Braun Vega, Herman – Peru/France

BIOGRAPHY OF HERMAN BRAUN-VEGA

This Peruvian artist was born in Lima in 1933. He was the son of a Jewish father from the then Austro-Hungarian Empire and an indigenous mother originally from Iquitos. His father, a diplomat, was a frequent traveller to Europe where he bought reproductions of masterpieces, from the Renaissance to Cubism, which he framed and hung in his home in Peru.

Herman Braun-Vega started his studies at the Lima School of Fine Arts, where he stayed for just a year and a half. At just eighteen years old, he moved to Paris following his brother, who had also travelled to the French capital to develop his painting career.

After training for some years and trying to find his place in the artistic scene, Braun-Vega started working in interior design with the prestigious Jean Royère to earn a living. He returned to Peru with his son in 1955, settling in Lima, where he opened a new décor agency with the architect Juan Gunther.

In spite of his success in the world of design and décor, Braun-Vega eventually went back to painting. In 1967, he returned to Paris accompanied by his son. After several relationships with women from different cultures and countries, he met the woman who would become the love of his life, Lisbeth Schaudinn. His new economic situation allowed him to dedicate himself entirely to painting.

Braun-Vega lived in France permanently from 1978 until his death in 2019, occupying a prominent position within the New Figuration. This movement is also known as the Narrative Figuration due to the social content found in the works and the demands made in them.

HERMAN BRAUN-VEGA’S WORK

At the start of his career, Braun-Vega’s language approached abstraction, with the use of free figuration based on gestural painting. However, after his time in Paris and the works and artists he was to encounter there, his language changed, increasingly prioritising figurative representation and the message over artistic experimentation.

His work, with strong links to European art and painting, moves away from the aesthetics of contemporary artistic production in Peru, but not from its themes. Braun-Vega tells us about the social and political problems of indigenous people and other inhabitants of Latin America with his own particular language.

Braun-Vega’s artistic production is marked by different stages of influences in which references to specific artists like Poussin, Ingres, Goya and Picasso stand out; others would continually return throughout his career, as is the case with Velázquez. Each artist gives him the opportunity to talk about one subject and he therefore uses them in his painting. This is why we can see Ingres within a debate about traditional perspective. In other cases he reflects on the use of the nude in painting, the multitude of artistic styles and the employment of different languages. Braun-Vega’s extraordinary technical mastery allows him to appropriate the works of these great artists from the history of art to perfection, combining them at his will. The key to his language lies in the composition of his works and his new perspective towards the artists he appropriates or refers to.

His works also stand out for their social and political critique, with constant references to the situation on the Latin American continent, to miscegenation, to the wealthy ruling classes, as well as to daily life. By representing the iconography of the past, he uses historical memory to refer to historical and everyday situations in the present day.

The blending of technique, history, art and culture is dominant in his work, of which La familia informal is the maximum expression. This triptych is part of the series “Peru/España, Memorias al desnudo”, created for the 1992 exhibition held at the former Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid.

Silvia Sánchez Ruiz
Curator