Word: brancusi
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...Brancusi was born in 1876, in a small village in Romania. He completed a long and thorough training in sculpture in Bucharest before reaching Paris, almost penniless, in 1904. He even worked briefly as a studio menial for Auguste Rodin before quitting in the realization that, as he later put it, nothing grows under great trees. Throughout his life, legends stuck to Brancusi like burrs; he was apt to be seen as a peasant sage, a Carpathian exotic (to most Parisians, Romania barely qualified as part of Europe). And he seemed even more of an original to American collectors...
...Chrysler Building carved from oak, and you have something very like his sculptural bases. As Rowell points out in the catalog, guests in his Paris studio would be regaled with homemade sheep's milk cheese and a glass of iced champagne--funk and chic together, essential Brancusi. He loved contrasting the rough with the smooth, the hyper-refined freehand curve with the lump and the block. And when those sleek organic forms, half-volatilized in light, rise up from their wooden pedestals, you think of the resurrection of glorified bodies...
...Brancusi was after a healing wholeness. He didn't care about "truth to material," but he did strive to make the action of the hand and the movement of thought one. He believed that every aspect of sculpture--whether rough, like his urgently hewn oak and walnut carvings, or exquisitely nuanced, like his marble head or bird forms, polished to the point where light and substantial weight become mysteriously the same--needed to be manual before it could be whole...
Oneness had a moral value for Brancusi, as both the origin and the aim of consciousness. It is marvelously expressed in sculptures like Sleeping Muse [III], 1917-18: the ovoid head inflected only by the ghost of a mouth, the delicate V of a nose and the incisions of hair, one of which follows an existing flaw in the veined marble. Part of the magic of his work is its sensitivity to material. Substance and metaphor fuse...
...Brancusi's most original use of traditional material arose from his handling of polished bronze. No earlier sculpture had made such a feature of polish. Bronze was patinated--treated with chemicals to give it a warmly dark surface. This obscurity, folding deep shadows into what was already dark, was part of its accepted expressive power. It conveyed density, invited touch...