ENGLISH NOTES Victor BRAUNER (1903-1966) - LE MATIN, 1962 In 1961, Victor Brauner purchased a house at Varengeville in Normandy and named it Athanor. He spent the better part of each year there. This painting dates from the following year and was probably executed there as well, as suggested by the date but also signs of a landscape, a genre rare enough in Brauner's work to suggest that the Normandy countryside that had welcomed so many painters was also a source of inspiration for him. Although the style of this piece is clearly related to others from that period, what is interesting here is a reference to one of the earliest Surrealist themes. Female genitals are painted four times on the woman's body, especially on the chin. The shadows are similar to Max Ernst. A famous drawing, Le viol, dated 1934, represents the face of a woman with breasts where her eyes should be, a navel instead of a nose and genitals replacing the mouth. It illustrated a book published that same year by André Breton, Qu'est-ce que le Surréalisme? A savage yet joyous sensuality pervades the canvas, yet affected by a certain force of gravity. The woman, with birds as boots, has three heads with, to the right, the profile of a normal woman, then a Surrealist representation of the lower face, and finally a fish. The fish inhabits the watery depths in which it perpetually moves. It symbolizes a desire to go elsewhere - here the dream is represented by a mask. This magnificent painting, both poetic and mythological, echoes, some forty years later, a poem by Paul Eluard written in 1922: "In a corner supple incest Stalks the virginity of a tiny dress In a corner a sky delivered to the spines of the storm emits pale orbs. "In a corner brighter for all eyes We await the fishes of anguish In a corner of a car summer greenery Immobile, gloriously, forever…" Litterature : Didier Semin, Victor Brauner, Filipacchi, Paris, 1990; Alain Jouffroy, Victor Brauner ou le premier dépassement du surréalisme, in the exhibit catalog of Victor Brauner, Didier Imbert Fine Art, Paris, 1990, March 6 - June 24, 2002, Paris, Centre Pompidou, La révolution surréaliste.