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Brauner's Eye

Painted 1931, manifested 1938, by Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner was a Rumanian surrealist. He had, as many artists do, two eyes. To start with.

In 1931 he painted the most surreal of all surreal paintings ever painted--not because of its (admittedly unsettling) content, but because it either predicted a surreal reality or steered its own painter to make its image real.

In 1931, then, while a healthy two-eyed man, he painted Self-Portrait with Injured Eye; euphemistic, as he shows his left eye-socket empty and scarred; he's not injured, but permanently mutilated--a one-eyed man.

'Self-Portrait with Injured Eye', painted 1931 by Victor Brauner. Click to enlarge.
Two-eyed, perceiving depth, he saw that Paris was the world's art heart. He moved there and joined the Surrealist circle.

In 1938, in a cafe where the Surrealists met, an argument got out of hand, and surrealist hothead Oscar Dominguez threw a bottle at Estaban Francés. He missed--and hit Victor. The glass took out his left eye, as he had predicted in paint, seven years before.

Note that he hadn't joined the argument. He wasn't living dangerously, picking fights, trying hard to get his eye gouged out. While that'd be self-destructive, artists since forever have sacrificed bits for art. Fingers, families, careers... ears.

But that's not Brauner. He just painted. And the world obeyed his... vision.

SOURCE: 101 Surrealists by Desmond Morris (2024), p. 38-9


LISTS AND LINKS: paintings - portraits - eyes & vision - disability, mutilation & amputation - Surrealism - violence - oops! - prediction, or summoning? coping with paranormality - a Brauner dream-painting: The City I Dream - workaholic cartoonist Rick Veitch sacrifices fingers in Ginsberg Unmasked - a (1938!) predictive dream of an injured Left Eye - a WWI soldier wills a specific injury to ward off worse, in Wound-Bargain

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