The Sculptor of Flight

I have seen three memorable exhibitions of sculpture in my lifetime. The first, in 1972, in the Forte di Belvedere above Florence, was of work by Henry Moore. The second, in 2022, at the Palazzo Strozzi, also in Florence, was of work by Donatello and his contemporaries. The third was “Brancusi,” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris earlier this summer.

Constantin Brâncuși once described architecture as “inhabited sculpture.” Much of the power of the Moore exhibition came from the interaction between sculpture, architecture, and environment. Overlooking Florence, Moore’s bronzes seemed more monumental than ever. I especially remember a room with an elephant skull—donated to the artist by the biologist Julian Huxley—surrounded by twenty-nine prints inspired by it. An elephant skull high over the city seemed to belong not so much to the world of Renaissance Florence as to that of twentieth-century Surrealism.

The Donatello exhibition, on the other hand, owed its success to the harmony of its various elements. The emotional freedom of Donatello’s work influenced all his contemporaries; this was one of the few times in the history of Western art when sculpture, rather than painting, led the way. Well-chosen juxtapositions of sculptures and paintings demonstrated how Masaccio and others were inspired by Donatello’s innovative poses and arrangements of figures.

As for Brâncuși, his work has never been exhibited so perfectly and on such a scale—not even in the reconstruction of his studio across the piazza from the Pompidou where hundreds of his sculptures have been housed since 1977. The first room in the exhibition—with its white walls, floor, and ceiling, and three giant white plaster roosters—conjured the feelings recorded by visitors to Brâncuși’s studio during his lifetime. “I suddenly found myself dazzled by clarity in an immense, white, unknown place, all aquiver with unknown beings,” the Surrealist artist and writer Valentine Hugo wrote in 1955. And Man Ray, who worked closely with Brâncuși and remained friends with him until the end of the sculptor’s life in 1957, said, “The first time I went to see the sculptor Brancusi in his studio, I was more impressed than in any cathedral. I was overwhelmed with its whiteness and lightness.… Coming into Brancusi’s studio was like entering another world.”

The next room was dominated by a huge Romanian farmhouse gate, its round arch ornamented with geometric patterns more commonly seen on the entrances to Romanesque cathedrals. Built in 1884 and donated to France for the 1937 world’s fair in Paris, this oak gate not only embodied the craft tradition of the world into which Brâncuși was born but hinted again that we were “entering another world.” Through a more modest oak gate made by Brâncuși himself, one caught a first glimpse of his studio, with his sculptures and other items he crafted—stools, tables, a loudspeaker, a stove, a pulley system, a chimney, his tools. Brâncuși treasured his tools. “When you finish a work,” he wrote, “you must let your tools rest, so that they invite you to continue the following day. Otherwise, they will pass on their tiredness to you, or get angry.”

In time one came to a long gallery with a wall made entirely of glass. Here, looking out toward Montmartre, Brâncuși’s elongated marble and bronze birds found a fitting perch. On the days I visited, the pale creams and grays of the Turquin blue marble Maiastra (1923/1940) harmonized with both the slate roofs and Parisian limestone below them and the shifting grays of an overcast sky. The perfect white of the plaster variants corresponded to the Pompidou’s white exterior struts. The glittering Bird in Space (1941), the tallest and most attenuated, was shown as Brâncuși often showed it in his studio—not against the windows, but against a red wall. In the catalog, Alexandra Parigoris quotes the playwright Roger Vitrac, who said that this bird had “‘abandoned the shape of its wings’ to launch itself into space.” She also aptly remarks that Brâncuși’s message was “less about the essence of a thing than the essence of an experience.”  Or, in his own words, “It is not birds I sculpt, it is flight.”

The exhibition was comprehensive. In addition to 120 sculptures from across Brâncuși’s career—from the Pompidou and other French collections, as well as museums in Romania, the US, and five other countries—there were letters, postcards, and a selection of photographs and short films by Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Brâncuși himself. Portraits of the artist by Oskar Kokoschka and Amedeo Modigliani showed his unkempt black hair and beard, emphasizing his peasant origins rather than his acquired Parisian sophistication. (Modigliani was so impressed by Brâncuși that he wanted for a while to become a sculptor himself.)

As well as exploiting the view of Paris from the Pompidou’s sixth floor, the curators made good use of its interior. A large circular gap in a partition allowed one an unexpected second look at some of Brâncuși’s most delicate sculptures of women’s heads. In a small, dark room, the shining bronze Leda (1926) rotated slowly on a turntable. Brâncuși would have enjoyed this theatricality. He invited visitors to his studio at specific times of day, when he knew that the light would show certain pieces at their best, and there are several accounts of him whipping off dust sheets from bronzes and startling visitors with flashes of gold. In 1936 he himself used a Garrard gramophone motor to make a turntable for Leda. 

Part of one room was devoted to the large, roughly carved wood cups and vases with which Brâncuși both acknowledged his past and playfully affirmed his refusal to distinguish between works of art and objects of practical use. These cups and vases served as stools, tables, plinths for bronzes—and sculptures. The one thing they could not do—entirely solid as they are—is contain liquid. Much of their humor comes from their apparent seriousness; their size lends them a strange self-assurance, and the knots and splits in the wood make them look aged and worn, as if from years of use. 

The interplay between different elements of Brâncuși’s sculptures is often subtle. The bronze ovoid Newborn II (circa 1923) rests on a circular mirror supported by a complex wooden shape somewhat like a giant egg cup; the upper cavity could be a womb from which the sculpture has emerged. The thin oval marble Fish (1922) also rests on a mirror on top of an oak stand; the striations of the marble are both reflected in the mirror and echoed in the grain of the oak. The sculpture ripples with life; Brâncuși wrote that he wanted to “seize the spark of the fish’s spirit.”

The rhythmic vitality of these works springs in part from barely noticeable asymmetries. Maiastra (1911), for example, has one eye slightly larger than the other; as one walks around the bird, this creates an illusion of movement. As for the wooden sculptures, Brâncuși alternates between shaping them to bring out the swirls of the grain and patterning his chisel marks to achieve a rougher, more dappled effect. The highly polished bronzes, on the other hand, lack actual texture yet pulse with shifting reflections; sometimes one glimpses one bronze reflected in another. Brâncuși’s use of different materials also endows the works with temporal depth. Their rough or cracked oak bases hint at a remote past from which these birds, fish, people, and animals might have emerged. Ezra Pound may have had something like this in mind when he wrote, after evoking “the white wide intellectual sunlight” of Brâncuși’s studio, “The white stillness of marble. The rough eternity of the tree trunks.”

The aphorism most often repeated in discussions of Brâncuși’s career is “Nothing grows in the shade of tall trees”—his explanation of why he gave up working as an assistant to Rodin after only two months. He seems always to have been determined to find his own way. Some of the first rooms suggested other paths that he might have followed. His squat limestone La Sagesse de la terre (Wisdom of the Earth, 1907–1908) reveals the influence of Cycladic or Oceanic sculpture. It is impressive, but Brâncuși may have considered it too similar to its archaic models: he never again created anything of the kind. Another path not taken was that of more naturalistic sculpture—perhaps, again, to escape the influence of Rodin. Be that as it may, I regretted, looking at Brâncuși’s bronze Head of a Child (1906), that he had created nothing else in this genre. He movingly captures the child’s openness to life—a delicate sense of uncertainty that is enlivening rather than disabling.

A later room was devoted to Brâncuși’s sculptures of animals: a fish, a seal, a turtle, a creature titled Nocturnal Animal (circa 1930), and several brilliantly witty roosters, whose zigzag necks rhyme both with the piercing sound of a rooster’s crow and with his jagged comb. Jean Arp, in his “Homage to Brancusi,” (1955) wrote:

The cockerel crowed—co-co-ri-co—and each sound made a zig or zag in his neck.

Brancusi’s cockerel is a saw of joy.

The cockerel saws day from the tree of light.

A caption in this room bears a statement by Dorothy Dudley: 

Those who call these sculptures “abstract”…have not felt how a pulse appears to beat in each one…how they have the look of having been made…by someone who is on the inside of things, who is on the same level as stones, trees, human beings, animals and plants—not above or apart from them.

Brâncuși showed an unusual degree of respect for his subjects, whether animals or people. The impassive female figure of La Sagesse de la terre sits on the ground with her knees drawn to her chest. Brâncuși does not expose her sexual organs or give the impression that he can penetrate her inner life. It is rather as if he recognizes that she has emerged from a past beyond his understanding. Placed beside her in the exhibition, Paul Gauguin’s Oviri (1894) seemed voyeuristic. Brâncuși honored the otherness of what was then termed “primitive art”; Gauguin merely exploited its exoticness.

Brâncuși was born in 1876 in a remote part of southwestern Romania. According to one of his first biographers, V. G. Paleolog, the region was still in the “epoch of wood”; nails and glass were rarities. His father was a peasant farmer and part-time carpenter, and by the age of seven Constantin was looking after the family cattle. He studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Craiova, the provincial capital, and then at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, after which he moved to Paris in 1904. There he began to associate with many of Europe’s most sophisticated poets, composers, and artists. 

The catalog’s subtitle—“L’Art ne fait que commencer”—is taken from one of Brâncuși’s most quoted statements: “Art—there hasn’t yet been any art. Art is just beginning.” These words are a reminder that he got his start in Paris during a period of great hope in European art. This was a time not only of individual achievement but of unusually creative artistic friendships: Apollinaire and Picasso in Paris, Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in London, Klimt and Schiele in Vienna. In St. Petersburg the Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov collaborated with all the important contemporary Russian and Ukrainian visual artists; he was close to the painter Pavel Filonov and revered by Vladimir Tatlin.

Few of these artists and writers belonged to the dominant classes or nationalities of the capital cities where they lived. Many were outsiders—marginal figures who began their careers on the cusp between different ages and worlds. Khlebnikov, for example, grew up in a remote settlement on the edge of the Volga Delta; his father was an official administrator for the Kalmyks—a nomadic Buddhist people—and the family lived in a solitary house surrounded by yurts. Like Brâncuși, he was obsessed with birds. As a student he spent five months doing ornithological field work in the Ural Mountains. He is said to have mentioned over a hundred different birds in his poems, often calling them by their local names. Some short passages in his poem-play Zangezi (1922), his last major work, are written in what he called “the language of birds.” The bird-language passages are intended to be incomprehensible to humans, but other passages are sublimely beautiful—not only in the original but also in Paul Schmidt’s translation:

Streaking the eastern streams of everland,
they fly away into their neverland.
With the nevering eyes of earthlings
like notnesses of earth-law,
fleet flight to the blue of heaven,
flight fleet into blue, hovering.
Shrouded in all-knowing sorrow,
they fly to the source of pre-knowledge,
winglings of no-where, mouths of now-here!

Applied to the visual arts, the term “Modernism” usually suggests a search for simpler color or form. Many Modernists were, paradoxically, fascinated by the archaic; they hoped that by understanding earlier forms of art they could reinvigorate tired cultural conventions. For Bartók, Brâncuși, Kandinsky, Khlebnikov, Malevich, and others, this was a matter not simply of copying Eastern European folk art or the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Far East, but of opening themselves up to the spiritual roots of these artistic traditions. Brancusi created no overtly religious work, but he was brought up Romanian Orthodox. In Bucharest and during his first years in Paris he earned part of his living by singing in a church choir. In 1925 he wrote, “Things are not so difficult to make. What’s difficult is to get oneself into the right state to make them.” Traditional icon painters often fasted before beginning an important work; how Brâncuși got himself “into the right state” we do not know. 

By the early 1920s, however, many of these artists had died, and Modernism had lost its impetus. Gaudier-Brzeska died in 1915; Apollinaire, Klimt, and Schiele in 1918; Khlebnikov in 1922. Gaudier-Brzeska’s death was a blow from which Pound never recovered, and Apollinaire’s was almost as great a blow for Picasso; he still had an equal in Matisse, but the two were more rivals than friends. It was Brâncuși—above all—who stayed loyal to Modernism’s initial hopes. Vitrac recognized this, writing in the catalog of a Brâncuși exhibition at the Brummer Gallery in New York in 1933, “Brancusi participates in the modern spirit…. What, today, is left of that spirit, personified in France by its true champion: the poet Guillaume Apollinaire? A few inconsistent notions…and a handful of free, independent men, among whom Brâncuși occupies a place in the foremost rank.”

James Joyce pointed to something similar when he coined the word “constantinently.” Joyce had asked Brâncuși, whom he had met through Pound, to draw a frontispiece for Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (1929). Brâncuși’s first attempts—two realistic portraits of Joyce—are outstanding. Joyce’s publishers, however, found them too conventional. Brâncuși then came up with a simple spiral, titled Symbol of Joyce. Pound, for his part, repeatedly praised Brâncuși for his devotion to his art, referring to him in Guide to Kulchur (1938) as “in some dimensions a saint.” In 1922 he wrote that “Brancusi has created a universe, a cielo, a Platonic heaven full of pure and essential forms.” And forty years later, in his notes for his last, unfinished canto, he wrote:

And for one beautiful day there was peace. 

           Brancusi’s bird 

                               in the hollow of pine trunks. 

Brâncuși was obsessed with the joy of flight, and his work is free of anger and hate. One might wonder if it slips into escapism—if he wanted to create a Paradiso without passing through an Inferno and a Purgatorio. This, however, would be to ignore the duality of his sculpture. The polished, streamlined bronzes bear witness to those elements that can be transformed, that allow the possibility of transcendence; the rough oak plinths—the splits and knots in the wood and the intransigent whorls of the grain—anchor the bronzes in the Earth and bear witness to all that remains stubbornly and unalterably itself. 

Brâncuși’s last major sculpture, Boundary Marker (1945), is correctly, if inadequately, described in the catalog as “a symbol of harmony between peoples” and as “one of Brancusi’s few works with a political dimension.” In 1907 he had created his first version of The Kiss—a motif to which he returned many times—in which the two lovers, each in profile, constitute a single, indissoluble unit. They are carved from a single block of stone; their lips just touch, and the man’s right eye meets the woman’s left eye, almost forming a single oval. Brâncuși referred to this sculpture as his “road to Damascus.” It was his first direct carving in stone and an explicit declaration of independence from Rodin—cool and self-contained, where Rodin’s famous sculpture is wild and dramatic. Most of the Kiss sculptures are still more schematic, the lovers’ facial features hinted at ever more sketchily.

Boundary Marker is the last in this long series. Composed of three stone blocks placed one atop another, it stands nearly two meters high. The central block shows the lovers, full length, on each side. The top and bottom blocks show smaller likenesses, flattened into friezes, three couples on each side. There is a clear line between the lovers; their lips and eyes do not merge. By the end of World War II Romania’s borders had shifted dramatically; the country lost Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union while regaining Northern Transylvania from Hungary. We do not know what Brâncuși thought of these changes, but it is hard to imagine a wiser response than Boundary Marker. Its many pairs of lovers—twenty-four altogether—are locked together in a kiss without a trace of sentimentality. The couples cannot get away from one another. As a political statement Boundary Marker is the polar opposite of Picasso’s Guernica—not a howl of protest but a quiet reminder of the need to accept reality without bitterness.

Centre Pompidou

Constantin Brâncuși: Sleeping Muse, 1910

Centre Pompidou

Various Endless Column sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși

Centre Pompidou

Various sculptures of roosters by Constantin Brâncuși

Every aspect of Brâncuși’s career was represented at the Pompidou, though the grandeur of his major work of land art—the World War I memorial at Târgu Jiu in Romania—could only be hinted at through photographs. The memorial is a triptych—Table of Silence, Endless Column (thirty meters tall), and Gate of the Kiss; the axis linking the three sculptures is a little more than a kilometer long. Brâncuși received the commission in 1935 and completed the ensemble in 1938. He was so moved by the opportunity to create a major work near his birthplace that he refused to accept payment. 

“Art gives birth to ideas,” Brâncuși wrote, “it does not represent them.” This implicit criticism of what we now call conceptual art deserves to be better known. He also wrote, “Don’t look for obscure formulae or mystery. What I give you is pure joy. Look at my works until you see them.” The cover illustration of the exhibition album is Sleeping Muse (1910), a highly polished, highly simplified head resting on its side. It is hard not to look at this radiant muse without imagining that it might reveal some mystery, should it ever wake from its sleep. But it is certainly a source of joy—a joy for which it is hard to find words.