He was born in Romania in 1903. The son of a Jewish timber manufacturer who later settled in Vienna with his family but returned to Romania in 1914.
In 1916 Victor Brauner attended the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest and the private painting school Horia Igiroşanu.
As he himself testifies, he began to paint going through all the stages – Dadaist, Abstractionist, Expressionist.
In 1924, he held his first solo exhibition in Bucharest at Le Gallerie Mozart. During this period, he met Ilarie Voronca with whom he founded the magazine 75HP.
Victor Brauner, Yves Tanguy and the Surrealists
After an initial stay in Paris (1925) he returned there in 1930, this time settling in the French capital. Here he met Constantin Brâncuși, became friends with the poet Benjamin Fondane and got to know Yves Tanguy who introduced him into the circle of the Surrealists. He also met Alberto Giacometti, who was his neighbour, and André Breton. Thanks to Tanguy, he produced his first paintings with the symbol of the enucleated eye, almost a foreshadowing of the accident he was involved in in 1938, in which he lost his left eye in a scuffle while trying to protect his friend Esteban. In 1935 he returned to Bucharest and joined the Romanian Communist Party. In April of the same year, he held a solo exhibition at the Gallerie Mozart. In 1938, he returned to Paris where the incident with his eye occurred.
The 1940s – From wax colours to monochrome
In 1940, due to the Nazi invasion, he left Paris and settled in French territories until arriving in Marseilles in 1941.
After 1940, during the Nazi occupation of France, the precarious conditions forced him to change his technique and to paint with wax paints. This new phase of his production coincided with the coming together of themes derived from alchemy and esotericism.
In 1947, he participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Maeght Gallery, after which he left the group and devoted himself to the production of mainly monochrome works.
In 1959 he settled back in Paris and opened his own studio in Montmartre.
In 1961 he held a solo exhibition in New York. Later, he settled in Normandy where he worked mainly on his painting-objects from 1965.
In 1966 he represented France at the Venice Biennale with great success and exposure.
In the same year, he died in Paris of a pulmonary embolism and was buried in the Parisian cemetery of Montmartre.
