Page 40 - Studio International - April 1970

great series of individual and thematic projects, where he was inhibited into making best way to understand their importance, it
sculptures : the Torso of a Young Man, The the simplest kind of vertical and lateral seems to me, is to see them playing the part
Cock, and The Turtle, all carved in the first arrangements of separate forms, trusting to of the shoulders and neck of the traditional
instance from a naturally-forked piece of wood. perspective to modulate on the larger scale. portrait bust. It is surprising how many of
These sculptures are distinct from the rest of Brancusi's sculptures on their bases can still
Brancusi's oeuvre in that their complex IV be read as portrait busts: all the expression is
internal structure, while remaining compact, With regard to the perennial problem of concentrated into the head, or object, which
implies through the use of sections the infinite Brancusi's 'bases', their aesthetic status : is the focus of our attention; but is articulated
penetration of space along every axis. They What started as an expedient, the answer to towards us by a structure which echoes or
are tense and dramatic, but wholly without the problem of presenting the object to the enhances the object, without competing with
rhetoric. Their complexity refers them to spectator at the right height and orientation, it; and which in form and handling is more
body, rather than head in terms of human of making a transition between the concen- generalized than the object.
physical equivalence—in both The Cock and trated, precious quality of the object, and the Sidney Geist has said that the bases perform
The Turtle Brancusi dispensed with the base, generalised and variegated nature of the the same function as the painted frames of
which plays the role of 'body' in presenting environment, became for him in one spec- Seurat, forming a gradation between the
the majority of his 'head' objects. tacular instance an end in itself—the Endless privileged reality of the painting and the
This group of sculptures is for me Brancusi's Column as a base become sculpture. habitual reality of the wall. But the base is far
major achievement. They challenge the ideal Except in the case of some pieces, such as more crucial structurally to the sculpture than
of refinement of form that he had set up as a some of The Fish4 for which he carved special the frame is to painting—with or without the
standard of finish, of completeness. They have pedestals, the bases are not specific to the frame the picture is suspended on the wall by
an openness, a freedom, an invention, that sculptures; he would re-arrange the sculp- supports which are taken for granted and
Brancusi confined otherwise to the bases and tures on different bases in his studio, thus over usually invisible, whereas the base in sculp-
useful objects. They combine the formal the years continuously re-defining the pre- ture is the support as well as the visual frame,
daring of the constructive mode, with the sence of the work around him, without the setting: it not only mediates between the
integrity and compression of carving. They affecting the character of the individual object and the world, but, coming between
have a sense of architecture which is not objects. The bases are not works of art, nor the object and the ground, represents the
evident in Brancusi's various architectural are they arbitrary decorative elements. The world in terms of its gravitational pull in