“Even as a youth in Munich he cham­pi­oned the rev­o­lu­tion­ary ideas of the Sovi­et republics (1918/19) and was impris­oned. After return­ing to his native Vien­na and fin­ish­ing school, he attend­ed the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts and the med­ical fac­ul­ty.
His cir­cle of friends includ­ed Franz Kaf­ka, Adolf Loos, Else Lasker-Schüler, Sig­mund Freud, Wil­helm Reich and Mag­nus Hirschfeld.
Attract­ed by the sur­re­al­ist move­ment, Bauer trav­eled to Paris sev­er­al times; In 1929 he worked on the 2nd Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo. His friends includ­ed: André Bre­ton, Paul Élu­ard, Sal­vador Dali, Georges Ribe­mont-Des­saignes and Jaques Prévert.
Bauer set­tled in Paris in 1932 and in Nice in 1936, with a study vis­it to Italy in between. Dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, Bauer was active in the Ital­ian resis­tance. In 1943 he was arrest­ed and sen­tenced to death. He sur­vived the fall of Mus­soli­ni and was released from prison in Milan in 1944.
It was only in the last 10 years after he final­ly set­tled in Nice in 1946/47 that Bauer was able to work con­tin­u­ous­ly as an artist. From 1950 to 1959, Vic­tor Bauer was large­ly con­cerned with com­po­si­tion­al designs on paper, some­times also in con­fronta­tion with already exist­ing cal­li­graph­i­cal­ly pre­pared papers. Dur­ing this phase, a painter­ly oeu­vre was cre­at­ed that was small in terms of the num­ber of works, but con­vinc­ing in its qual­i­ty and worth dis­cov­er­ing.
Since only a few pic­tures and water­col­ors have sur­vived from ear­li­er years, the work of the 1950s can be seen as Vic­tor Bauer’s artis­tic lega­cy. ”Hel­mut Dreiseitel

The exhi­bi­tion on the 1st floor shows works on can­vas from 1947 to 1953 and works on paper from 1953 to 1958.