European Capital of Culture 2023: departure and return

In 1931, Victor Brauner painted a small self-portrait. It shows the artist with a broken eye; it runs out like fried egg. Seven years later he actually loses his left eye in an accident. “My painting has turned violently against me,” he wrote, “and I now bear this indestructible mark on my face.”

Victor Brauner’s biography is marked by the horrors of the 20th century. Born in Romania in 1903 to Jewish parents, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest. In 1930 he went to Paris and belonged to the surrealist movement. Their obsession with the eye is significant – from Luis Bunuel’s and Salvador Dali’s film experiment “Le Chien Andalou” to Georges Bataille’s erotically erupting “History of the Eye”.

Monster machine Hitler

In 1934, Brauner created a prophetic image of Hitler in the same format: a grimace, a bloody head with hooks, tools, nails in the skin, a monster machine. In 1940, Brauner fled from the Nazis to southern France. He died in Paris in 1966.

The National Museum in Timisoara is now showing the first Victor Bauner retrospective in his country of origin. In 2023, Timisoara is European Capital of Culture, along with Elefsina in Greece and Veszprém in Hungary. It was the turn of the metropolises, West Berlin held the title in 1988, with lasting success.

For a long time, the focus has been on the European peripheral zones, and Timisoara has proven to be a good choice. On December 16, 1989, the uprising against Ceausescu began here. General strike, revolution, dozens of dead demonstrators.

Edge and center: The European Capitals of Culture function as a learning program. The western Romanian city in Banat, which currently has 300,000 inhabitants, has a long multicultural and multiethnic tradition. Romanian, Hungarian, German and Serbian were spoken here. Around 1900 Timisoara (Timisoara) was an important industrial and commercial center. The mayor is a native German. Dominic Fritz, in office since 2020, comes from Lörrach.

Large churches and baroque buildings characterize the cityscape in the center. The Capital of Culture year brings attention and investment. Many old Imperial and Royal buildings are still scaffolded in February for the opening of “Timisoara 2023”.

Victor Brauner returns to Romania. 40 works came from the Center Pompidou for the exhibition, which shows this artist of the Romanian diaspora as something familiar and at the same time new. A show with the famous sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), who also moved from Romania to France, follows in September.

Backdrop cities with obscure body parts, mysterious female bodies, sexualised dream landscapes: you can find the whole surrealistic palette in Brauner’s work, which is currently en vogue again. He drew some from Romanian folk art.

During the Ceausescu terror decades, Brauner was one of the ostracized artists. Which didn’t stop the dictator’s clan from doing business with Brauner’s works. Relatives of the artist – they also went into exile – tell of how canvases were rolled up and hidden behind stacks of firewood in front of the Securitate. There were also Brauner counterfeits in circulation.

You can feel the excitement in Timisoara, the positive tension. The “Gateway to the West” should be wide open and attract visitors. Timisoara has an airport, there are flights from Frankfurt and Munich. Driving to Belgrade takes three hours. The train to Budapest takes seven hours. The Central European dimensions never cease to amaze: too little is known about them.

The cultural year for Europe and the city begins with concerts, parties and exhibition openings. The focus of the agenda throughout the year is the visual arts. The Kunsthalle Bega is a little outside of the old center. German discounters are grouped around depressingly bare parking lots, behind them prefabricated buildings. The installation “You Are Another Me – A Cathedral of the Body” is running here.

surrealism and sex

Another European network: the director Adina Pintilie presented this film work as Romania’s contribution to the Venice Biennale last year. In 2018 she won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale with “Touch Me Not”.

Disturbing, liberating, dignified: Adina Pintilie’s protagonists are naked in front of the camera. They talk about intimacy, sex and relationships, they touch each other. Queer people, lovers with physical disabilities fill the screens with their stories, distributed across the room. A garden of pleasure and pain, a distant memory of the surrealists and their extreme physical subjects.

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