Brancusi often recounted how, when he visited the Air Transport Exhibition in Paris in 1912, along with Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, Duchamp stood thoughtfully in front of a propeller and proclaimed: “The paint is gone…”. And then he suddenly asked him, “Tell me, can you do this?” It seems that in the several decades that followed, the sculptor tried to confirm that he could get closer to that goal...
In his effort to prove this, Brancusi has managed to be recognized as “the inventor of modern sculpture.” His work, as well as the process of making it, are the subject of a magnificent exhibition now open at the Center Pompidou in Paris: more than 120 sculptures, complete with many photographs, drawings and films by the artist. The various sections of the exhibition revolve around the reconstruction of one of Brancusi's workshops, with the sculptures displayed as he did, establishing a dialogue between them and having many tools and materials clearly visible.
Due to his particular circumstances, and in life, practically the only way to see his work was in his studio-workshop in Paris: he invited people to call him and, by appointment, he himself presented the sculptures, placed with great refinement. in the space where he worked. Ultimately, his study became his most influential work. He gave it and all its contents to the French State shortly before his death in 1957. Since the creation of the Center Pompidou, the Atelier Brancusi has been presented in a separate volume, accessible from the same square as the main building.
Born in 1876 in Romania, Constantin Brancusi was often presented in worldly circles as a peasant from the Danube Plain. After dropping out of school, working in various jobs as a teenager, he demonstrated tremendous manual skill. To the point that he was accepted directly into the second year of a good arts and crafts school presenting a violin of his own making, made from pieces of the barrels that he fixed for restaurants at that time. He passed brilliantly through the Bucharest School of Fine Arts and in 1904 he decided to tour Europe — “on foot,” he liked to say — to settle in Paris and try to make his way.
His artistic ideal at that time was quite influenced by the work of Auguste Rodin and, precisely, in 1907 he was invited to work as an assistant in the sculptor's prestigious studio. She barely stayed with him for a single month. He justified his decision to leave with his well-known aphorism: “Nothing grows in the shadow of big trees.”
It is there that he met Edward Steichen, another assistant, who became one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century and was an essential friend for Brancusi's career. That same 1907 he began to work directly on the stone, dispensing with the usual intermediate stage of plaster. He wanted to reach a more powerful expression, dictated by the stone itself. His growing interest in the stylization of forms, coupled with various exotic influences that he absorbed, decisively distanced his art from tradition.
In 1911 he installed his stone sculpture The Kiss on a tomb in the Montparnasse cemetery, a highly stylized representation of a linked couple; In the following decades he often returned to this theme, exploring a wide variety of forms of expression. The same thing happened with several other themes, which provoked numerous interpretations, often erasing the border between the figurative and the abstract.
His bronze works are polished in such a way that they absorb and reflect the environment in which they are located; The fineness of the polishing is also dazzling in many of his marble works. The bases, often made of wood, more rustic, of a great formal variety, are an intrinsic part of the work.
Brancusi held a fascination for intellectuals, and was the friend of Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Cocteau and many others. Of musicians, he was a close friend of Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud; Among the artists he has always had Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp at his side, as well as Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Julio Gonzalez, Le Douanier Rousseau, Nancy Cunnard...
Modigliani was also his companion and disciple, followed years later by Isamu Noguchi. “Seeing far is one thing; Getting there is another.”
