Word: brancusi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...marble of Greece. Almost too many influences are detectable in Noguchi's works, ranging from the rock gardens he knew in his boyhood in Japan (his father was a Japanese professor of English literature at Keio University, his mother an American) to his apprenticeship under Rumanian-born Constantin Brancusi. But Noguchi has managed to create a whole range of forms recognizably...
...number of sculptures which happen to accompany the Picasso at the Museum of Fine Arts make an interesting comparison. There is a Lehmbruck which is rather more elegant, more refined. There is a Brancusi fish which is more restrained. But there is also a Calder stabile which pursues much the same goals as the Picasso--a forceful statement of dramatic black shapes--and next to it the Picasso looks far more complete, more resolved, more dignified...
Present fashion has partly reverted to the archaic, preferring the Kore to the Nike. To devotees of abstract art, the Kore seems the less fussy and closer to the "pure form" of modern sculptors such as Brancusi and Henry Moore. Yet the Kore's abstract balance is physical and intensely feminine too. She bulges the stone, breathing, and smiles from her cliff of self most tenderly. The Nike (Victory) has greatness of another order: she moves like a swirl of gauze and a body both, proudly displaying the lightness of spirit-filled flesh. She is the archaic maid...
...were after: not beauty so much as life. In fact, says Elisofon, some of the objects "were believed to be alive by their makers. An important belief of the Polynesians was in mana, an impersonal supernatural power. Sculptures contained mana." Such modern sculptors as Lipchitz, Gonzalez, David Smith and Brancusi are not far from this idea, and for mana they, too, sacrifice resemblance. "The primitive artist and the modern one," says Elisofon, "both produce more of what they feel than of what they...
...workers, Lipchitz is a hard taskmaster. "What interests me now is to find new paths," he says, and hands them yet another casting problem. But it is just this drive that leads Britain's Sir Herbert Read (who ranks Lipchitz with such sculptors as Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Brancusi and Giacometti) to say: "From the early days of cubism to the present, Lipchitz has been in the forefront. He has extended the whole conception and technique of bronze casting...