Paul Păun

Paul Păun (born Zaharia Zaharia, also styled Zaharia ben Reful ben Zaharia, Bebe Morel or Paul Paon-Zaharia; September 5, 1915 – April 9, 1994) was a Romanian and Israeli avant-garde poet and visual artist, also active as a journalist and medical practitioner. Inspired by the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Yesenin and the Romanian avant-garde magazine unu, he was a co-founder of the magazines Alge and Viața Imediată. Păun set himself the goal of making poetry a living experience, experimenting with licentious themes (which resulted in his prosecution for lewdness) before discovering Marxism and proletkult aesthetics. Like other avant-garde writers, including his friends Gherasim Luca and Dolfi Trost, he adhered to the then-illegal Romanian Communist Party.
During the early stages of World War II, Păun became interested in surrealism, and was drawn into Luca's surrealist group. This small community survived clandestinely during the war years, when Păun himself was marginalized due to his Jewish Romanian ethnicity. It reemerged as a prominent cultural movement in the mid-to-late 1940s, when Păun also had a fêted debut as a surrealist painter and illustrator. Like many other Romanian surrealists, he found himself disenchanted with the Romanian communist regime, and was exposed to communist censorship. He emigrated to Israel in his late forties, and focused on his career in medicine, with only occasional contributions to art and literature.
Category:Poets
Category:Romanian avant-garde
Category:Surrealism