The Hive Encaustic is going to be quiet this week while I get my life together.
Every morning I drag myself out of bed earlier than nature intended to assemble blog posts and other bon mots of the writerly sort. Then I’m off to work to suffer in a whole ‘nother field of endeavor. This week I’m using my writing time to assemble my notes on glazes and cold wax paint. The recipes are all over my desk on index cards, it’s a mess.
Next week I’ll be back with a cold wax paint apologia (mineral spirits, ptooey!), but in the meantime I leave you in the hands of a true master of the encaustic, the quite good-looking Surrealist painter (at least until he lost his eye in a bar fight) Victor Brauner. These images come from an exhibition catalog called Surrealism: New Worlds by Mary Ann Caws (2011) for the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco.
Victor Brauner (1949) A L’Ami. Encaustic on card, 8 1/2″ x 6 1/2″.
Victor Brauner (1959) Le Specialiste du vide- Petites annonces. Oil, newspaper and wax collage on paper. 15 3/4″ x 19 3/4″.
And finally, Victor himself.
Victor Brauner (June 15, 1903 – March 12, 1966). Taken sometime before he lost his eye. He’s wearing some kind of strappy overalls here, I think.
The Theory thanks you for Victor Brauner week, and would like to share some bits of a very interesting review by none other than Clement Greenberg of a 1947 exhibition at Julien Levy in NYC. I was surprised by this, given CG’s antipathy toward Surrealism, and he indeed opens by noting the “irrelevance” of Brauner’s earlier work, allowing even so that “unlike most other surrealists, he was irrelevant in an affecting way.” But, CG continues, “now…he has produced some actually good painting.” Observing that Brauner began working with encaustic due to wartime shortages of oil paint, CG observes the influence of Paul Klee in what he terms Brauner’s “abandon[ment of] his former smoky effects for a flat-patterned, ornamental, emblematic kind of painting that clings as closely to the picture surface as inlay work…an entirely unexpected inventiveness that has nothing to do with the usual surrealism.” Readers of CG will see that this says quite as much of the author as it does of the painter, but there we are. Complete text in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Arrogant Purpose (1945-1949). Look for it in your library or online at GoogleBooks.
Thanks, Theory! I wish we had some photos of the so-called actually good paintings. Given that Victor was isolated for a couple of years during the war and had developed a highly idiosyncratic encaustic methodology (i.e. using wax-soaked canvases and India ink almost like woodblock prints, then cleaning the wax surface with gasoline) the painting surface was almost all he had to work with. Thanks for sending the catalog my way.
Well, it’s difficult to get a clear sense of the chronology of his work, but a painting from 1946, Composition in Wax, in a private collection in Paris, has a similarly totemic quality to A L’Ami, and is presumably related to what Greenberg saw and liked. Interestingly (and oddly), The Surrealist, one of Brauner’s best known works, dates from January, 1947, has nothing to do with the influences of Klee and Dubuffet, which CG finds praiseworthy and is, I think, precisely what he would have disliked. This painting was owned by none other than Peggy Guggenheim, and you can see it on the Guggenheim’s website.
Theory, do we have an image of Composition in Wax somewhere? Peggy G must have loved Victor (we know she loved Max Ernst–and who wouldn’t?) because she had a couple of his works in her collection. Those Surrealists….
PG, who did indeed love her Surrealists, Marcel Duchamp, too, also owned Brauner’s beautiful Consciousness of Shock (1951), which you have previously had up on the blog. There is, unfortunately, relatively little readily available about his work – I would recommend anyone interested take a look at the Mary Ann Caws catalog you mentioned, online at http://www.weinstein.com/surrealism-new-worlds/docs/weinstein-gallery-surrealism-new-worlds-web.pdf. And, for that, anyone interested in Surrealism, particularly the role of women, should look at Caws’ own website, maryanncaws.com, as she is one of the most important scholars in the field.
I’ll post the images of these works later today, if I get a chance. It is already one of those days here in the alternative reality called work.