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拍品专文
Sammy Kinge has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Rire du fleuve et mon mystère was executed in 1936, three years after Brauner had joined the surrealist group, inducted as he was by André Breton in 1933. Mysterious not only for its imagery and the statement of its title, yet more so for its premonitory aspect, this composition represents a rare and large example of his works on paper in gouache of this period.
Picturing a head in profile, resembling the artist’s own, an eye within morphs into a concealed wine glass, connected at the bottom with a revolver pointing inwards on the head. This quintessentially surrealist composition presents a subliminal landscape of motifs that evoke incongruous, perhaps random, associations - or dislocations - between sight, perception, intoxication, desire, escapism and danger within the depths of the unconscious mind.
The motif of the eye was prevalent within Brauner’s œuvre by this time, the artist having created a number of works including his well-known Self-portrait with Enucleated Eye in 1931. The vision of the eye had also featured in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s unforgettable silent film Un chien andalou, heralded as a surrealist masterpiece, featuring a famous scene where a woman’s eyeball is cut with a razor. These violent evocations, although not referential in a strictly literal sense, portray disruption between the physical world as perceived by the eye, and interpretations of the mind, with subliminal parallels to the figure of Oedipus, a prevalent figure in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
What Brauner could not have known as he created this work two years earlier, was that on 28 August 1938, this vision would become a reality. Óscar Domínguez, famously a heavy and violent drinker, was engaged in an argument with fellow artist Esteban Francés. As Brauner stepped in to diffuse the situation and protect his friend, he received Domínguez’s wine glass to his face, destroying his left eye. Rire du fleuve et mon mystère therefore presents a similarly Œdipean fate, in an extraordinary parallel to the events of his life to follow.
Rire du fleuve et mon mystère was executed in 1936, three years after Brauner had joined the surrealist group, inducted as he was by André Breton in 1933. Mysterious not only for its imagery and the statement of its title, yet more so for its premonitory aspect, this composition represents a rare and large example of his works on paper in gouache of this period.
Picturing a head in profile, resembling the artist’s own, an eye within morphs into a concealed wine glass, connected at the bottom with a revolver pointing inwards on the head. This quintessentially surrealist composition presents a subliminal landscape of motifs that evoke incongruous, perhaps random, associations - or dislocations - between sight, perception, intoxication, desire, escapism and danger within the depths of the unconscious mind.
The motif of the eye was prevalent within Brauner’s œuvre by this time, the artist having created a number of works including his well-known Self-portrait with Enucleated Eye in 1931. The vision of the eye had also featured in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s unforgettable silent film Un chien andalou, heralded as a surrealist masterpiece, featuring a famous scene where a woman’s eyeball is cut with a razor. These violent evocations, although not referential in a strictly literal sense, portray disruption between the physical world as perceived by the eye, and interpretations of the mind, with subliminal parallels to the figure of Oedipus, a prevalent figure in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
What Brauner could not have known as he created this work two years earlier, was that on 28 August 1938, this vision would become a reality. Óscar Domínguez, famously a heavy and violent drinker, was engaged in an argument with fellow artist Esteban Francés. As Brauner stepped in to diffuse the situation and protect his friend, he received Domínguez’s wine glass to his face, destroying his left eye. Rire du fleuve et mon mystère therefore presents a similarly Œdipean fate, in an extraordinary parallel to the events of his life to follow.