Victor Brauner is less familiar than his Romanian compatriot Constantin Brancusi, yet his work in many genres—Cubist- and de Stijl–inspired abstraction, Dadaist collage, Surrealist furniture, and encaustic painting—has an ineffable Balkan pungency to it and should be better known. His great painting Force de Concentration de Monsieur K., 1934, is an unforgettable Botero-esque send-up of a porcine bourgeois seen in the nude, while his unique Loup Table goes Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup one better with its bland carpentry and snarling taxidermy. If at times his ’40s painting seems discouragingly esoteric—full of references to the Kabbalah and Novalis—perhaps such arcana is one way of dealing with the apocalypse Brauner survived.

— Brooks Adams