Page 37 - Studio International - July August 1973

(Above)
Rodin
Burghers of Calais 1886-7
Bronze, 85 x 91¾ in.
Photo: Musée Rodin, Paris
(Right)
Brancusi
Gate of the Kiss 1937
Stone, 5.3o x 5.5o x 1.75 metres
Turgu Jiu, Romania
(Far right)
Brancusi
Endless Column 1937
Stone, 29.35 metres high
Turgu Jiu, Romania

evoke the Gothic cathedrals to which he was top-heavy head merging into shoulders leads the only achieving partial success in the Balzac, is
so attached. figure into its precarious backward tilt. The achieved apparently without effort in the
Much of the naturalistic detail and Balzac represents the point at which gravity masterful design of the Turgu Jiu Endless
apparently rhetorical gesture of the Burghers has changes from being an attribute of the figure — Column. In both these sculptures Brancusi
been eliminated from the Balzac, and to its as in the studies — into the subject of the achieves on the gigantic scale a perfect
expressive cost. The heavier drapery of the later sculpture itself. equilibrium at the point at which the sculpture
sculpture, concealing the braced internal These two master-images for public sculpture, meets the ground. The dangerous and unstable
structure of the figure in favour of the simple the horizontal rectangular block and the relation between object and base of many of the
silhouette, sacrifices most of the tension inflected vertical monolith, were evidently small sculptures — touching at a point on a
characteristic of the preliminary nude studies. present in Brancusi's mind some forty years curved surface, the finest of footings, even on an
From certain views the distribution of mass in after the Balzac, when he was planning the edge (as in the Fish) — is replaced in the Gate
the draped Balzac is hard to square with the monumental group at Turgu Jiu. The Gate of and the Column by an actual gravitational
convincing anatomy one knows to exist the Kiss rivals not Rodin's Gate of Hell, but the stability, while the image and proportions of
beneath. However it is perhaps niggardly to Burghers of Calais to whose frontal aspect its each piece, perceived as it rises from eye level,
question the success of a sculpture in which external proportion corresponds. The Gate of appear to release the sculpture from the pull of
Rodin was reaching out, extending himself, as the Kiss is, if only in terms of its continuous the earth.
never before. The effort towards a dramatic decoration, a group of figures. Paradoxically it
and generalized simplification of volume was a emphasizes both the massiveness and the The fundamental role of gravity in the
heroic one, but simply not within his talent to transparency of the rectangular motif. Its great emergence of modern sculpture is nowhere
accomplish without a self-conscious and stability, its sheer physical weight, is belied by more evident than in the sculpture of Degas.
obtrusive theatricality. The concept of the the subordination of every element — the Here a liberated conception of the figure in
figure as a single, virtually unmodulated material, the proportions, the nature and depth sculpture opened up possibilities for the free
vertical, was to have a profound effect, notably of relief— to its intended function — the gate, to articulation of volume that were untapped until
on Brancusi. Moreover the Balzac is about be passed through not primarily by the body, steel came into general use as the central medium
gravity — the upward thrust of the figure from but by the eye and the spirit. of sculpture, and are even now by no means
the plainly-stated horizontal base, its stability The incorporation of the diagonals into the exhausted. Because of the secrecy which
again threatened by the pull of the earth, as the soaring vertical, with which Rodin struggled, surrounded its making, the objectivity of
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