André Pieyre de MANDIARGUES – Manuscript on Victor BRAUNER. 1962.

André Pieyre de MANDIARGUES (1909.1991)

Autograph manuscript signed – Victor BRAUNER.

A quarto page on blue paper.

[June 1962]

"Victor Brauner had never shown anything as fascinating as the few paintings in his recent exhibition."

Interesting manuscript by Mandiargues celebrating, for the Nouvelle Revue française , the work of the Romanian Dadaist, then surrealist, painter, Victor Brauner – “governed by magic and sexuality” – who exhibited at the Galerie Rive droite in May 1962, in Paris.

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Read and Seen^*

VICTOR BRAUNER (Right Bank Gallery)

For a long time, and precisely since the already distant era of the Waxworks , Victor Brauner had not shown anything as fascinating as the few paintings in his recent exhibition. Magic and sexuality, as we know, have constantly governed Brauner's art ; they are at the origin of all his approaches, they are inseparable from his spiritual climate. Now, in the attempt at the sexual act or the magical operation, there is no intermediate measure between success and fiasco, and one would say that in every pictorial attempt by Brauner, the same is true. Let us hasten to add that in our opinion the success is complete in the works of the last period, where the rhythm is intense and sustained, where the forms flourish with a tropical ease, where the contours are closed as in the Aztec reliefs or in the decoration of the most beautiful vases of the Nazca culture.

ANDRÉ PIEYRE DE MANDIARGUES  

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^* “Read and Seen” was the title of the section of La Nouvelle Revue française in which the article appeared, in June 1962 (no. 114).