Sorry, Mark Rothko’s late paintings, there’s a new annoying read of art as foreshadowing kid in town. Victor Brauner’s 1931 self-portrait has been on the Pompidou’s Surrealism anniversary world tour for a while now, and is currently on view at THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, where Andrew Wasserman photographed it yesterday, at a distance that hopefully doesn’t need a content warning.
The wall label reads, “Victor Brauner lost his left eye in an accident in 1938. Seven years before, curiously, he had made this small self-portrait with a removed eye, which now acquired the aura of prophecy. Brauner accepted his partial loss of physical sight, saying it had turned him into a seer.”
Which is still more circumspect than the Pompidou—who owns the painting but does not publish it, apparently—which calls the painting a “premonition,” and the foundation of Brauner’s surrealist cred: “cette œuvre occupe une place symbolique dans la vie et la création de Victor Brauner, annonçant l’accident qui le frappa lors d’une rixe entre Óscar Domínguez et Esteban Francès, dans la nuit du 27 au 28 août 1938, et qui le priva définitivement de son œil gauche (l’œil droit dans le tableau).”
So some things here: the accident was a bar fight between two other artists, and the eye Brauner actually lost was not the one missing in the painting. Losing his eye had an understandably large impact on the artist and his life and practice, well beyond the symbolic. The allure of using art to make sense of such a loss is also understandable.
The Pompidou’s text mentions writings about Brauner’s case and the Surrealist fascination with eyes and sight. So maybe the best thing that can be said is that post hoc prophecying is a lens [sic] on the past, a strategy for making meaning. So is irony, and whether it was prophetic, Brauner’s painting is certainly ironic. Maybe he should have been a Dadaist instead.