Page 39 - Studio International - April 1970

coarse stone becomes almost completely afforded a means of re-entry into articulated Brancusi made from time to time some
linear, as in the Gate of the Kiss of 1937. form, without following traditional modes constructed wood sculptures—i.e. combining
Timidity of 1915 indicates an alternative way of articulation derived from the human body. separate, already shaped pieces of wood—he
of preserving the block which Brancusi Almost certainly it was the stimulus of clearly found the lack of integrity, of whole-
scarcely developed. Cubism, with its emphasis on the breakdown ness, in the material disturbing, and pre-
Starting from the Rodin-like, naturalistic of unitary forms, their separation into parts, ferred to feed back the possibility of an
Sleep as an initial experiment in marble, the that prompted Brancusi to turn to wood, with implied free relation of parts into later marble
denser, more closely-packed material suggests its long grain and tensile strength, in which carvings like the White Negress and Leda.
the horizontally-orientated head detached the definition and separation of form could be From the discovery of The Sorceress derive a
from its neck, the Sleeping Muse of 1910, which achieved swiftly and decisively with the saw
he then casts into bronze. Bronze becomes a and axe. This use of wood, at once so radical
carving material for Brancusi, something and so natural, was not preconceived, but
utterly different from a means of making clay arrived out of a series of experiments,
permanent. He worked on the bronzes, starting, as with his first use of marble, from a
making each cast individually distinct, and strongly naturalistic basis. Both the peasant
from the marble Prometheus made his first carving of his native Rumania, and African
highly polished bronze. Polishing is the last art, provided him with models for the clear
refinement of carving, the abrasion and re- and decisive handling of wood : indeed the
moval of fractional quantities of material, so universal interest in African art at the time
that the surface is not only smooth and trans- must have been more of an embarrassment
lucent as in the marble, but becomes, in the than a guide to Brancusi; where Picasso and
bronze, a container for the image of the Braque were free to borrow the formal sim-
spectator and the environment, shaped and plifications of African carving and transfer
modulated in the form of the object. them almost without modification into their
In 1911 Brancusi broke out of the remaining own painting, such literal transposition was
constrictions of human subject-matter with clearly impossible for Brancusi in the same
the first Bird: though the form is still basically medium. His first attempts to resolve this
a head and neck, the handling of the marble difficulty consisted in combining a European
is given a definition due to his increasing motif—walking child, caryatid—with stylized,
confidence with the material and the pos- `primitive' handling of the parts of the body.
sibilities of invention now that the obsessive Then, in The Prodigal Son, the naturalistic
need to identify traces of the human image overall organization is abandoned for an
was no longer present. He had found a way almost abstract and mechanical division of
round Rodin's legacy from European natura- forms, apparently achieved largely by a num-
lism— the necessity of the figure, or part-figure, ber of saw cuts through a rectangular block.
as the proper subject of ambitious sculpture. It was not until The Sorceress that Brancusi
Moreover his development of bird and animal found the ideal solution, an articulation into
themes gave Brancusi a formal confidence, a parts not imposed by style or decoration, or
more abstract and inventive detachment, in by an overemphatic use of tools, but inherent
his handling of human subjects. in the material itself That is to say an already-
If marble, and bronze and marble, became articulated, naturally-forked piece of timber
the vehicle for thematic compression and replaces the conventional block, and in effect
refinement, Brancusi's discovery of wood becomes the motif of the sculpture. Although