“Simplicity is complexity resolved,” Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși once remarked. The sculptor, painter, and photographer brought that ethos of refinement to his art. He is regarded as one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and a pioneer of modernism, known for sleek works in plaster, limestone, marble, polished bronze, and carved wood that emphasized elegant purity of form over detail.
His Paris studio was on the famed Impasse Ronsin, a dead-end street home to a buzzing artists’ colony. The studio was the center of his creative universe: where he worked, entertained friends and clients, and displayed his groundbreaking works, whose forms challenged conventional artistic boundaries. A new exhibition, “Brâncuși: The Artist and His Studio,” at the Museum of Modern Art, traces the provocative artist’s creative life through dozens of artworks and objects from his studio.
Among the most famous of these works were “Bird in Space” (L’Oiseau dans l’espace), a series of at least 16 sculptures the artist made between 1923 and 1940. Created in bronze and marble, each Bird in Space depicts a streamlined, vertical form that suggests flight rather than a bird itself.
Three bronze versions of Brâncuși’s iconic work are included in the exhibition. In the work, Brâncuși eliminated the bird’s wings and feathers, instead elongating the swell of the body. The bird’s head and beak are reduced to a small oval plane. A radical departure from sculptural precedents that emphasized the artist’s hand and detail, the deceptively simple Bird in Space courted controversy and misunderstanding. Here’s a closer look at three surprising aspects of the work and its history.
In a pivotal court case, it redefined sculpture.
The Kiss, 1916
Constantin Brâncuși
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Brummer Gallery Exhibition Catalog, 1926
Constantin Brâncuși
Grob Gallery
In legal terms, “Bird in Space” rewrote the definition of sculpture. In 1926, Brâncuși shipped a version of the work from Paris to New York City for an exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, organized by Marcel Duchamp, his close friend and advocate. U.S. law allowed artworks, including sculpture, to enter the country free of import taxes. But when Bird in Space arrived, officials refused to admit it as art. At the time, sculptures were defined as reproductions, in carving or casting, of natural objects such as the human form. Finding no such recognizable form, officials classified the work as a utilitarian object, “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies” to be specific, and imposed a duty of 40 percent of its value.
The sculpture, today in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, ended up at the center of a landmark 1928 court case, Constantin Brâncuși v. United States, in which Brâncuși defended his work as art. The case began as a question of how closely the work imitated a bird, which would clear it of the import tax, but evolved into a debate over who decides what counts as sculpture, and why. A number of art world heavyweights testified, including photographer Edward Steichen, British sculptor Jacob Epstein, and William Henry Fox, director of the Brooklyn Museum. Art critic Frank Crowninshield testified that the work did suggest a bird: “It has the suggestion of flight, it suggests grace, aspiration, vigor, coupled with speed in the spirit of strength, potency, beauty, just as a bird does. But just the name, the title, of this work, why, really, it does not mean much.” Ultimately, the court ruled in Brâncuși’s favor.
The judge’s opinion in the case referenced the rise of abstraction: “a so-called new school of art, whose exponents attempt to portray abstract ideas rather than imitate natural objects.” He added, “While some difficulty might be encountered in associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and highly ornamental.” Ultimately, he decided the sculpture is a work of art, allowing it tax-free entry to the U.S.
Critics see “Bird in Space” as a representation of the artist himself
Self-Portrait, 1935
Constantin Brâncuși
Osborne Samuel
Bird in Space (white marble), 1925
Constantin Brâncuși
Bruce Silverstein Gallery
Brâncuși did not indulge in deep readings of his sculptures, preferring their often gleaming, highly polished surfaces to speak for themselves. “Don’t look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you,” he once proclaimed. That gave critics a tricky task when it came to interpreting Brâncuși’s work, as noted by American artist Sidney Geist in his 1984 essay “Brâncuși’s ‘Bird in Space’: A Psychological Reading.”
“We see a finished, perfect product; we are in the presence of exquisite drawing and an exquisite sensibility,” Geist wrote. “Brâncuși doesn’t show his hand. He carefully gives his work titles, which seem to conceal rather more than they reveal.”
In the essay, Geist avoids purely formalist interpretations of Brâncuși's work, looking instead to repeated themes and motifs as evidence of their significance. “Bird in Space,” he argues offers an oblique portrait of the artist himself, who was born in Romania but fled a difficult childhood home and traveled extensively throughout his life.
“Brâncuși’s elusiveness is linked, then, to traveling, to escape, to going beyond. Bird in Space will be symbolic of his craving for, and of his flight to, the absolute.” Geist argues that the work may show no bird at all, but can instead be seen as the upright form of a man with a swelling chest, or as a phallic symbol, or even a flame.
“It is symbolic of the urge for transcendence, for escape from the earthly and the contingent,” he continues. As the artist himself once declared, “All my life I have sought the essence of flight. Flight—what bliss!”
Several “Bird in Space” sculptures were intended for a never-completed temple of love.
Not every “Bird in Space” was meant for a gallery. After meeting Brâncuși in Paris in 1933, Yeshwant Rao Holkar, the maharaja of Indore, India, ordered three: one in bronze, one in black marble, and one in white. When his young wife died in 1937, he invited the sculptor to India to design a temple of love and peace to hold her ashes.
Brâncuși’s plan was uncompromising. The structure would have no doors or windows and would be entered through an underground passage. Inside an apple-shaped chamber, a small square pool would be flanked by the three birds, at the pool’s sides. The bronze would be placed so that the midday sun lit it just once a year. Henri-Pierre Roché, the dealer who introduced the maharaja to Brâncuși, described the bronze as “struck full by the midday sun, through the circular hole in the ceiling on a particular holy day of the year.”
When Brâncuși reached Indore at the end of 1937, his patron was away on a tiger hunt and beginning a new romance. After a frustrating month, Brâncuși went home. The temple was never built.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/CYv4fw1
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