Brancusi: Master of Reductions

LEAN, sleek and impersonal as a hood ornament on a Pierce Arrow, Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space is far better known than its maker. It made headlines in 1926 when the U.S. Customs Bureau refused to let it in the country duty-free, claiming that it was not art but mere metal. In the comic-opera court proceedings that followed, a group of American art lovers won a modest but crucial ruling: that to be art, a work by a recognized sculptor need not bear a striking resemblance to a natural object. Whether or not the decision affected the course of art, it sharply changed the official practices of the U.S. Customs Bureau. But in all the brouhaha, Bird came to seem more the epitome of an era than the creation of any one man, and Brancusi's full achievement came to be scanted.

Now a show has been mounted that gives Bird both a family and an ancestry. It traces for the first time the full development of the canny, determined peasant's son who literally walked to Paris from his native Rumania to become an artist. Currently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the show was initiated by Director Thomas Messer of New York's Guggenheim Museum. Messer's biggest triumph was to get Rumanian museums and collectors to release six works of their country's most celebrated modern artist. Loans from other owners (including Paris' Museum of Modern Art, which inherited the contents of Brancusi's studio on his death in 1957) have brought the total number of pieces up to 84 sculptures and 23 drawings. By far the largest and most comprehensive Brancusi show ever assembled, it will move on to the Guggenheim Nov. 21, then to Chicago's Art Institute in the spring.

Breakthrough. Brancusi's early work, never before seen in the U.S., is the most surprising part of the current exhibition. In Paris he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and exhibited such accomplished work at the Musee Luxembourg that Rodin invited him to work in his studio. Brancusi refused. "Nothing grows well in the shadow of a big tree," he said, and spent the next two years working in virtual isolation. His last work in a traditional mode is the tender portrait head, Torment. Then, in 1907, he made the great break with the past that determined the whole future course of his career.

It was a year of decision for many masters of the modern movement. At the cafes of Montparnasse, the radicals of the new generation were discussing Africa's primitive sculpture and the great Cezanne memorial exhibition. It was the year Matisse exhibited his epochal Joie de Vivre and the year Picasso showed Braque his newly completed Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting that launched Cubism.

Brancusi did not mingle with the cafe crowds, but he was obviously aware of what was going on. Upon receiving a commission to do a funerary monument in Rumania, he began work on a kneeling bronze woman. Starting with a violently agitated figure that Rodin might have been proud to acknowledge, Brancusi went through several successively simplified versions until he arrived at the motionless Prayer he finally cast. Though still conventional in form, the mourner's classic calm and smoothed-over details foreshadow aspects of Brancusi's mature work.

The final breakthrough came later in the year when he carved The Kiss. Nothing could be less like Rodin's voluptuous lovers than these stolid, blocklike figures. Where Rodin's lovers flicker and twist, Brancusi's lovers face each other straight on and are barely scratched on the surface of the stone. The tender surface of Rodin's burnished bronze palpitates with life; Brancusi's pitted limestone is all idea.

Brancusi had found his own style. From then on, he began those drastic reductions of natural shapes that left the human head an egglike form on which the features are barely traced, that found in a delicate wafer of blue, mottled marble the poetic essence of fish, that outlined in metal and stone the soaring flight of a bird.

Peasant Vigor. For a sculptor whose working life spanned more than 50 years, Brancusi's approximately 200 extant pieces do not constitute a large body of work. Once Brancusi found a motif that delighted him, he characteristically repeated it over and over again, subtly altering and refining its shapes and using different materials to give it new substance. There are 16 versions of Bird in Space. Not all his works, however, share Bird's elegant abstraction or the witty sophistication of Princess X, a subtly phallic take-off on the society-portrait bust. In his native Rumania, Brancusi had been trained as a cabinetmaker, and when he worked in wood, he could express himself with peasant vigor. The jagged forms of The Cock, shown here in bronze, were originally carved in wood, concentrating the character of the barnyard bully into his aggressive beak and flaring tail feathers. Sidney Geist, author of the leading study of Brancusi's work and guest curator of the current exhibition, puts the matter succinctly: "Enviable in its scope, dazzling in its perfections, tentative only in its repetitions, the scale of this effort is human rather than superhuman."

The key word is human. There is something endearing about ambition that limits itself to work so well within the bounds of art and finds a lifetime of satisfaction in the transformation of simple animal forms into elegant shapes. When old age stopped him from working, Brancusi spent his days fondling his precious "children," as he called his sculptures, covering them with dust cloths every night. And when he willed them to Paris' Museum of Modern Art, he did so on the condition that they be displayed in an accurate reconstruction of the crowded Montparnasse shack in which he--and they--spent so many happy years together.

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