Over 12,000 visitors from Romania and abroad have visited the Timisoara National Art Museum (MNArT), to admire the first Romanian retrospective dedicated to the Romanian surrealist painter Victor Brauner, since March 1st. This represents a record of popularity for the museum.
“Probably no exhibition in the history of the museum has attracted such a large number of visitors as the ‘Victor Brauner: Inventions and Magic’ exhibition did, in just two months (…) Until now, only with the Victor Brauner exhibition, the National Art Museum in Timisoara has exceeded the total number of visitors from last year. We intend for this type of success to remain a milestone that we will constantly reach in the future”, the director of the museum, Filip Petcu said on Tuesday.
About 100 works (paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings and documents) make up the retrospective exhibition dedicated to the 20th century Romanian surrealist painter and sculptor. Of these, 40 works are offered as a special loan from the Center Pompidou in Paris, together with works from the collections of the Saint-Etienne Metropole, Musee Cantini Marseilles and other museums in Romania or from private and foreign collections. Brauner’s paintings, drawings, illustrations and letters are included, as well as two of his five sculptures, giving a comprehensive overview of his 40-year career.
Brauner was born in Piatra Neamt, in northern Romania in 1903, the son of a Jewish timber manufacturer who subsequently settled in Vienna with his family for a few years.
The family returned to Romania before he settled in France in 1930, moving there permanently in 1938, the year before World War II broke out. He died in Paris in 1966 and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.
