Victor Brauner - "Conglomeros" - 1968

“Conglomeros” Victor Brauner – Exhibition Booklet

Paris, Galerie Alexandre Iolas, 196 boulevard Saint-Germain – from December 18, 1968 to January 18, 1969

The booklet presents itself in the barest form imaginable: a single sheet folded in two, forming four pages. The cover page bears the exhibition title, the dates, and the gallery’s name. The inner page reproduces a Brauner drawing titled Le Conglomére. There is no text: neither critical notes, nor biography, nor list of works. This radical minimalism itself is a stance: it harkens back to the tradition of invitation cards and surrealist exhibition announcements, in which the image takes precedence over discourse and the gallery merely indicates the place, the time, and the artist.

Victor Brauner was born June 15, 1903, in Piatra Neamț, Romania, into a Jewish family oriented toward spiritualism—his father was interested in spiritism and occultism, influences that would permanently mark his work. He briefly studied at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts in 1921, participated in the Romanian Dadaist ferment, and co-founded the 75 HP journal in 1924, before staying in Paris for the first time in 1925, where he befriended Constantin Brâncuși, a fellow countryman. He returned to Romania, then settled permanently in Paris in 1930, where Yves Tanguy introduced him to the Surrealist group. André Breton wrote the preface for his first Paris exhibition at Galerie Pierre in 1934. Brauner formally joined the Surrealist group in 1933.

In 1938, during a quarrel in Óscar Domínguez’s Paris studio, he lost his left eye—an accident he had foreshadowed with troubling precision in several of his paintings from the preceding years, where figures with torn-out or empty eyes recurred with insistence. This event, seen by his contemporaries as the realization of a prophecy, greatly reinforced his reputation as a seer within the Surrealist group. During World War II, displaced to the Alpes-MMaritimes and then to Marseille because of his Jewish origins and the occupation, he was cut off from his usual painting materials and invented alternative techniques—the painting by candlelight, wax frottage, working on canvas sacks or on coarse paper—which allowed him to develop an autonomous formal universe, profoundly original, increasingly distant from Breton’s orthodox Surrealism.

The term Conglomeros designates both a monumental sculpture Brauner created in 1945—in plaster, 180 cm high, now held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, made with the help of sculptor Michel Herz—and a series of drawings, paintings, and works on paper revolving around this foundational motif. The Conglomeros sculpture is a composite and ambiguous being, an organic body and an architectural mass at once, whose forms simultaneously evoke a human body, a mineral structure, and an undefinable mythological entity. It sits within Brauner’s most fertile period, the war years, when his isolation led him to develop a fully personal mythical bestiary.

Alexandre Iolas—born Constantin Coutsoudis in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1908 and died in New York in 1987—was one of the most influential and original gallerists of the 20th century. A former ballet dancer in the troupe of the Marquis de Cuevas, forced to give up dancing after an accident, he turned to art dealing after finding a painting by Giorgio de Chirico that changed his life, as he himself put it. He opened his first gallery in New York in 1945—the Hugo Gallery—then founded the Galerie Alexander Iolas in 1955, gradually expanding into an international network: Geneva (1963), Paris (1964), Milan (1966), Zurich, Madrid, and Rome. The Paris gallery, established at 196 boulevard Saint-Germain, was opened at the persistent urging of Max Ernst, with whom Iolas maintained an unwavering friendship, and quickly became one of the cultural hubs of the Paris Left Bank. Iolas kept his promise to Ernst: he closed the Paris gallery upon Ernst’s death in 1976.

Victor Brauner was one of the four Surrealist artists that Iolas defended with the greatest constancy and passion—alongside Magritte, Max Ernst, and Matta. The relationship between the two men is longstanding and warm: Brauner referred to Iolas in his letters as the American gallerist. The façade of the Paris gallery appears in an archival photograph held by the Kandinsky Library of the Centre Pompidou, taken during a Brauner exhibition opening in 1965. The December 1968 Conglomeros exhibition was one of the first posthumous shows dedicated to the artist in this gallery, and its booklet—absolutely austere—bears the mark of a dealer who, in his own words, did not conceive the gallery as a marketplace but as an arena of passion for art.

18 x 23 cm (closed). 4 pages. One fold in the center. Foxing. Three small orange traces on the second page.