Page 46 - Studio International - March April 1975

Brancusi

in Rumania

Photographs by Sean Hudson

The film-maker Sean Hudson, best- appreciation of the harsh, primitive and
known for his anthropological work isolated condition from which Brancusi
`The Hadza', 1965, recently returned early escaped, but which deeply marked
from a four-week visit to Rumania, his art and his character.
where he was making a preliminary In the beautiful photographs here
survey for the projected Arts Council reproduced of the monuments at Turgu
film on Brancusi. Hudson brought back Jiu, Hudson concentrates not on the
a unique photographic record of most of autonomous formal structure of the
the Brancusi sculptures in Rumania, and pieces in detachment from their
of the nearly unchanged peasant life of surroundings, which has often been
the sculptor's native region, Oltenia. noted by photographers, but the way in
This background material is not which they sit in the environment, the
superficially folkloristic — ie relating way they are used by people. In fact the
forms in the sculpture to local handicrafts, monuments are no more regarded by the
etc., — but provides a sensitive people of Turgu Jiu than is their own