33 Facts About Herman Braun-Vega

Herman Braun-Vega was a Peruvian painter and artist.

Herman Braun-Vega decided not to limit his painting to aesthetic research, but to adopt a clear pictorial language accessible to non-specialists even though his works often have several levels of reading.

Herman Braun-Vega's painting, enriched with references to the history of art, often depicts characters, landscapes, fruits and vegetables from his native Peru.

Herman Braun-Vega asserts his mixed origins through syncretic work, often very colorful, interspersed with political messages including transfers of press clippings.

Herman Braun-Vega's father, Francisco Braun Weisbrod, was Jewish born in 1902 under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the city of Stuhlweissenberg, currently in Hungarian territory.

Herman Braun-Vega's mother, Armida Vega Noriega, was born in Iquitos, capital of the Peruvian Amazon.

Herman Braun-Vega's older brother, Max, was born in February 1932.

Herman Braun-Vega's father bought art reproductions in Paris and had them framed in Peru.

In 1950, Herman Braun-Vega became the student of Carlos Quizpez Asin at the School of Fine Arts in Lima, where he studied for a year and a half.

Herman Braun-Vega had to abandon painting and dedicate himself to interior design, working for Jean Royere on whose behalf he finds himself in charge of opening a decoration agency in Peru.

In November 1967, Herman Braun-Vega returned to Paris with his son.

Herman Braun-Vega himself suffers from Parkinson's disease and painfully completes his last paintings in 2014.

Herman Braun-Vega felt so much devastated by the loss of Violette in 2016 that his state of health did not allow him to attend the funeral.

Young Herman Braun-Vega Braun produced paintings that perfectly integrated the lessons of modern art and fed on some of its movements such as cubism or impressionism that kept him away from any temptation for photorealism.

Herman Braun-Vega quickly adopted a very gestural and very free technique which contrasts sharply with the mastery, planning and rigor of execution of his later works.

Herman Braun-Vega Braun uses the polyptych technique experimented with in the previous years to achieve the desired narrative effect.

Herman Braun-Vega is presented as the painter who made painting the subject of his painting.

Herman Braun-Vega had already produced portraits of the photographer Jose Casals and the writer Pablo Neruda in 1965, but these were very stylized portraits.

Sensitive to Herman Braun-Vega's ability to freely recreate the spirit of the artists with whom he nourishes his painting, critic Jean-Luc Chalumeau, who appreciates his "flamboyant unrealism", underlines the skill with which he plays with the grain of the unbleached canvas as if it was a color on its own right on his palette.

Beyond aesthetic considerations, it is a way for Herman Braun-Vega to show his contemporaries in their ethnic diversity.

Nevertheless, Herman Braun-Vega produced a series specially for the occasion entitled Peru-Spain: bare memories in which he is particularly interested in the consequences of this encounter, as brutal as it was, and in the ethnic and cultural mix that resulted from it.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Herman Braun-Vega introduced into his work a large number of still lifes in paintings, often smaller in size, painted on wooden panels augmented with reliefs which harmonize with the volumes and perspective of the painting.

Herman Braun-Vega willingly agrees to come and explain his paintings to school students who visit the exhibitions.

Herman Braun-Vega testifies to his mixed origins, explaining that he would not be there if the Spaniards had not discovered the American continent, condemning not the arrival of the Spaniards but only the violence which accompanied it and claiming the cultural miscegenation which resulted and which appears evidently in his works.

Herman Braun-Vega said he decided to "inherit" from himself, focusing on the formal aspect of his own heritage as can be seen in some of his still lifes where there is no social or political content, nor references to Western iconography.

However, the appropriation practiced by Herman Braun-Vega is not only remarkable because it is systematic.

Herman Braun-Vega interprets these anachronisms as a loss of reference points in time and believes that these works are representative of the liquid world where time passes without moving forward, where beginning and end, progression and regression, learning and forgetting, merge making impossible any planning, any project.

Herman Braun-Vega explains, for example, that the painting depicting Pope Innocent X, taken from a painting by Velazquez, holding in his hand not a statement by John Paul II as in Bauman's description, but a newspaper commenting on pedophilia in the Church of the United-States is entitled Let the Children Come to Me.

Herman Braun-Vega concludes in his letter that his art is the antithesis of the liquid culture defined by Bauman.

Herman Braun-Vega wants to transmit this memory and to reach the widest possible audience, the painter seeks to activate the viewer's memory by adopting the strategy of "the three memories" that represent different gateways of more or less easy access to the content of his paintings.

Herman Braun-Vega identifies the cultivated or historical memory through the iconography of the great masters, the social and political memory through the introduction of contemporary situations and the memory of individual experience, of everyday life.

Since he began making explicit references to art history, Herman Braun-Vega has been interested in the artistic filiations that exist between the great masters of painting.

Herman Braun-Vega considers that painters form a large family and this is the family he refers to in his Autoportrait en famille in which he depicts himself in the company of Picasso, Velazquez and Rembrandt.