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

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

In October, the Philadelphia Museum of Art inaugurated an important exhibition of the art of Brancusi. Its partner was the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, a city which had never seen a comprehensive show of works by the expatriate who had made his home there for half a century. The Centre's own rich holdings derive from Brancusi's bequest to the French state. The works traveled to Philadelphia as the Centre prepared to erect a new permanent home for them beside its main Beaubourg building.

"Constantin Brancusi" was organized by Ann Temkin, curator of 20th-century art at the Philadelphia Museum, and Margit Rowell, former curator of sculpture at the Centre Pompidou and current chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modem Art. In many respects they assembled a conventional survey of a modernist hero. The show followed by a respectful 26 years the last major retrospective.[2] It boasted several loans which could be considered curatorial triumphs. In Philadelphia it was generously stocked with some 90 sculptures, 30 drawings, 50 photographs and a number of bases by the artist which have not been catalogued individually. The show was slightly larger in Paris, where it debuted six months earlier.

Where the exhibition offered more than the considerable sum of its works was in the determination of the organizers to come to terms with the reappraisal of Brancusi which has occurred during the last two decades. The point is not that the art-historical apparatus has changed, although a few pieces have resurfaced in recent years and chronologies have been fine-tuned. The simple fact is that the rethinking of Brancusi beckons us to see the art as we had not before. The exhibition, particularly as it was installed in Philadelphia, permitted just that.

The show opened with a group of early figural bronzes from the years 1905-07, when the influence of Rodin and Medardo Rosso prevailed in Paris and before Brancusi had renounced modeling as the basis for his sculpture. It concluded with the more monumentally scaled works of the 1930s and 1940s, including the World War I memorial ensemble at Tirgu-Jiu in Romania (Endless Column, Gate of the Kiss, and Table of Silence), which was represented by photodocumentation. Along the way, the array of sculptures dramatized the changes of material and adjustments of form which occurred as the artist pursued his best-known themes--the head, torso, bird and fish.

Present were the first stone version of The Kiss (1907-08) whose truncated and chunky form represents an early foray into the archaizing look of direct carving, and the last, Boundary Marker (1945), in which the motif of the embracing couple has been elongated, flattened and reiterated in a reprise of the self-conscious patterning of Secession design. The incarnations of Sleeping Muse included serene white marble (1909-10), bronze polished to a high luster (1910), bronze patinated to distinguish between flesh and hair (1910), and plaster with a delicately mottled surface that seemed warm, organic and most inviting to the touch (1912-13). Minute modulations of the contours of the four heads differentiate a subtle range of states from the heavy passivity of deep sleep to the bodiless lightness of dreaming.