Re-reading Brancusi: the Philadelphia story - sculpture, Constantin Brancusi, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Art in America, Jan, 1996 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Of the many anecdotes which punctuate the biography of Constantin Brancusi, my favorite has the creator of Bird in Space at a Paris aviation fair in 1912 with friends Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger. The trio pause to admire the sleek perfection of a metal propellor. Brancusi later recalled having observed that sculpture had found its new standard. Leger's version has Duchamp declaring that it was all over for painting. Duchamp couldn't recall the outing at all.

Perhaps I like the story because these three avatars of modernism together remind me of the classic joke set-up which begins with a priest, a minister and a rabbi. Leger was the unwavering enthusiast for whom technology promised a rational and progressive society. Duchamp was the bemused ironist who saw the machine usurping every human role from the production of art to sexual intercourse. And Brancusi? Brancusi? At an aid show?

Scholars have charted the impact of technology on the lives and works of most modern artists. But how reluctant we have been to include Brancusi, whom at history long portrayed as working in some private ether comprised of equal parts nature, spirit and folk wisdom. He has been a protagonist in just about every narrative of 20th-century sculpture yet he has remained a solitary player. Cite chapter and verse from the book of modernism and Brancusi is there, developing a reductive abstraction, drawing inspiration from non-Western and folk art, transforming the base from passive platform to generative element, demoting the human figure from supremacy in the hierarchy of subject matter, frankly addressing sexual forms. Yet at the same time Brancusi has resisted membership in the standard modernist fraternities. His vision was too transcendent for Expressionism, too concerned with wholeness for Cubism, too imbued with nature for Purism. He became a wonderful amalgam of archetypes: peasant, child and holy man. He was the rough-hewn fellow lured from Romania by the opportunities of Paris only to be scorned there by an uncomprehending establishment. And he was the worker who honed each flawless surface with loving diligence, issued vatic pronouncements about beauty and essences, and bravely resisted the demolition of his beloved Montparnasse studio-hermitage-sanctuary during the final years of his life.

There has always been another Brancusi--or at least "more" of him--beyond this cherished cartoon. Much that had been omitted and ignored has been unearthed and reappraised during the last 20 years.(1) It is not that Brancusi has been a casualty of postmodernist iconoclasm; on the contrary, he has lost only his innocence in a process of revision that has penetrated the cliches to disclose a sculptor who was more complex, more canny, more deliberately engaged in the artistic issues of his time.

Meet the Brancusi who numbered Duchamp, Leger, Gonzalez, Man Ray, Satie and Pound among his many friends and acquaintances. This Brancusi confounded the boundaries between high and low art by fabricating utilitarian objects as well as sculptures and by fashioning objects which shifted between service as art work and base. This Brancusi engaged in the debate about originality by producing multiple versions of his pieces, recombining them to make new works, and employing found materials. This Brancusi undermined the myth of phallic creativity by creating works of unstable gender identity and images of female potency. This Brancusi determined his image for commerce and for posterity by controlling the dissemination of photographs of himself and his works, by hosting ritualistic studio visits that seemed to be all but scripted, and by inducing the French state to preserve his atelier and its contents intact. This Brancusi equipped his studio with Black & Decker power tools. "

The fact of the sculptor's lifelong friendship with Marcel Duchamp should have given ample warning that any one-dimensional account of Brancusi as an unworldly visionary in quest of a neoplatonic ideal was doomed to be off the mark. Their relationship began in Paris but deepened in the course of what became a successful joint venture in America. Brancusi and Duchamp attracted considerable notice--much of it derisive--in press coverage of the 1913 Armory Show. But they also caught the eyes of a number of fiedgling collectors of European modern art, and Americans would remain their most loyal patrons. For some 40 years Duchamp functioned as his friend's agent in the U.S., overseeing the transport of the Romanian's sculptures, supervising the, installation of his shows, and negotiating with dealers and buyers. During the 1930s, after his "retirement" from art-making, Duchamp covered his expenses by dipping into an inventory of Brancusi sculptures which he had purchased from the estate of the sculptor's first important collector, New York attorney John Quinn. And it was the ever-enterprising Duchamp who brokered the 1950 donation of the Louise and Walter Arensberg collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which thereby acquired the largest concentration of works by both artists in private hands.