How Constantin Brancusi Brazenly Redefined Sculpture
How Constantin Brancusi Brazenly Redefined Sculpture
Modern
art is discussed, admired, renowned, and sometimes reviled for many
different reasons, but there’s one defining quality that usually stands
out as a point of fascination or contention: It doesn’t look like
anything “real.”
And it’s true—a lot of
modern art from the 20th century doesn’t bear a wholly physical
resemblance to its subjects. But according to sculptor ,
the concept of “being real” is about a lot more than looking like
nature. This idea was central to his work and is what made him so
controversial in his time, and so pivotal to the evolution of sculpture.
Brancusi
was born in 1876 in rural Romania. His father was a peasant, and
Brancusi grew up distinctly outside of the traditional Western European
narrative in which many of his peers were entrenched. Throughout his
entire life, he embraced an outsider’s position—from the sandals he wore
to the way he styled his hair and the folk music he listened to.
Similarly, his artwork didn’t follow the style of his Western
predecessors. It broke with the academic tradition, and helped shape the
principles of radically reductive and non-representational modernism
that are both celebrated and scorned today.
Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1928. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Constantin Brancusi, Mlle Pogany, version I, 1913. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In
Brancusi’s time, conventional art critique prioritized a physical
likeness to life. Brancusi bucked convention by creating unexpected
shapes that almost comically defied the forms that their titles
suggested. Works like Bird in Space (1923) and Princess X
(1916) hardly look like any bird or princess that you’ve ever seen.
But, according to Brancusi, that was exactly the point, and what made
his sculptures more honest. “What is real is not the external form,” he
said, “but the essence of things.”
For
people who measured skill by how well one could render muscle rippling
in marble, this was surprising, and even slightly ridiculous. But
ultimately, Brancusi challenged the art world to reconsider what
sculpture really was and what it did. And this changed the way future
generations would make and view art.
Today,
Brancusi is one of the 20th century’s most famous sculptors, firmly
established in the canon. This past May, Christie’s sold La Jeune Fille Sophistiquée (Portrait de Nancy Cunard) (1928/1932) for a record-breaking $71 million. His work resides at the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A series of 11 important sculptures by the artist are also the centerpiece of a new exhibition, on view at the Museum of Modern Art from July 22nd through February 18th.
Constantin Brancusi, The Cock, 1924. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Edward Steichen
Brancusi In His Studio, 1927
Heather James Fine Art: Curator’s Choice
But
audiences didn’t always embrace Brancusi’s approach to sculpture. In
1920, the organizers of the Salon des Indepéndants in Paris forced
Brancusi to remove his sculpture Princess X because it was too overtly phallic. And in 1927, a customs official famously refused to recognize Bird in Space
as a work of art, and instead tried to impose the 40 percent customs
duty typically applied to things like kitchen utensils. According to the
U.S. tax law, sculptures were defined as “reproductions by carving or
casting, imitations of natural objects, chiefly the human form.”
Brancusi went on to launch a formal legal complaint which lead the
court—and the public—to reconsider its definition of art.
It’s
true that the definition of sculpture had quite literally been set in
stone before Brancusi. The world wasn’t prepared for his work because it
looked nothing like sculpture had for the last several hundred years.
Artists like
had amazed the world with their technical skill by striving to recreate
the human form as closely as possible. “I saw the angel in the marble,”
Michelangelo remarked, “and I carved until I set him free.”
Brancusi’s
sculptures were less angelic, and perhaps seemed less impressive
because they didn’t show off the same technical chops. But this wasn’t
because Brancusi didn’t have the skills. He briefly apprenticed under
French sculptor , and early in his career, he was praised for his portrayals of human anatomy. Brancusi’s early écorchés, or musculature studies, were so masterful that they were exhibited at the Romanian Athenaeum in 1903.
Constantin Brancusi
Princess X, 1915-1916
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Constantin Brancusi, Endless Column, version I, 1918. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Thomas Griesel. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The
artist’s decision to create non-representational sculptures was a
deliberate and bold artistic choice. And unlike many other sculptors
before him, Brancusi didn’t rely on making casts. He shaped every
sculpture individually with his own hands and tools, meaning that even
works bearing the same name or exploring the same motif are unique.
Margit Pogany, who inspired the defiantly anti-realist sculpture Mademoiselle Pogany (1912),
talked about the experience of sitting for the artist. “Each time he
began and finished a new bust in clay,” she wrote. “Each of these was
beautiful and a wonderful likeliness, and each time he only laughed and
threw it back into the boxful of clay.” The finished sculpture, instead, was
a curious sort of portrait: a large ovoid with disembodied arms and
otherworldly, resting eyelids, just scarcely echoing the basic features
of a woman’s head.
“A thing which would
pretend to reproduce nature would only be a copy,” Brancusi said. “I am
trying to get a spiritual effect.” He didn’t see the beauty of sculpture
as lying in the recreation of the physical form, but rather in the
revealing of something previously invisible. He believed there was more
than one way to represent the truth in things.
Constantin Brancusi, Fish, 1930. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
This idea is particularly striking when viewing and physically walking around works like Fish (1926), on view at MoMA. “It behaves
more like a fish than it looks like one,” noted Paulina Pobocha, who
curated the exhibition. Because of the color and striation of the
marble, the shape of the flat oval, and the highly polished finish,
Brancusi’s sculpture literally is ungraspable, shifting in and out of
focus like a minnow darting through water.
Some of Brancusi’s favorite ideas to explore were actually incredibly abstract themselves—for instance, his Endless Column (1918),
with its jagged and angular geometry, hints at the possibility of
infinite repetition. But looking at the sculpture in person, you get the
sense that Brancusi has made the abstract more immediately digestible.
“Something
happened when we brought this piece into the gallery space,” Pobocha
said. “The lighting makes it possible to see the surface qualities of
the oak, and to see how articulate and deliberate the striations are.”
Using material and surface as an expressive form was so important to
Brancusi, even when trying to communicate intangible ideas. The details
always mattered.
One of the best examples of this is seen in his 1916 sculpture The Kiss,
a block-like form depicting two lovers embracing. The sculpture bears
the same title as an 1882 piece by Rodin, which is so lifelike that the
stone looks soft. But there’s hardly a way to compare the two sculptures
otherwise; they look like they hail from different worlds entirely.
Tom Lubbock, the late chief art critic of The Independent,
wrote about exactly how the two works, considered in tandem, exposed
the flaws in trying to define “good” sculpture, or to pin down a single
representation of an idea: “Beside the Rodin, the Brancusi looks absurd;
absurdly crude and inarticulate. And beside the Brancusi, the Rodin
looks absurd; absurdly grandiose and explicit. Which is sublime, and
which is ridiculous, is a matter of taste.”
With his version of The Kiss,
Brancusi wasn’t trying to outdo Rodin’s technique or say that his
sculpture looked more like two lovers kissing. Instead, he forced people
to have a conversation about a block of marble and what it meant for a
viewer to understand two forms joined together. Brancusi didn’t impress
with technical realism—he hinted that there was something else that we
weren’t seeing, and left us to mull over what that might be.
Auguste Rodin
Le Baiser (The Kiss), ca. 1886
Musée Rodin, Paris
Brancusi loved to quote the French poet Nicolas Boileau in saying “rien n’est beau que la vrai”—nothing
is beautiful except that which is true. What his works show again and
again is that it’s unfair, or maybe even impossible, to pin down one
definition of what is beautiful or true. And slowly, Brancusi’s
sculpture started to communicate this message to others.
When Judge J. Waite ruled on whether the artist’s Bird in Space
was really “art,” he wrote: “There has been developing a so-called new
school of art, whose exponents attempt to portray abstract ideas rather
than intimate natural objects. Whether or not we are in sympathy with
these newer ideas…we think the facts of their existence and their
influence upon the art worlds as recognized by the courts must be
considered.”
The judge put a fine point on
it—whether or not a viewer can get behind Brancusi’s version of reality
or representation, the artist opens up a dialogue that multiple
subjective viewpoints exist and are worth our consideration. That
recognition in itself can be a beautiful thing.
Kaitlin Macholz
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-constantin-brancusi-brazenly-redefined-sculpture
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