Word: brancusi
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Dates: during 1927-1927
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...dilettantes gathered round an object, gaping, making a murmur of "Is it a bird? If it isn't, what is it? Whatever it is, is it art?" It was tall, shiny, spindling, like a magnification of an exclamation point, like a Freudian symbol. Manufactured by famed Sculptor Constantin Brancusi of Rumania, it was titled, with a supreme disregard of appearance, with an arrogant, baffling simplicity, "The Bird...
Last week this scene was replayed in the Customs Court of Appeals in Manhattan. Another one of Brancusi's birds, a bright, sinuous piece of brass pipe, tapering at the ends in a not perfectly symmetrical curve, has been shipped from Paris to Edward Steichen, Manhattan photographer and artist. Denied duty-free admission as a work of art, it had been subjected to a tax of $229.35, more than a third of what Purchaser Steichen had paid for it. Appealing the decision, Purchaser Steichen appeared in court accompanied by experts who would support his claim that the bright enigma...
...Waite. Assistant Attorney General Marcus Higgenbotham said: "A mechanic could have done this thing." Countered Sculptor Epstein: "No ... he could have polished this but he could not have conceived it." Finally, sick of a nagging, abstruse controversy, Justice Waite intelligently decided to delay a decision until testimony from Birdmaker Brancusi, now in Paris, could be secured...
Photographs of sculpture by Brancusi Fiori and Faggi are also on show. The work of Brancusi is so eccentric that it has caused a furore among artistic circles wherever it has been shown. His work is so unusual, in fact, that the stolid customs officials of New York City, untrained in the finer points of the new style, refused to admit several of his statues exempt from customs as works of art. Art was art, they maintained, but not these monuments...
...Sculptor Brancusi simplifies line and movement until anything may mean anything. Is it then that the honest U.S. inspectors are mentally too advanced to comprehend plain simplifications...