A collection of art by Victor Brauner.

Victor Brauner (1903-1966) was born in Piatra Neamt in eastern Romania. He was the son of a timber manufacturer who settled in Vienna, where Victor attended elementary school.

The family went back to Romania, where Brauner attended the Art School in Bucharest (1919-1921) and started painting. There, as he testified himself, he went through all the stages: "Dadaist, Abstractionist, Expressionist".

In 1930, Brauner settled in Paris, where he became a friend of Benjamin Fondane and met Yves Tanguy, who would later introduce him to the circle of the Surrealists. He lived on Rue Moulin Vert, in the same building as Giacometti and Tanguy.

In 1935, Brauner returned to Bucharest, and in 1938 again returned to France. After Nazi Germany´s invasion of France in 1940, Brauner had to leave Paris. He lived for a while in Perpignan and Saint Feliu d’Amont and kept in touch with the Surrealists that had taken refuge in Marseille, where he moved in1941.

After the war, Brauner settled in Paris again. Brauner executed his later works in encaustic, a technique in which paint is mixed with molten wax. Into the resulting hardened surface, he incised the figures with pen and ink. He had first employed this medium after he was forced to take refuge in Southern France and was unable to obtain his usual working materials.

Around 1960, Brauner settled in Varengeville, where he spent most of his time working. In 1966 he was chosen to represent France at the biannual exhibition in Venice. Brauner died in Paris, on March 12, 1966. The epitaph on his tomb at Montmartre cemetery is a phrase from one of his notebooks: "Peindre, c´est la vie, la vraie vie, ma vie".