Brancusi’s Enchantment Is Everlasting: Learn Vogue’s 1995 Appreciation of the Sculptor
“Spare Essentials,” by Michael Brenson, was originally published in the October 1995 issue of Vogue. For more of the best from Vogue’s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here. Constantin Brancusi and Pablo Picasso both settled in Paris in 1904, became integral parts of the city’s artistic avant-garde, and both, of course, became world-renowned artists. But in virtually every other respect they were opposites.
Picasso had a remarkable, if not unprecedented, ability to transform aggression and violence into that is restrained even when it takes flight. Picasso changed styles all the time; Brancusi’s sculpture of 1940 looks much the same as it did in 1910. Picasso’s paintings are intensely autobiographical, but it is difficult to find evidence of Brancusi’s life in his work
While Picasso (born in 1881) made art that welcomed, indeed almost gauged, the convulsiveness of twentieth-century life, Brancusi (born in 1876) wanted his sculpture to offer a reality beyond the self, beyond the artist, beyond the nightmares and corruptions of politics and history. In a society that tends to measure success in terms of products becoming bigger and better each year, Picasso’s series of distinct and sometimes startlingly different styles remains the model of appropriate artistic development.
Brancusi’s career, in contrast, cannot be easily approached
Brancusi’s career, in contrast, cannot be easily approached in terms of a word like development. The distinctions among most of the sixteen versions of Bird in Space that he modeled, carved, and polished over 20-some years are so subtle that it is difficult to tell even the order in which they were made. They suggest not a succession of moments but rather a single recurring moment, defined once and for all in its first formulation.
Picasso’s flashy, unpredictable, copiously productive oeuvre energized the art market. Brancusi, though successful with American collectors, never had a dealer or gallery in Paris, where he lived for the last 53 years of his life. Brancusi and Picasso also embody two fundamentally different experiences of time. Picasso’s style is so changeable, his imagery and compositions often so disjunctive, that his work implicitly argues that time stops for no one and threatens to destabilize everything as it marches relentlessly ahead.
For Picasso, the new was power; its will to render obsolete what came before was as irresistible as a force of nature. Brancusi believed in timelessness, as Margit Rowell, one of the two curators (with Ann Temkin) of the landmark Brancusi retrospective that opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this month, points out. For him, newness, suggested by his spankingly clean surfaces and his recurring images of eggs, embryos, and swollen bellies, was itself timeless, a truth that connected him and everyone else to other cultures and ages.
Time for Brancusi is a seamless, accepting, ever
Time for Brancusi is a seamless, accepting, ever more expansive moment in which new and old, past, present, and future, forever coexist. If Picasso was a poet of shock, Brancusi was a poet of fusion. He studied Plato, as well as Buddhism and other Eastern religions, and was familiar with theosophy, that influential late-nineteenth-century attempt to synthesize the religions of the world.
He simplified not only to refine and purify but also to concentrate and embrace. In his variations on the motif of the kiss, he sealed together man and woman, and made the acts of looking, touching, and trusting equally indispensable. Brancusi’s refinement grew out of knowledge of the inspired economy of non-Western and preindustrial artistic traditions. It also reflected the widespread avant-garde belief that it was possible, through distillation and simplification, to strip away European values and conventions that many early modernists blamed for the Great War.
In his 1937–38 memorial to the thousands of civilians who held off the German army in 1916 in Tirgu-Jiu, Romania, not far from his place of birth, Brancusi achieved a monument to fusion, a synthesis of monumentality and intimacy, movement and prayer, grandeur and simplicity, sculpture and site, that has haunted sculptors ever since. Brancusi was both an outsider and an insider.
He knew everyone. He was admired by Picasso
He knew everyone. He was admired by Picasso and Henri Matisse. He worked briefly for Rodin and taught Amedeo Modigliani how to carve. Isamu Noguchi worked as his assistant. He was friends with Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Erik Satie. Marcel Duchamp was essential to his success in America. But Brancusi always remained very much on his own. He never married. In 1934 he had a son by the English musician Vera Moore, but he and his son never met.
Throughout his life, he enjoyed the company of young women, but those relationships remained private. Brancusi could be talkative, even garrulous, but about his personal life he was unfailingly discreet. He shared with many avant-garde artists an admiration for non-Western cultures and a belief that by exploring the mystery of form it was possible to arrive at basic truths. But he was never part of any movement.
While it is difficult now to imagine the modernist mainstream without him, he was never really a mainstream figure. While Picasso changed addresses many times, Brancusi basically lived in one place. He moved to 8 Impasse Ronsin in Montparnasse in 1916 and, twelve years later, to number 11. As he grew old and fragile, he became anxious about keeping his work together. He put more and more energy into making his studio a sacred and self-contained world, a temple in which he, in his increasingly famous white beard and white work clothes, would act as prophet and priest.
The studio included furniture he made, as well
The studio included furniture he made, as well as wood and stone sculptures, and ghostly works in plaster, among them giant versions of Endless Column and The Cock. “By the end of his life,” Pontus Hulten, the former director of the Pompidou Center, wrote in the book Brancusi, “every single object was assigned a specific location on the floor or on the tables, to within a centimeter.
Whenever Brancusi sold a sculpture which would leave the studio for good, he would make a bronze or plaster cast of the work, preparing in advance for the spatial and spiritual void the sale would create.”
What the roughly 90 sculptures, 30 drawings, and 50 photographs in this retrospective—the first in the United States in 25 years—make clear is why Brancusi is one of the few modern sculptors it is impossible to go beyond.
His sculptures are aristocratic yet humble. His shapes are so finished, so resolved, so self-contained, and yet so subtle in their inflections and modulations that they always seem open to discovery and change. Marble and onyx are hard stones, but Brancusi’s endless rubbing, guided by his sensitivity to the individuality of each stone, makes them seem like translucent bodies whose interiors can be sensed, if not seen.
Almost all the metal and stone sculptures appear
Almost all the metal and stone sculptures appear not only to hold light but also to attract it, so that they are always both self-sufficient and eager for contact with the space around them. The sculptures are born of enormous effort, but they never seem labored. Each line, edge, and surface has a rightness that is the result of a concentration and will so powerfully present that they feel almost as sculptural as the material.
Brancusi’s sculpture is intensely physical, in love with this world, yet it is always in the service of something beyond the material. It is as much mind as body, spirit as matter. The retrospective, which comes to Philadelphia after a remarkable success at the Pompidou Center in Paris this summer, also makes it possible to consider Brancusi’s extraordinary influence. The tilted heads and lean figures carved by Wilhelm Lehmbruck on the eve of World War I suggest the expressive economy of Brancusi’s 1906 and 1907 works.
The history of organic abstraction that runs through Jean Arp and Henry Moore is unimaginable without the inner vitality of Brancusi’s rounded shapes. Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and the minimalists learned from Brancusi’s serial imagery and the anonymity of his luminous, streamlined forms. Ellsworth Kelly has written, “For me, his art was an affirmation; it strengthened my intention to make an art that is spiritual in content.” Brancusi was an inspiration to Scott Burton, whose stone tables and stools reinforced Brancusi’s challenge to a clear-cut hierarchical distinction between objects of spirituality and objects of utility.
Brancusi also left a mark on Martin Puryear,
And Brancusi also left a mark on Martin Puryear, one of the few contemporary sculptors able to make distilled economical shapes metaphorically and sculpturally convincing. But there are problems raised by Brancusi’s career. At a certain point—during World War II, when he remained in occupied Paris—Brancusi seems to have essentially stopped growing. In his last years, he produced little, choosing to concentrate on his studio.
After the war, making sculpture seemed to be inspired not by participation in the spirit and magic of the world around him but rather by a need to take refuge from it. In the same period, an aesthetic of inelegance and unfinish took hold. Many artists and critics felt that in the wake of the Holocaust it was irresponsible to lose oneself in the contemplative object. Brancusi’s faith in form and timelessness began to be identified with good taste, self-protection, and escape.
In short, his approach is seen by postmodernists as a denial of the crisis of faith and experience of trauma that Picasso considered permanent elements, not just surmountable phases, of the human condition. Brancusi’s sculptures are now dismissed by many young artists as merely commodities for the rich. The big question raised by this retrospective is what use artists will make of Brancusi’s achievement.
It will always be possible for artists to make beautiful objects influenced by his example. But can his way of working still provoke a new way of seeing? Can his optimism and sweetness and yearning for synthesis and fusion still generate surprise and wonder? Can Brancusi’s ecstatic and inexhaustible simplicity inspire sculptors to reinvent their medium again? Don’t bet against it.
Source: www.vogue.com
