Composition with a portrait

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: The National Museum of Art, Bucharest (Romania).

Brauner repeatedly emphasized that all his paintings are autobiographical and social. In this sense, worried about the threatening political events in Europe, he decided to reduce the size of his works and created “pictures for cases”, that is, small enough in case if they had to be transported, which soon turned out to be relevant. The composition with a portrait, where the hand of the model without a face is transformed into a separate living face is one of such paintings. The naked male body, sculpturally and roughly sculpted against the background of the serene sky, is proportionally correct, and the second character is depicted without any respect for anatomy and scale.