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

André Pieyre de MANDIARGUES (1909.1991)

Autograph manuscript signed – Victor BRAUNER.

One page in quarto on bluish paper.

[June 1962]

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

An 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 (Galerie Rive droite)

For a long time, and specifically since the now distant era of the Waxworks , Victor Brauner had shown nothing as fascinating as the few paintings in his recent exhibition. Magic and sexuality, as is well known, have consistently governed Brauner's art ; they are at the origin of all his endeavors, they are inseparable from his spiritual climate. Now, in the attempt at the sexual act or the magical operation, there is no intermediate step between success and fiasco, and it would seem that in every pictorial endeavor by Brauner, the same holds true. Let us hasten to add that, in our opinion, the success is complete in the works of his later period, where the rhythm is intense and sustained, where the forms flourish with a tropical ease, where the contours are as defined as in Aztec reliefs or in the decoration of the finest 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).