Word: brancusi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have preconceived notions, the presence of the object will touch you in some way, and you'll be in dialogue with it. I mean, what do you do with people like Tom Wolfe? His fear of modern art is sad. He must have been flogged with a Brancusi somewhere along...
...born of long reflection on the past. He was a child of the museum, which is why this posthumous show seems so much like a homecoming. He was steeped in a great tradition of which the exemplars were, in poetry, Stephane Mallarme; in painting, Henri Matisse; in sculpture, Constantin Brancusi. Wilmarth was a man of wide visual curiosity, but of all modernist movements the one that interested him most was symbolism, which reached its height around 1890 under Mallarme's leadership and which, through its effect on Matisse and others, lay at the very root of 20th century...
...Wilmarth's later work of the '80s, the hidden figure becomes explicit. Wilmarth's sign for it was in part a homage to Brancusi: an egg-shaped form, a glass sign for a head. Sometimes it appears on its own -- once, in a piece called Sigh, 1979-80, with the "face" cut away and resting resignedly inside the egg, an image of exquisite poignancy. Usually the head is fixed to a metal plaque with edges and attachments that suggest a window frame, and thus someone (the sculptor himself) looking out into our space. These pieces are darker and less restrained...
...packs three layers of imagery into its mass without the slightest strain or theatricality. At first it is a great bowed head and shoulders, rearing up from the earth and leaning forward. Its immense back carries memories of Matisse's bronze backs, and its pose refers, distantly, to Brancusi's Mlle. Pogany. Then, from the side, one notices how it resembles a big wave about to topple -- the ocean over which the deity ruled. And finally, from the front, closer in, the deep pits and bosses in the surface suggest a rock carved at random by the swilling of that...
With his peerless instinct for composition, Weston could soon reconfigure the female nude to find the fracture lines of Braque or the seamless forms of Brancusi. But it took a personal and artistic crisis in 1923 to push him beyond ingenious deployments of volume and line. He took off for Mexico with his lover Tina Modotti and one of his sons. He spent the next three years rubbing shoulders with the muralist Diego Rivera, dodging the postrevolutionary turmoil and making pictures under the Mexican sun that specifies every object it falls upon. Among them were a series of vivid head...