Word: brancusi
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Despite the Hall-of-Fame line up of artists in the show, the works of some of the big names are less than stellar. Alberto Giacommetti's sculpture "Walking Woman" has none of the impact of his more famous anorexic forms. The works of Miro, Gorky, Moore, and Brancusi are equally disappointing...
Before the establishment of communist rule, Romania enjoyed an extremely vigorous cultural life. In the pre-communist years it produced such luminaries as: Brancusi in sculpture, Iorga in history, Lipati and Enesco in music, and better-known playwright Ionesco. Today there is a general stifling of creativity and the life of the mind...
...first two sections, dealing with the period 1900-50, are at least competent. The history they describe is more settled and hence readily encapsulated. The "period rooms"-unconvincing reconstructions of the Gertrude Stein salon at 27, Rue de Fleurus, the "291" gallery in which Alfred Stieglitz introduced Matisse, Brancusi and modern photography to a tiny coterie in New York, and Piet Mondrian's Manhattan studio, among other places-are tackily made and none too accurate. But the paintings fare better...
...weak and splits off. Hence the elongated, torpedo-like form of a Shinto deity from Japan's Kamakura period (12th-14th centuries)-a courtier, oddly clownlike in his peaked cap and baggy pants, but carved with a reductive formal elegance that might have inspired Brancusi seven centuries later. All its shapes are circumscribed by the block; one could roll it downhill...
Bark and Catfish Skin. Japanese swords have virtually no parallels in Western art. Only one shape in our cul ture seems to rhyme with the strict parabolas of a tachi's profile: Brancusi's Bird in Flight, with its soaring curvature, immaculate surface and absolute finality of line. The resemblance is not merely formal. Just as the abstract contour of the Bird is rich with allusions to nature, so the blade contains landscapes...