garde styles. He showed Expressionist influenced paintings in his first solo exhibition in Bucharest in 1924, and in the same year published his ‘Picto-poetry’ manifesto and an article entitled ‘Surrationalism’ in the short-lived periodical 75 H.P. He made his first trip to Paris in 1925, and following his return to Bucharest in 1927 was involved with the Romanian Dada and Surrealist review unu, in which his work was reproduced.
Brauner continued to move between Paris and Bucharest until 1938, when a royal dictatorship was instituted in Romania (followed by a dictatorship in 1940), and he left the country for good. In Paris again for four years from 1930, he met fellow Romanian artist Constantin Brâncusi, and lived in the same building as artists Alberto Giacometti and Yves Tanguy, the latter of whom introduced Brauner to the Surrealist circle. It was in this period that, influenced by the writings of French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille, Brauner painted a prophetic self-portrait in which he depicts himself with a damaged and bleeding eye, Self-portrait, 1931 (Centre Pompidou, Paris). Seven years later, in August 1938, Brauner lost his left eye when he intervened in a brawl between Surrealists Óscar Dominguez and Esteban Francés. Strange imagery of eyes–horns growing out eye sockets, eyes held in palms of hands, eyeballs punctured or strewn on the ground–appear in Brauner’s works of the 1930s, both before and after his traumatic accident. Brauner officially joined the Surrealist group in 1933, and in 1934 the group’s leader, André Breton, wrote the catalogue introduction for his first solo show in Paris at the Galerie Pierre. Like other Surrealists of the period, Brauner sought inspiration for his work in dreams and the unconscious, as well as in diverse religions and ancient myths. When he returned to Bucharest in 1935 he mounted an exhibition of Surrealist paintings and accompanying texts that excited considerable attention.
At the onset of the Second World War, Brauner fled to the South of France, where he kept in contact with the exiled Surrealist group in Marseille. He returned to Paris in 1945 and participated in the first major postwar Surrealist exhibition, Exposition internationale du Surréalisme (July–August 1947), which was organised by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton. Brauner’s postwar painting incorporated esoteric symbols and forms derived from sources ranging from tarot cards to Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was officially excluded from the Surrealist group in 1948 for refusing to denounce his close friend, the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. Brauner represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1966, the year of his death, with an entire room devoted to his work. The first survey of Brauner’s work in his native Romania was held at the National Museum of Art in Timisoara in March–May 2023.
Brauner made Auxerre at a time when many Surrealist artists were experimenting with the collage medium. The Surrealists especially valued the capacity of collage to unsettle the viewer through the provocative juxtaposition of images. Breton had recognised this quality in Max Ernst’s inventive collages of the early 1920s, praising them for their ‘marvellous faculty of attaining two widely separate realities … of bringing them together and drawing a spark from their contact… and disorienting us’. Collages were made from fragments of printed matter, photographs and other ephemera that were removed from their usual contexts and assembled into bizarre combinations that suggested dreamlike, illogical or startling new realities.
By the 1930s many more Surrealist artists and poets were following Ernst’s example and using the medium to introduce the irrational and the chance encounter into their work. Important practitioners included Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, André Breton and Georges Hugnet among many others.
Victor Brauner made very few collages, Auxerre being one of only four known examples extant. In Auxerre Brauner combines two unrelated photographic images that he has clipped from disparate printed sources. Lying stiffly across the flat bed of a printing press is a woman in evening dress, the pearls around her neck picked out with dabs of white gouache that the artist has also used to paint out her eyes. The incongruous combination of mechanical object and human figure has the unsettling effect of a reality that cannot be grasped or explained by reason, and that seems to exist beyond the threshold of the mundane, everyday world. Auxerre is a quintessentially Surrealist image that recalls a metaphor in Comte de Lautréamont’s epic poem Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) that so inspired Breton and the Surrealists: ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’.
Auxerre has an important provenance, having been acquired from Brauner by the Surrealist poet Georges Hugnet, who was also a major exponent of collage. Its acquisition has been generously supported by the Estate of Ian and Judith Gardiner.
Cathy Leahy is NGV Senior Curator, Prints and Drawings.
The NGV warmly thanks the Estate of Ian and Judith Gardiner for the acquisition of this work, which will be on display in the Surrealist gallery on Level 2 of NGV International from August 2026.
This essay was first published in Issue 57 | NGV Magazine Mar–Apr 2026.