"You have turned the antic into the modern," Rousseau le Douannier once told Brâncuşi. Those words complete very accurately the characterization suggested by Dan HÄulicÄ: "He produced the century's purest classicism out of the exotic."[1] The Romanian sculptor was one of those modern artists who achieved such a complex synthesis: archaic – exotic – modern. The comparisons with the art forms created in areas lying outside Europe, ranging from the African carving to the much more uncertain structures of a Tibetan art which he is unlikely to have been familiar with, have led to some arguable conclusions. The references to the Black Africa's art, for instance, are both substantiated and challenged by the biographers' accounts. From Petre Pandrea we find out that black art, "laden by carnality, was thought by Brâncuşi to be a witching and malevolent art." [2] It is the same biographer who accounted that while Brâncuşi was working on the first version of The Kiss, he praised the accomplishment of the art created by the archaic man who "forgetful of his chores was working with cheerfulness" [3], which concurred with his aspiration "that sculpture express pure joy". [4] There is no doubt that many critics of the Brâncuşian work reached a deadlock when trying to explain it in respect of the traditional information and the kinds of form relationships given credit to by the history of European art in the 20th century – they probably ignored the remarks made by Henry Moore more than five decades ago which read that "apart from its individual value, Brâncuşi's work has had a historic importance for the development of contemporary sculpture". [5] The year 1907 is a highly characteristic moment for the development of Brâncuşi's own vision. It is now that he creates, as most of his critics agree, The Prayer, The Wisdom of the Earth. The figure of the knelt woman in the graveyard in Buzău is the eloquent proof of the fact that "detaching himself for the first time from Rodin's sphere of influence, he proceeded to the stylisation and simplification of shapes, removing any traces of pathos and thus imparting it an essential purity, with special emphasis on the specificity of the gesture". [6] It is that particular sculpture, meant for a graveyard in the country, that recovers, at the beginning of the 20th century, the fundamental significance of the classicism which, along centuries, had been replaced by the image of the victorious athletic body, impressing – even after death – by the amplitude of the gesture. The Prayer goes as back as those times when "the ancient Greek art aims at reducing everything that is complex and confuse to a distinct and intelligible unity" [7] Undoubtedly, it is precisely the crossroads from where the Romanian sculptor headed towards those forms that were "ever more compact, cut down to the essential, as his consciousness was growing more lucid, and his inner life, more active." [8] This moment of reincorporating the significance of the ancient Greek statuary, dating from the period of constituting a concentrated vision of quintessence marks the beginning of all those remarks, more or less acceptable, that refer the Brâncuşian art to the "timeless archetypes" identified either in ancient Egypt architecture, in the Cycladic idols, Venus of Lespugue, The Sun Gate of the mysterious Inca structure in Tiahuanaco, or in who knows what other original cult of fertility. [9] Noteworthily, all those horizons of the civilisations, – to which the Romanian research has added the models of our country's archaic culture – were revealed to Brâncuşi when he approached the matrixes of a genuine classicism sans rivage. Much commented upon, the sculpture which Brâncuşi would revisit several times until 1925, The Kiss, was created in 1907, as well. A distinct monograph was dedicated to it by Sidney Geist [10] who thoroughly examined the composition of this work, revealing a few important implications resulting from the analysis of details, the evolution of some of their relations, and the distribution of voids and full spaces. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether the numerous examples quoted by Geist, who compared The Kiss with various illustrations of the theme, suggest that they could be interpreted as sources of the Brâncuşian work. Similarly, the "three major factors" advocated by Geist as being decisive for the genesis of this work at the end of the year 1907 – viz. Derain's Squatted Figure in Kahnweiler Art Gallery, Matisse's painting Music (study) at the autumn Salon, and the meeting with Charles Morice – are highly questionable. Certainly, Brâncuşi did not intend to develop a system of culture philosophy; still, his entire work – starting with that milestone, 1907 – reveals his aspiration towards instituting a logical organisation of forms into a new kind of relations that emphasizes the internal structure of things. The Brâncuşian synthesis achieved by The Kiss is one of the most expressive evidences – it has the particularity of not pointing to any specific archetypal source, and, at the same time, of suggesting multiple meanings that belong to very diverse areas of world culture. From this point of view, the remark made by Comarnescu is noteworthy: "For ages, there has been the custom in our villages that the surviving partner plant on the grave of the much beloved two trees with interlocked branches, symbolizing love beyond death." [11] The arms (which Geist analyses strictly morphologically, indicating the various angles inscribed in their movement) do suggest the branches of some young trees, which seems to support Comarnescu's reading. This detail thus enhances the complexity of placing the Brâncuşian sculpture in a quite definite area of the archaic arts. The process of essentialisation down to the most elementary form does not reach its ultimate consequences: Brâncuşi was convinced that simplifying does not imply cancelling any identifiable form, so that it seems quite natural to recognize the handsome distinction between the man's arms and the woman's ones, according to William Tucker. [12] Still, the suggestion of the branches encircling the two lovers' bodies as a sign of life is pertinent. The thorough perusal of the numberless reproductions of African art, included in the albums printed all over the world lately, reveal no decisive comparison: even if sometimes – very rarely – the anatomical simplification is comparable with the manner Brâncuşi treated this detail, I could not come across any example where the position of arms, these horizontal traces in The Kiss, can be found in an African work of art. On the other hand, the similarities with the Cycladic statues, in particular with those in Keros and Siros[13], are striking. The type of figurine with arms folded across the chest (usually the left arm over the right one) appears between 2500-1900 B.C. [14] This issue has not been settled yet, since we know very little about the likely presence of some Aegean figurines in the Paris museums at the beginning of the last century which the young sculptor might have seen. For the moment, the only possible answer is that he reached to the sources of European art by simplifying the forms in the way his distant forerunners did. The coincidences delved into by commentators can only be regarded as chance meetings in an infinite universe of forms, among sculptural syntactic solutions, inevitably limited. Likewise, it seems to me that the insistence in discussing the apparent connection of this sculpture to the funerary rituals is exaggerated to a certain extent. It refers to the destination, famous by now, of the version of The Kiss that was placed on the grave of the self-murderer in Montparnasse graveyard. Yet, it is extremely doubtful that in 1907, when he started to carve the first version of the couple forever united in love, Brâncuşi had in mind the implications of funerary significance. The Indo-European legend of 'intertwined trees' has no connection, in my opinion, with the meanings of the first version of the sculpture. Undoubtedly, the late avowals made by the artist himself in the winter of 1956 deserve proper consideration. Not long before his death, he said: "While working assiduously, as usual, on this sculpture, I realized how far the reflection of a couple's outer forms can be from the elemental truth. How alien these statues are to the great event of birth, to the people's joy and sorrow. They reflect almost nothing out of the greatness of life and death. I actually meant to make a thing that remembers not only one couple, but all the couples who loved and succeeded each other on the earth before leaving it. Because each and every of my works has been generated by such a deep feeling." [15] Brâncuşi's words remove the substance of The Kiss out of the contingent sphere, where comparing forms is decisive. With this work, as with all the others created by Brâncuşi, their crucial meanings are to be sought among some more complex relations of spiritual nature, whose esthetic and ethic implications underpin the ideas expressing the artist's characteristic attitude and the significance he bestowed upon the environment he belongs to and which he incessantly discovers in an effort to achieve a work expressing – beyond "the reflection of outer forms" – "the elemental truth".
Adapted from The Wisdom of the Earth, Bucureşti, Editura Meridiane, 1988
[1] Dan HÄulicÄ, Brâncuşi ou l'anonymat du genie, Bucureşti, Editura Meridiane, 1967, p. VIII, [2] Petre Pandrea, Brâncuşi, amintiri şi exegeze, Bucureşti, Editura Meridiane, 1967, p. 162[3] Idem, p. 196[4] Ibid.[5] Henry Moore, London, 1957, vol. I, p. XXXIV; first published in The Listener, 18.VIII, 1937. [6] Barbu Brezianu, Opera lui Constantin Brâncuşi în România, Bucureşti, Editura Academiei R.S.R., 1974, p. 108[7] René Huyghe, subchapter Art Forms and Society, introduction to Section 5, The Earliest Civilisations of Antiquity in René Huyghe (ed.), Larousse Encyclopedia of Prehistoric and Ancient Art, Series Art and Mankind, New York, 1967, p. 242[8] Frank Elgar, entry on Brâncuşi, in Dictionnaire de la sculpture moderne, Paris, 1960, p. 35 [9] see ibid. 10 Sidney Geist, Brâncuşi / Sarutul, translated by Radu Negru and Al. Pascu, Bucureşti, Editura Meridiane, 1982[11] see Petru Comarnescu, Mircea Eliade, Ionel Jianu, Témoignages sur Brâncuşi, Paris, 1967, pp. 31-32[12] William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture, London, 1981, p. 47[13] see Bogdan Rutkowski, Arta egeeana, translation by Anca Irina Ionescu, Bucureşti, Editura Meridiane, 1980, Fig.. 68[14] Idem, pp. 120-121[15] Cf. Barbu Brezianu, op. cit., p. 118
by Dan Grigorescu (1931-2008)
