For today’s post I’m going to devote the entire page to an artist statement written by Victor Brauner. On the Fantastic was published in the 1943/44 edition of VVV. This was a magazine published briefly in New York by the Surrealists displaced by the war in Europe. I haven’t had a chance to check Abe Books to see how much a copy of this issue might be. Can’t be much more than the entire GDP of, say, Portugal.
As you might expect, dear readers, this gem was brought to light by The Theory. Since I just had to write an artist statement myself (where I fell back on words like “memory” and “luminance”) I had no idea an artist statement could be like this. But why not? Maybe we can, like Victor, break away from the terror and boredom of our awful artist statements!
This is a reduced image file I cobbled together from the pdf sent me by The Theory. If you want the original pdf, which also contains a blurry, black and white reproduction of one of Victor’s paintings, let me know in the comments below.
The Theory immediately loved this, too. I’m not certain how extensively it has been reprinted, but the most readily available source (at least mine) is Mary Ann Caws’ (again!) terrific collection Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology (MIT Press, 2001) – should be generally available in libraries and can be previewed on GoogleBooks. Also, if you can find it, Marcel Jean’s anthology, The Autobiography of Surrealism (Viking, 1960) has a very interesting article about VB by Pierre Mabille, “The Painter’s Eye,” reprinted from the Surrealist journal Minotaure. NB: Complete sets of VVV run about $10,000, which I think qualifies as “delirious, obsessive.”
“Delirious and obsessive” is a great working description of The Theory and myself too. I’ll leave it to readers to decide which one of us is which. I’ll update Tuesday’s post with a hard link to Mary Ann Caws’ catalog (provided by The Theory, of course) and finish the week with a couple more Brauner images. In the meantime, we love encaustic “because it is incandescent, burning liquid.”
Victor’s style of statement is very cool. Just, PLEASE…if you are going to follow it, group “You will like my art because it is…” all the way at the top and save us from having to read “…because it is____” how every many lines. LOL Please?
Cross-eyed and annoyed with the “because it is” repeated 41 times…LOL. %(
I thought about editing it, but that would have meant retyping the whole thing. Instead I embraced the idea “Because it is primitive” and left it as is. Also Victor had spent a lot of time alone–that’s got to mess with your head.