(Piatra Neamtz, Rumania 1903–1966 Paris)
La leçon de Twist, 1962, signed and dated; titled on the reverse, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Le point cardinal, Paris (label on the reverse)
L’Attico Galleria d’Arte, Rome (label on the reverse)
L’Attico esse arte, Rome (label on the reverse)
Private Collection, Italy
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Paris, Galerie Le Point Cardinal, 1963
Paris, Victor Brauner, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 2 June – 25 September 1972 (label on the reverse), exh. cat. p. 108
Rome, Victor Brauner, L’Attico-esse arte, 22 January – 19 March 1983, exh. cat. no. 23 with ill.

Literature:
Jean Leymarie, Victor Brauner, in “Le petit journal des grandes Expositions”, edited by La Réunion des Musées Nationaux in the occasion of the exhibition held at Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris 1972

Victor Brauner is a figurative painter with symbolic traits, and was very close to the Surrealists, Dali and Magritte in particular.
An affinity with Surrealism is present in his ability to explore the unconscious, especially through the dream angle, but depicted primitively, a quasi-infantile type of drawing conceived with the desire to represent the original stages of the human race.
What differentiates Brauner from the Surrealists are the characteristic features of his art, namely the flatness of the drawing, the schematic naivety, the frontality: a return to the two-dimensional, flattened figures and the primitive art in which Paul Klee set the benchmark in the twentieth century.
A natural comparison can be made between Victor Brauner’s style and Klee’s Mask of Fear, both in the inspiration taken from ethnologically themed masks and the two sets of legs which typologically suggest the presence of two figures united in a single body just as in La leçon de Twist.
Brauner was also very close to Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, which truly regressed to primitive states, escaping from contemporary twentieth-century culture.
What they had in common were sharp contours and homogeneous backgrounds, elementary forms that conceal or narrate myths: an expressive rigour that led to a clear reading of the images.
In La leçon de Twist, a painting from the 1960s that sits between the movements of Surrealism, Metaphysics and Magical Realism, Brauner offers us an art autre: not an excess of museum neoclassicism, nor wild brutalism, “but a long journey back to the stylised elegances of other epochs, hieroglyphics, apotropaic symbols, initiation rites” (Renato Barilli), thus giving us the sensation of being the primitives of a new era.
“The subject of the painting is totemic; the painting is therefore magical, establishing a direct, enchanting relationship with the great primitive reveries”.
(Comunicazione senza pregiudizio, Victor Brauner January 1961)
“The triumphant imagination will be the basis of a liberating ethic. Prohibitions and restrictions of all kinds will be abolished, and a reality will open up where anything is possible”.

Manoscritto dimenticato dietro consapevolezza, Victor Brauner January 1964

“Standing before Victor Brauner’s present painting, my joy becomes sacred”.

(André Breton, “Entre chien et loup”, Cahiers d’art, 1945–46).