Victor Brauner
(1903 - 1966)

 

Victor Brauner was a Romanian painter and sculptor of the surrealist movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Brauner

The Surrealist
1947
Oil on canvas
60 x 45 cm
Guggenheim N.Y.
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/681

 

In The Surrealist Victor Brauner borrows motifs from the tarot to create a portrait of himself as a young man. The tarot, a set of seventy-eight illustrated cards used in fortune telling, was a subject of widespread interest to Brauner and other Surrealists. Four of these cards, for example, appeared on André Derain’s cover for the December 1933 issue of Minotaure. A group including Brauner even produced a deck of cards in 1940–41 that was probably a tarot. One tarot card, the Juggler (the first card in the Marseille tarot deck), provided Brauner with a key prototype for his self-portrait: the Surrealist’s large hat, medieval costume, and the position of his arms all derive from this figure who, like Brauner’s subject, stands behind a table displaying a knife, a goblet, and coins.¹ The tarot Juggler appropriately symbolizes the creativity of the Surrealist poet, for it refers to the capacity of each individual to create his own personality through intelligence, wit, and initiative, and thus to play with his own future, as the juggler manipulates his baton.