MASP

Victor Brauner

The Goblet of Doubt (Grail of Doubt), 1946

  • Author:
    Victor Brauner
  • Bio:
    Piatra Neamt, Romênia, 1903-Paris, França ,1966
  • Title:
    The Goblet of Doubt (Grail of Doubt)
  • Date:
    1946
  • Medium:
    Têmpera a cera sobre eucatex
  • Dimensions:
    65 x 50 x 0,5 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Alto Madeira S.A. Porto Velho, 1949
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00162
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS


By Luciano Migliaccio
According to Aguilar (1991), Brauner’s experience with pre-Columbian imagery was so profound that he actually produced new Aztec visual programs. Within the Cubist discipline, as approached by Klee, Brauner created flat figures, which only manage to escape from a two-dimensional world due to the daring yellow-golden fire he sets in the background – The Globet of Doubt (Grail of Doubt) e Pentacular Architecture. From the flaming window, the face of the ejected figure is simultaneously depicted in two moments, frontal and profile, a technique that recalls the Mediterranean period of Picasso rather than his Cubist period. Spatiality is suggested by the slight inclination of the goblet which provides balance for weights of equal density, simultaneously suggesting fruit, breasts, and fountain. Like a tarot card, this image brings an imprint of remote Antiquity on its texture and bears the symbolic strength of idols and heraldry which only comes to life when seen through the eyes of the initiated. The poet René Char wrote: “after long ebullience and matured anguish, Victor Brauner brandishes the fable of our helpless grandeur, reinstating it in his images of El Faiyûm, of the frescoes from the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii, Judas’ kiss of Saint-Nectaire, Van Gogh’s shooting crows. Brauner treads at the limit of the solar center and does so beneficially”. For Alain Jouffroy, Brauner is the only artist who was able to go beyond the surrealistic experience as illustrated by Dalí and Magritte, on the one hand, and by Max Ernst on the other. His work presents symbolic essence and is at the same time autobiographical, expressing the anxieties and restlessness of the contemporary individual in an original manner.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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