Brancusi
1
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI:
His spiritual roots by Aidan Hart
It wasn’t easy to find Brancusi’s studio gallery at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, at least in 1985. No flashy signs. No banners. In fact I walked straight past it a few times thinking that it was a builders’ shed. But this shed it turned out to be.
The door was locked, but after a ring on the bell the lone attendant opened up.
Within was a paradise, a garden of Brancusi’s sculptures. And thanks to the studio’s obscurity I was alone, able to enjoy the sculptures in silence. Probably Brancusi the craftsman wouldn’t have minded his studio being mistaken for a builders’ workshop, or that people had to make an effort to see his works; he knew that the best things come through persistence and solitude.
Constantin Brancusi is commonly regarded as a founding father of modernist sculpture, with Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian being founders of abstract painting. But has subsequent modernism much in common with
Brancusi’s work and vision, or has it become its very antithesis?
Herbert Read wrote in his book Modern Sculpture that the “modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.” If this is so, then the question is whether or not Brancusi was an individualist, in the sense that he aimed to break with everything that had come before. Brancusi’s own words and his stylistic influences strongly suggest that it is closest the truth to say that rather than being an individualist and among the first of a line, he was in fact a traditionalist and among the last of a line. He was among the last practitioners within mainline western art who have worked according to the principles of what can be most accurately called sacred art.
As Calinic Argatu has written, “Brancusi’s amazing modern artistic message is a product of Tradition...”1 He was new because he was old. He was an individualist in breaking with Europe’s humanist tradition of the last few centuries,
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI:
His spiritual roots by Aidan Hart
It wasn’t easy to find Brancusi’s studio gallery at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, at least in 1985. No flashy signs. No banners. In fact I walked straight past it a few times thinking that it was a builders’ shed. But this shed it turned out to be.
The door was locked, but after a ring on the bell the lone attendant opened up.
Within was a paradise, a garden of Brancusi’s sculptures. And thanks to the studio’s obscurity I was alone, able to enjoy the sculptures in silence. Probably Brancusi the craftsman wouldn’t have minded his studio being mistaken for a builders’ workshop, or that people had to make an effort to see his works; he knew that the best things come through persistence and solitude.
Constantin Brancusi is commonly regarded as a founding father of modernist sculpture, with Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian being founders of abstract painting. But has subsequent modernism much in common with
Brancusi’s work and vision, or has it become its very antithesis?
Herbert Read wrote in his book Modern Sculpture that the “modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.” If this is so, then the question is whether or not Brancusi was an individualist, in the sense that he aimed to break with everything that had come before. Brancusi’s own words and his stylistic influences strongly suggest that it is closest the truth to say that rather than being an individualist and among the first of a line, he was in fact a traditionalist and among the last of a line. He was among the last practitioners within mainline western art who have worked according to the principles of what can be most accurately called sacred art.
As Calinic Argatu has written, “Brancusi’s amazing modern artistic message is a product of Tradition...”1 He was new because he was old. He was an individualist in breaking with Europe’s humanist tradition of the last few centuries,