Victor Brauner, The Magical Adventure
2026
39€ €
This exhibition, which presents the encounters between Victor Brauner’s work and a private collection and between the artist’s creation and his personal collection of non-Western objets d’art, is accompanied by a catalog published in French and English. Through a collection of new, unpublished texts, it examines these encounters and the history around them so as to share the artist’s magical adventure.
Following the introduction, the catalog features a conversation between the exhibition’s curator and Samy Kinge, Victor Brauner’s collector and art dealer, who has loaned his collection for the purposes of the exhibition. Here they evoke their encounters with the artist and his creation.
Five specialists each contribute an essay studying Victor Brauner’s work from diverse perspectives. Fabric Flahutez analyzes the concept of a collection based on sensibility and affinity or on the poetic companionship of artist-collectors, such as Victor Brauner, Roberto Matta and André Breton. The anthropologist Marie Mauzé examines the notion of magical art in relation to Brauner’s work, from Claude Lévi-Strauss to André Breton. Didier Semin looks at the notion of bricolage that runs through Brauner’s creation, with references to Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind, so-called Art Brut and “savage” or “primitive” arts. The private collection is then studied by the exhibition curator in relation to the works on show, those, previously unseen, thereby underscoring the cohesion and quality of this unique collection. Lastly, Noémie Fillon presents Brauner’s personal collection, exploring its constitution, its singularity and the plurality of prisms through which it was created: magical, ethnographical and fraternal.
Reproductions of the works exhibited—Victor’s Brauner’s corpus from the 1920s to the 1960s, encompassing painting, graphic art, sculpture and objects, as well as works from Oceania, Africa and Mexico selected from Brauner’s personal collection, on loan from the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne—are published alongside the essays to punctuate the catalog.
An analytical illustrated biography and a selection of archives from the private collection complete the artist’s universe.
This catalog is a unique publication that accompanies visitors through the exhibition while presenting the inventions and the magical adventure of one of the 20th century’s most singular and spellbinding corpuses, revealed by an extraordinary private collection.
Available at the museum, for orders : bookshop@nmnm.mc
