Word: brancusi
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LEAN, sleek and impersonal as a hood ornament on a Pierce Arrow, Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space is far better known than its maker. It made headlines in 1926 when the U.S. Customs Bureau refused to let it in the country duty-free, claiming that it was not art but mere metal. In the comic-opera court proceedings that followed, a group of American art lovers won a modest but crucial ruling: that to be art, a work by a recognized sculptor need not bear a striking resemblance to a natural object. Whether or not the decision affected...
...Messer of New York's Guggenheim Museum. Messer's biggest triumph was to get Rumanian museums and collectors to release six works of their country's most celebrated modern artist. Loans from other owners (including Paris' Museum of Modern Art, which inherited the contents of Brancusi's studio on his death in 1957) have brought the total number of pieces up to 84 sculptures and 23 drawings. By far the largest and most comprehensive Brancusi show ever assembled, it will move on to the Guggenheim Nov. 21, then to Chicago's Art Institute...
Breakthrough. Brancusi's early work, never before seen in the U.S., is the most surprising part of the current exhibition. In Paris he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and exhibited such accomplished work at the Musée Luxembourg that Rodin invited him to work in his studio. Brancusi refused. "Nothing grows well in the shadow of a big tree," he said, and spent the next two years working in virtual isolation. His last work in a traditional mode is the tender portrait head, Torment. Then, in 1907, he made the great break with the past that...
...Brancusi did not mingle with the café crowds, but he was obviously aware of what was going on. Upon receiving a commission to do a funerary monument in Rumania, he began work on a kneeling bronze woman. Starting with a violently agitated figure that Rodin might have been proud to acknowledge, Brancusi went through several successively simplified versions until he arrived at the motionless Prayer he finally cast. Though still conventional in form, the mourner's classic calm and smoothed-over details foreshadow aspects of Brancusi's mature work...
...final breakthrough came later in the year when he carved The Kiss. Nothing could be less like Rodin's voluptuous lovers than these stolid, blocklike figures. Where Rodin's lovers flicker and twist, Brancusi's lovers face each other straight on and are barely scratched on the surface of the stone. The tender surface of Rodin's burnished bronze palpitates with life; Brancusi's pitted limestone is all idea...