Word: brancusi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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That landmark of modern art, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, found its final resting place last week: the Philadelphia Museum. What's more, a prime version of another historymaker, Brancusi's abstract sculpture, Bird in Space, alighted in the same spot. These headliners were just a part of one of the most superb School-of-Paris collections ever made, the 1,000-item, $2,000,000 life-work of Walter Arensberg, 72, rich California scholar, and his wife Louise. Their collection, which fills their servantless Los Angeles house from floor to ceiling (and which includes...
...Arensbergs bought fine works by almost every pioneer modern artist, but they cherish especially fervent views of Duchamp and Brancusi...
...substitute for knowledge. Many of those in last week's show were like men who, having never learned to sing, just shout. There were others who seemed not to belong in the exhibition at all. The doughnut-soft abstractions of Jean Arp, the polished simplifications of Constantin Brancusi, the striding stick-figures of Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore's pierced fantasies would probably have baffled Rodin as much as they do most gallerygoers...
Both were by Parisian sculptors already represented in the museum collection. Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space had long been a polished bronze bone of contention for museumgoers. To some it looked like a crackpot design for a propeller blade; others swore they got the same upward lift from it as from Shelley's To a Skylark. The museum's new Brancusi was a six-foot slab of blue-grey marble, precariously balanced on its side and entitled Fish. It had neither head nor tail, and no one could be sure in which direction the fish...