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

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

The visitor's sense of encountering a "different" Brancusi in Philadelphia resulted from three crucial and coordinated curatorial decisions: to make liberal use of bases from the artist's studio, to group the works in heterogeneous ensembles, and to keep the sculptures and the photographs in close proximity. The cumulative effect chastened any lingering inclination to view Brancusi as a seeker of the absolute resolution of form. Instead, the viewer confronted an artist who was absorbed with the circumstances of presentation and display, an artist keenly aware that the resonance of each piece fluctuated in response to its context.

Brancusi's bases are composed of geometric blocks of smoothly worked stone, craggy wooden platforms fashioned from found materials bearing carpenters' marks and traces of old paint, and a host of smaller components in the shapes of cylinders, crosses, cubes and disks. Sometimes he partnered a sculpture with a specific base, but he also developed a studio inventory of bases that facilitated his restless tinkering with the conditions of display. The bases were not simply foils for the exquisite forms they carried. They were essential partners in an ongoing drama of material transformation which depended on the play of contrasts and paradoxes for its effect.

Brancusi's studio photographs inspired the curators to use original bases instead of neutral museum pedestals. The photos also guided the arrangement of art works within the exhibition in order to communicate a deep strain of theatricality which the single sculpture is unable to convey. For the most part, the Philadelphia installation avoided the largely taxonomic approach followed in Paris, where several versions of the same subjects rendered in different materials were grouped together like so many specimens readied for comparative analysis. To be sure, there were opportunities for close comparisons. More important, though, nearly every gallery in Philadelphia was anchored by one or two ensembles in which the sculptures and their bases offered a wide variety of contrasting themes, heights, masses and materials.

The presentation respected Brancusi's often averred wish that his sculptures be seen in ensembles and not in isolation. It also lent teeth to his assertion that he did not produce sculpture in editions but rather reconceived themes with the passage of time. The pure white marble Newborns of 1915 and 1916 found their rightful place among other emotionally direct works of the teens, including the primitivizing Socrates and the honestly rugged arch and bench made from salvaged beams. By contrast, the stainless steel Newborn of 1927, a wickedly perverse marriage between the sentimental subject and the numbingly cold material, seemed happily at home in the more cosmopolitan company of Nancy Cunard (Sophisticated Young Lady), 1925-27, and the provocatively phallic bronze Torso of a Young Man (1924).

Where the campaign to honor the ensemble stumbled, and badly, was in the presentation of works associated with a project conceived in the 1930s by Brancusi and the Mahara ah of Indore. In the gallery which usually houses Philadelphia's permanent collection of Brancusi sculptures there were gathered three versions of Bird in Space polished bronze, white marble, black marble), the large wooden King of Kings, and a watercolor study for a fresco called Birds in the Sky. Along with a few drawings, this is all that remains of an aborted project devised by the artist and his Indian patron to erect a "Temple of Meditation" in which to offer art for contemplation. The attempt to evoke a temple in the cramped and altogether profane space of the gallery trivialized the project. The little watercolor hung reproachfully on the wall like a decorator's swatch, and the visitor waited for canned music to swell.