In 1930, the same year that Victor Brauner moved to Paris from Romania and painted Suicide at Dawn, a fairly recent addition to the Lacma Modern collection, Max Ernst was beginning a new collage novel, and Bunuel and Dali showed their film L'Age D'Or which provoked a violent riot where ink was thrown at the screen, seats were destroyed and the Surrealist paintings in the entrance hall to the Studio 28 were destroyed. The film was banned.

Brauner's second trip to the city (he would eventually end up living there) was eye opening. He befriended Brancusi (a compatriot), Giancometti and Tanguy. But his imagery, though foundational to the mystical precepts and juxtapositions of Surrealism, was particularly violent. Some scholars consider him the most talented recruit of the middle thirties, though his name is not as well known as his confreres.

During WW 2, he was in hiding in Switzerland and unable to get materials so he used candle wax.

This disturbing image of suicide provokes many questions and made me wonder if this transition to Paris was not as smooth as it may have appeared. The factions of the Surrealists who prized poetry and myth bordered on gang warfare at times, so passionate were its adherents. In fact Brauner did not really enter fully into their group until 1933, so this image well predates that time. His work influenced Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

One of the first things he worked on with the Surrealists was a booklet which commemorated the Trial of Violette Nozieres who had murdered her father (and tried to also poison her mother, though she survived) because he had been raping her for the past six years. He had his first solo show in Paris in 1934 which contained, prophetically, images of figures with mutilated eyes; he lost his own eye when he got in the middle of a fight between the Spanish surrealists in 1938. Artists!