On Constantm BrancusiDORE ASHTON

1 BEGIN WITH a fable, curiously titled The Stonj of Brigands, writ-ten by Brancusi sometime before 1925, when it was pubhshed inThis Quarter magazine:

Long ago—very, ver '̂, very long ago, when men didn't know howanimals come into the world. . . .One day in those days, a manfound a chicken incnhating her eggs. And since in those days ani-mals and men understood each other, he asked her what she wasdoing. And since the chicken was nice—because in those daysanimals had A lot of respect for men—Ah! mueh, mnch, mnchmore than now—she got up in order not to leave a man stand-ing, and went to him to explain. And she explained for a longtime, a long time, .so that wlien .she returned to her eggs, theywere already spoiled.

That is why in our time chickens who are sitting on their eggsare angry enough to spit in our eye!

The moral ofthis stor\ is obvious: it is that artists take a dim viewof explanations, and often have to defend themselves from the stu-pidities of their commentators. Picasso, for example, when pesteredby critics about the influence of African sculpture on his work, an-swered, "L'art negre? counais pas" (African art? Never heard of it).

By the time Brancusi jotted down Iiis fable, he had had ampleexperience with pests wanting explanations, and some experiencewith interpretations that enraged him. I think that his profound re-spect for intuition and his conviction that, as he wrote on one of hisscribbled notes, "When one is in the sphere of the beautiful, no ex-planations are needed," arc fundamental to our untlcrstanding of hiswork. What is more, all explanations seem gratuitous when in tliepresence of his best works.

Yet, even Brancusi had recourse to words, which are, after all,

20

DORE ASHTON • 21

necessary for explanation. Far from being the unlettered, divinelyinspired peasant he was imagined to be by some of his critics, hehstened attentively to the words of his early friends such as Guil-laume Apollinaire, and read the works of others. When, for instance,his sculpture Princess X was attacked for obscenity, he angrily ex-plained—yes, expliiined—that his endeavor could be compared toGoethe's principle of the Etemal Feminine. Not, certiiinly, an unso-phisticated remark.

Just as Brancusi's oeuvre is complex, varied, and far more exper-imental than is usually granted, he himself had a coinphcated tem-perament. In the often oversimplified history of post-World War Iartistic trends, two quite opposing strands of thought and feeling areusually discerned: a new preoccupation with classicism, and a newpreoccupation with all that is not classic—all that is explosive, anti-rational, and even corrosive. Brancusi was already a prominent per-sonage, and was seen by many, such as the British aesthetician CliveBell in 1926, to be "as pure an artist as Bach or Poussin." But therewas a powerful impulse toward iconoclasm in Brancusi. He was a vig-orous contestant in a fateful game, and he knew the value of whatthe French call drole de type {strange type)—eccentric challengersof just about all received ideas. His closest friends comprised a pro-cession of outspoken droU t)^pes. When the Dada movement arrivedin Paris in the person of Tristan Tzara, who was a fellow Romanian,Brancusi was quick to respond, even saving in one of his fragmentsof writing underneath a drawing on the Socrates theme, "Dada willbring us the things of our time." Tzara was a frequent visitor, and sentlittle notes to Brancusi's address in the Impasse Ronsin signing him-self "Tzara with open eyes." Brancusi was also friendly with BlaiseCendrars, another rollicking writer, lull of tall tales, and, of course,with the arch-exception. Marcel Duchamp. One of his oddest friend-ships was with the very young iconoclast, Cocteau's protege Ray-mond Radiguet, whose rebelliousness was paradoxical: he attackedwhat he called "lc conformisme anti-couforuiistc " (the conforrnisTnof anticonformists). Brancusi was himself no stranger to paradox. Inone of his notes he referred to forms that were "relatively absolute."

22 • RARITAN

Brancusi's attraction to these drole de types does not cancel hisown proclivity for ideahsm, or principle. An anecdote related by Mile.Pogany, who had posed for Brancusi for almost two months duringthe winter of 1910, illustrates this point. There were occasions whenBrancusi created a clay bust so admirable that she implored him tokeep it. But, she wrote, "he only laughed and threw it back into theboxful of clay that stood in the corner of the stndio." Eventually,Brancusi completed Mile. Pogany's portrait in several variations andmaterials spanning twenty years of meditation, beginning perhapswith Muse (1912). I take it he was seeking not the likeness of her facebut the principle—the idea at the very origin of identity. Principle isfinally a mysterious combination of faith and reason.

One of Brancusi's most fruitful associations with a notable ec-centric was his close friendship with composer Eric Satie, also, final-ly, a man of principle, a faithful adherent to Plato s thcor) of idealforms. Brancusi enjoyed his conversations with Satie, a unique manwhose everyday banter was always amusing. Brancusi used to quotehim laughingly, as when he disparaged snobbisui and officialdom inthe art world: "Getting the Legion d'Honneur means nothing in it-self The main thing is not to deserve it."

But that was only one side of their relationship. The other, andfar more significant, was the meeting of similar spirits. Satie, beneathhis banter, was a profoundly searchiug spirit who had taken uponhimself the task of purging music of all but its innermost form. Hisadmirer, Jean Cocteau, in his 1918 essay on modem music, Le Coqet I'Adequin, wrote that Satie "cleans, simplifies and strips rhythmnaked." The following year, Brancusi and Satie were introduced andsaw a great deal of each other, as each was working around the figureof Socrates. Satie s Platonism can be found in his remark to himself:"Do not forget that melody is the Idea, the contour, just as much asit is the form and content of the work." In his comments on Satie'sSocrate, Roger Shattuck says: "The aesthetic of 'Socrate' is one ofchaste, unembeflished subordination of music to text. . .one note toeach syllable." He sees it as Satie's "approach to immobility and rep-etitiousness." Socrate, I imagine, is Satie's expression of the principle

Fig. l: Socrates, 1922. Oak, 43Y4 x 11'A x 14'/. inches, on oak ftKJting

7'A X 9Y4 X loVi inches, overall 51 'A inches high. Limestone cylinder,

liVs inches high. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. (187,1956)

The Museum of" Modem Art, New York. © 2006 Artists Rights Societ)' {ARS),

New York/ADAGF, Faris, Digital Image ©The Museum of Modern

Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

of infinity, just as the varions Mile, Pogany portraits can be seen for-mally as infinity signs.

Amid jokes and banter, both Satie and Brancnsi were seriouslyengaged in symbolizing the figure of Socrates. As early as 1917, Bran-cnsi had carved a symboHc cup and placed it atop one of his endless

24 • RAHITAN

columns and, with the Child sculpture, called it a "mobile group." By1922, he had photographed his sculpture Socrates surmounted by hiscup, presumably of poison. Brancnsi's cnp, like all of his works, canbe perceived from many points of view, and can seive as a vessel ofhis concerns. It is a fundamental form derived from the geometrieimagination at work in many of his pieces: a half sphere, in whichthe challenge to a sculptor resides in its equilibrium as it touches theground only at a single point. At the same time, since it is cars^ed inwood, it is Brancusis acknowledgment of an organic essence with itsown weight and grain. It also suggests something ofthe normal fnnc-tion ofthe cup, as we know from Brancusis letter to John Qninn, in-viting him to accept the cup as a gift to keep in his dining room. ForBrancusi, the enp metamorphosed from a liomely adornment for arich man's dining room to a grave philosophic metaphor.

Socrates (Fig- 1) is hewn rather roughly from wood, and weknow from Isainu Noguchi that Brancusi knew wood intimately, andthat when he wielded his axe he could "come down heavily, exposingvvith its shaipness the grain as though polished." We can see the ge:.-'•".re in Socrates, where Brancnsi cuts deep and sure, and in whir̂ ^the circular hollow is visibly hewn to reveal the grain. In oue of hisnotes to himself, Brancusi characterized Socrates, saying "The wholeuniverse fiows tlirough. Nothing escapes the great tliinker." The no-tion of fiowing is canght in the circular void, but also in the grain ofthe wood,

Braneusi had a long history with wood, r,ince he came from aplace where wood was abimdant and where carving was a rural pas-time. But he had also begun his training in an Arts and Crafts schoolwhere handling wood, ibr furniture and decorative purposes, waspart of the curriculum. After that, he had a perfectly academictraining, where he learned how to model clay for bronze casting,and. probably even before he arrived in Paris in 1904, was faniiharwith Rodin's ideas, by that time widely broadcast in Europe. It isoften said tliat from the beginning he rejected Rodin (even thoughhe spent an entire month as Rodin's assistant in Meudon before hestruck out on his own). But Rodin, looking back to Michelangelo,

DORE ASHTON • 25

spoke of form emerainp;. That is, drawn by the artist from the roughblock, exposing the duality of art and craft, nature and culture. Bran-cusi tried his hand at this method in Sleep (1908), said to be his firstdirect car\'ing in marble, lie had clearly derived an important lessonfrom Rodin: the torm is within the block and tbe artist must reveal it.Brancusis aesthetic was not, in fact, so far from Rodin's. It w;is Ro-din, after all, who said, "Each profile is actually the outer evidence ofthe interior mass; each is the perceptible surface of a deep seetionfrom whieh the final surface emanated,"

Naturally, since Brancusi had his own point of view, his searchfor the inner structure in each piece of wood or marble would arriveat a very different place. If you look at uiany statements by bothpainters and sculptors from arouud 1905 to World War II, you willfind in the French a certain word constantly repeated: the word"depouillier," which means to strip, to lay bare. Brancusi obviously setabout stripping bare, stripping down to essential forms, soon after hearrived in Paris, He early expressed his contempt for certain nine-teenth-eentuiy habits of modeling, especially in clay, and reservedgreat disdain for Michelangelo, and, at times, Rodin, calling theirworks biftek. For instance, in an interview in London, in 1925, hesaid "Michelangelo's sculpture is nothing but muscle, beefsteak;beefsteak run amok." According to Noguchi, Brancusi used the wordbiftek frequently to refer to sculptors he didn't like and their work.We ean assume, then, that hardness—a fundamental characteristicof wood and stone^was, as a matter of principle, something withwhich he could contend. And he was contentious.

Braneusi liked to begin at the beginning—as he said, he placedhimself within nature and sought to experience, through nature'screations such as wood and stone, the metamorphosis within eachmaterial. We know from his many photographs of his studios that hetreasured great timbers and great blocks of stone. What commenta-tors tend to forget is that the process of creating an image, a scidp-ture, begins with the quest ontside of the studio. Both Brancusi andhis admirer Noguchi visited quarries and timber yards. The initial actis not the cut, but the choosing. The divining. A stone sculptor, for

Fig. 2: Torso of a Young, Girl, 1922, Onyx.

Courtesy uf the Fogg Art Miiseuin. Harvard University

Art Museums, The Lois Orsvvell C-ollection,

1998.293. Photo credit: Jiinius Beebe, © 2006 Artists

Rights Societ)' (ARS), New York/ADACP, Paris,

example, tries to divine the inner crystals and veins as he gazes at ablock of stone or a quarry wall. A wood sculptor does the same, divin-ing the direction ofthe wood grain and its irregular patterns. And allthis, they never forget, has been wronght by nature—by winds and

DORE ASHTON • 27

waters and climate. Time. Furthermore, they think with their hands,that is, their tools. The heft of a tool and the sharpness of a blade isalways with them. As they gaze at the virgin block of timber, theybring an almo.st visceral calculation with them. Brancusi made hisown tools for good reason. The point for him was that these sub-stances—limestone, marble, cherry, oak—have pasts. For artists asfor writers the past is essential aud, above all, alive. As HannahArendt so often said, quoting William Faulkner: "The past is neverdead. It is not even past," So for Brancusi the process was to reveal,and in so doing, make visually poetic metaphors. The question be-came for him: how much could be condensed to create a vitalimage?

The partial answer can be visually assessed in the sequence oftorsos in marble, revealing in eveiy sense. Each torso is a summary,a distillation. The earliest suggests Rodin's adaptation of ancientGreek fragments in marble about which the poet Rilke was so elo-quent. Meditating on Rodin's achievement, Rilke wrote: "The objectis definite, the art object must be even more definite: vvithdrawnfrom all chance, removed from all obscurity, lifted out of time andgiven to space, it has become lasting, capable of eternity; The model.•ieems, the ait object is" Rilke exliorted himself, "Somehow I toomiist manage to make things. . .realities that proceed from hand-work. Somehow I, too, must discover the smallest basic element, thecell of my art," Eater, he would say ot Cezanne and his idea of real-ization: "The convincing quality, the becoming a thing; the realityheightened into the indestructible through his own experience oftheobject." I cite these lines by a consummate poet because I thinkBrancusi's way of creating is closely related. Eike the poet, he wassearching for the ideal form that is definitively removed from allchance and, in its infinite reduction, or what Matisse used to call dis-tillation, becomes a new metaphor A very difficult idea, I m afraid,and not given to easy explanation. When Samuel Beckett wrote abouthis master, James Joyce, he said that Joyce's writing "is not aboutsomething. It is the thing itself."

The earliest stone torsos were somewhat about something, but

Fig. 3: Prometheus. 1911, White marble, 5 VN X 7 X 5 'A inches.

The Louise and Walter Arensberg C^ollection, 1950, Philadelphia Museum

of Art, Philadelphia, PA, ©2006 Artists Rights Society- (AKS),

New York/ADAGP, Paris, Photo credit: The Philadelphia Museum

of Art/Art Resource, NY,

his Torso of a Young Girl, carved a decade later, is something, some-thing complete within itself (Fig. 2). For this wonderful sculpture,Brancusi chose a kind of stone with special properties. Onyx is a crys-talline stone, whose inner facets of light—the light that the crystalemanates—glimmer and, when polished judiciously, have the glowof life itself as exemphfied by the elements—skin and curves—per-ceived in the persona of a young girl, Brancusi has succeeded inreducing her features to the quality of roundness, the Idea of round-ness—breasts, buttocks, and belly subsumed in a perfection of curv-ingness, and sldn itself becoming light from within, and without. His

DORE ASHTON • 29

accomplice is matter, the stone itself, which is why, I suppose, sculp-tors often refer to living stone.

The decision to elicit both the life and the Idea of life can be en-acted only by perseverance, a signal quality in Brancusi. In the sameperiod as the torsos of the young girl, he earved from veined marblethe Young Bird, again conflating several essential characteristics ofhis subject to reveal it.s fundamental character. (The word "charac-ter" comes from the ancient act of incising, or cutting a figure in aclay tablet—cutting into to make a sign.) There is the sound quality:Young Bird has a sheared plane symbolizing a cry—as we know fromearlier marble characterizations ofthe newborn human infant—andit has the general form of birdness, that is, the rounded breast thatthe nineteenth-century writer Miehelct admired, sa)'ing that the birdis the only creature that creates its environment—its curved nest—with the action of its breast, A hollow echo, or an echoing hollow, infact; or, a metaphor To accent the bird's smallness, its infancy, Bran-eusi builds a comphcated and bulky base so that we are presentedwith the fragile creature at eye level, but peripherally we are awareof the concreteness, even the earthboundness, of the bird's environ-ment. Another good example of Brancusi's diligent search for themost telling characteristic is his carving ofthe Torso of a Young Boy,which is an admirable abstraction from a fact of nature—a piece ofwood with its branching members—and a commentary on specificvouthfulness: the lean erect torso and limbs of an adolescent, straightas a plumb hne, irreducible in spaee. The Idea of a boy.

But we must not earr}- the idea of Idea too far, Brancusi'sknowledge of the history of sculpture was ample, aud, as a )'outh inthe academy, he had copied the head of the famous Laocoon. Thegesture of torment, head cringing into the shoulder, appeared inBrancusi's own early characterizations called Torment, which meta-morphosed into ovals slightly canting toward a base. The idea of tor-ment took many forms subsequently, and appeared in a sculpture hepointedly titled Prometheus (Fig. 3). We have an amusing account byJames Johnson Sweeney, a friend and connoissenr of Brancusi, whowas struck with his first vision 0^ Prometheus:

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I saw no evident link between it [the sculpture], and the FireBringer or his eagle. On looking into the classical dictionary, Ifound that his mother was Clyniene the Oceanid. Immediately Ifelt on track: here, a marble head, almost featureless, that of achild born in the sea, washed up in the shingle. But when I askedBrancusi, he explained simply that it was the head of sufferingPrometheus. "If it is properly set you see how it falls on hisshoulder as the eagle devoured his liver."

There is an important phrase here: if properly set. We always talkabout sculpture in the round, and how we must perceive it frommany angles while walking aroiuid the object, aud how sculpture cre-ates and is created by space, and so on. But Brancusi talked abouthow his work must be properly set: in other words, there is an idealviewing point from which the Idea ofthe fonn becomes self-evident.

For instance, while the Young Bird was set on a weighty base—its relative eondition as a fledgling not yet able to fly emphasized bythe full roundness and weight meeting the limestone plinth—themany versions of Bird in Space (perhaps his best-known work) werealways set on smallish bases to emphasize the vertical soaring motionof the sculpture (Fig. 4). As Brancnsi said in the catalogue of the1933 Bnunmer exhibition in New York, it was "A project of a bird,that once it is enlarged, will fill tlie sky." In other statements, he did-n't say "sky," but "vault of heaven," lending an almost architecturalquality to his ambition. As is repeatedly pointed out, Brancusi per-ceived these many attempts to arrive at the optimal shape of a fiyingcreature as attempts to embody the sensation of fiying in matter.Matter is respected, but by the act of carving and polishing, will betranscended. When Brancusi was still hopeful about realizing hisproject for the Maliarajah of Indore in the early 1930s—the first ofhis total projects that envisioned both sculptural and architecturalelements—he wrote to the Maharajah: "My Birds are a series ofdifferent objects on a central unchanging theme. The ideal real-ization of this theme would be an enlarged work filling the vault ofthe sky. . . .The more I've succeeded in ridding myself of myself,the closer I've gotten to it." Many art historians have mentioned

Fig, 4: Bird in Space, 1941, Polished hronze. AM4002-106.Photo: Adam Rzepka, Musee National d Art Moderne,

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. ©2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York/ADAGP, Paris, Photo credit: CNAC/MNAM/Dist.

Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Branensi s attraction to Buddhism, and particularly the Tibetan monkMilarepa, whom he read attentively. Unquestionably the "centraltheme" Brancusi referred to can be considered from a spiritnal pointof view—that is, the desire to transcend earthlv concerns. But the

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phrase "ridding myself of myself" expresses a desire familiar to manyartists. There are numerous testimonies to an experienee of self-tran-scendence among artists who have tried to explain the creativeprocess. There comes a moment in the struggle to give form to feel-ing when the intense absorj>tion in the task works to set the artistfree, to bring him beyond his self. Brancusi always craved that expe-rience, and I think his perseverance—that is, his returning again andagain to a central unchanging theme—was a quest for the idealmoment of freedom, freedom from the necessity imposed by gravity,from velleities of daily life, from the indeterminate. Soaring, after all,is the essence of freedom. Brancusi's recourse to metaphor is alwaysrelated to this quest. In one of bis written notes he said of himself:"Like a fight object that one puts into the deep ocean, I have had tomake my way up Uke a blind man, not knoviing why and strugglingagainst all currents and obstacles to reaeh the surface." In relation tothe birds in space, we have evidence offered by Noguchi, who, whenhe entered Brancnsi's studio as a dedicated apprentice, was witnessto the masters making plaster replicas from stone birds, then send-ing them to be cast after having worked the plaster, and then begin-ning once again to polish the castings to make entirely new objects.This may be an example of what Brancusi meant when he said hestniggled against all currents and obstacles.

There is yet another bird that Brancusi sought to characterize,only this bird, the Gaihe eock, is known to us through synthesis: it isnot the bird itself that rises but his cry, a sound become thing. Eachtime Brancusi fashioned this vivid symbol, often in carved plasterin his studio, the sound was offered in variations, much as Satie's sin-gle sounds are multiplied into musical composition, or melody inwhich slight modulations are the sole indication of its finally melodicand composed character. The forest of plaster coeks seen in so manyof Branensi's own photographs of his studio are haunting remindersof Brancusis ability to orchestrate his own environment (Fig. 5). Inthem the senses are alerted to the musical properties or the rhythmsimplicit in his life's work. Those triangular cuts, marching up tri-umphantly, sound into the sky. In the studio photography of aronnd

Fig. 5: View of Brancusi's studio, called "Grands coqs," ca. 1940-1945.Silver gelatin print from Brancusis glass plate original.

Photo: Jacques Faujoiir. Musee National d'Art Modeme, (CentreGeorges Pompidou, Paris. ©2006 Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo credit: GNAG/MNAM/Dist.Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

1945 or 1946, they arise above, and their rhythms are repeated, prob-

ably not accidentally, in the triangular cuts and ridges of the magnif-

icent wood sculpture of the King of Kings. I could always hear the

clatter of primitive washboard music on the king's torso. And as for

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the coeks, Brancvisi's fellow artist, Jean Arp, wrote a httle verse aboutthem that quite perfectly covers the subject, beginning with the lines

The cock crowed eo-co-rico and eachSound made a zig or a zag iu his neck.

We know from the numerous biographies that Brancusi loved music,had once built a violin for himself, had a huge collection of recordsof folk music from all over the world, including spirituals recorded inthe United States, and, according to anecdote, played duets with hisfriend Satie. Noguehi described a phonograph that Brancusi hadbuilt for himself with the novel feature of two arms. More important,perhaps, is the historical fact that the word "musicality," from thedays of Delacroix, had entered the lexicon of visual art to designate atendency toward abstraction. I have no doubt that Brancusi hear-kened to an inner rh)1:hm as he worked, as fimdamental as the factthat each person walks in an idiosyncratic rhythm, and that folkdances, which Braneusi was said to have relished performing, springfrom organic responses as simple as the beat of the heart. This diffi-cult issue of rhythm has to do with Brancusi's work techniques andwith his idealism. When he was working on his wood version oftheEndless Column, the box frame saw was thnist back and forth in adefinite rhythm; otherwise, it would not have functioned well forhim. And his act of polishing a bronze casting of one of his birds alsohad its rhythms, as Noguchi's suggestive words tell us: "The long filehad to go its full length, curving over its roundness."

The most apparent use of rhythm is of course in the motifthat has accumulated the most commentary—the Endless Column(Fig. 6). In this absolnte, or perhaps Brancusi would have said, com-paratively absolute, conception, the erect chain of polyhedronsmeant to pierce the vault of the heavens has incited many musicalcomparisons. Brancusi himself referred to his column as a "song."Perhaps "hymn" is the right word, for in the ensemble at Tirgu Jiuthere are symbolic relationships that call upon a philosophic schemaofthe universe and its center, in which the colunni climbing upward

Fig. 6: Endle.ss Coluntn at Tirgu jiu, Romania, ca. 1938. Silver print.AM 4002-915(1}. Photo: Jacques Favijour. Miisee National d'Art

Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2006 Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo credit: CNAC/MNAM/Dist.

Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

becomes an axis inundi. "The endless column" Brancusi wrote, "islike a timeless song that lifts us into infinity."

This timeless song inspired many sculptors in the twentieth cen-tur)'. The earliest significant tribute was written by the British sculp-tor Barbara Hepworth who, after a visit to Brancusi's studio in 1932,wrote:

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The quiet, earthbmind shapes of human heads or elliptical fish,soariug forms of birds, or the great etenitd column of wood, em-phasized the complete unity of form and material. . . . I thinkBrancusi's understanding of these timeless elements in sculptureis very close to Stravinsky's understanding of rhythm.

I'm sure Hepworth had in mind the thumping rhythms of The Riteof Spring, at whose 1913 premiere Brancusi might very well havebeen present. Satie's rhythms, although a hundred times lighter thanStra\insky's, were also organized on a similar plane. I ean well under-stand why curator Carmen Gimenez organized her thoughts aroundthe principle of musicalit)'. In her introductory essay in the cataloguefor a Brancusi exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Gimenez says"bis sculpture extends like an unending melodic line," and, in aninspired simile, speaks of how "each piece occupies both its ownplace and projects it.self by means of its aura as an animated 'ghostsonata.'" She was talking abont a visual pbenomenon tbat patinaedsculptural surfaces isolate, and tbat, to use Paul Klee's phrase, makesthe imisible visible.

I turn now to a different kind of specialist—sculptors who havereported on their tremendous experience of Brancusi's masterwork,the ensemble at Tirgu Jiu. Tbe late Gbristopber Wilmartb, a majortwentietb-century American sculptor, wbo even as a student reveredBrancusi, made a special pilgrimage to Romania in 1974 to see themasterpiece with his own eyes. He went, he told me, in order to see"a tme place." He said the Endless Column was the greatest publicsculpture in existence, pointing out that "it is never tbe same in anyhgbt; it changes constantly; it seems to penetrate the sky." It is,Wilmarth said, an "ascension piece" and "quivers like the image of aspirit." In bis own early work, it is clear that the geometric elementsin Brancusi's work, such as tbe balf-spbere and tbe circle, were care-fully assessed, and their simplicity' captured in tbe first of bis woodand glass wall pieces. Later, some five years after the voyage toRomania, Wilmartb was still pondering Brancusi's principles andmetbods and effects, when he embarked ou a remarkable project:

DORE ASHTON • 37

the illumination of the sonnets of Mallarme. Tbere, tbe predominantimage is an ovoid sbape, often an emblem of the buman visage. Inthe glass-and-bronze relief, WJien Winter on Forgotten Woods MovesSomber, tbe oval is pierced witb an inner oval, much as Socrates'bead was an opening through wbicb the universe flowed. In anotberin this series. Insert Myself Within Your Story, tbe luminescent ovalis both suspended and perforated by a dark steel rectangular ele-ment, invoking dualities that are omnipresent in Brancusi's work aswell: bard and soft, dark and light, materiiil and ethereal. Wilmarthsintense preoccupation witb making a "place," a true place, as in thecase of Braneusi, led bim to make many experiments with series ofworks. These be always exbibited with great care so that the viewer,tbe vertical person, felt englobed by an ideal space. For bim, the waybis works were "set," to use Brancusi's tenn, was always of signalimportance.

Tbe otber specialist is tbe still living and remarkable sculptor,William Tucker, wbo also made a pilgrimage to Tirgu Jiu arouud1972, and reported on tbe experience at lengtb in bis book. EarlyModem Sculpture. Altbougb Tucker's writings on Brancusi are, so tospeak, objective—that is, he is evaluating Brancusi as a major twen-tieth-century sculptor in an historical context—be cannot concealhis awe, bis immense emotional response to the Endless Column,and declares finally that If there is one piece in the histor\- of mod-ern sculpture wbicb in every respect deserves tbe title 'masterpiece,'it is surely tbe Tirgu Jiu Endless Column!' His observations about tbecolumn are consonant witb tbose of many others wbo bave marveledat the perceptual transformations Brancusi anticipates—bow in acertain light, tbe elements appear to be a fully modeled spiral, or inanotber light, a pure vertical plumb line, or, in still anotber, a seriesof ellipses.

But I imagine Tucker's response was tempered by bis earliestinvestigations of Brancusi, while still a student. He would bave pagedtbrough tbe books and seen tbe dramatic photographs of tbe ear-liest Endless Cohimn in the garden of tbe pbotographer Steichen—a great hewn tree-trunk tbat Brancusi transformed—and later

38 • RARITAN

pbotograpbs of the many trial columns, witb differing numbers ofelements, and also hewn in wood by the master's own band. Pbo-tographs of tbe Impasse Ronsin, often reproduced, sbow Brancusiboarding bouse timbers to be worked eventually—great, truedlengtlis of wood, sometimes retrieved from demolitions, sometimesfrom lumberyards.

When I first visited Tucker, before he settled in the UnitedStates and wbile he was working in London, I saw his narrow gardentimbers, tarred and weathered, clearly retrieved from long-ago dem-olitions. After his return from Romania, Tucker did a remarkableseries of sculptures derived from heavy oaken timbers. Portraits ofKand House in 1975, and, six years later, tbe powerful House of theHanged Man. Aside from an oblique allusion to Cezanne (and somecommentators bave likened Brancusis work to Gezannes), tbere isan oblique allusion to Brancusi in tbe notcbed interior members andtbe illusion induced by an irregular geometric conformation. Tbelong side of tbe triangle sweeps up from a certain angle and contin-ues beyond tbe crest. Tben, there is a mysteriousness tbat does notlend itself to easy explanation, just as there is in Brancusi's oeuvre.These continuities in art history exist, and are mysteries, phantoms.

Even the repetitions in Brancusi, wbicb some critics bavetbought to have inspired so-called minimalists such as Donald Jndd,bave served in inarkedly different ways tbe two speciahsts. Tuckerand Wilmartb, who to my mind are Brancusi's true beirs. Gocteaubad written, with Stravinsky in mind, that tbe same cbord, oftenrepeated, is less fatiguing to tbe ear than tbe frequent repetitions ofa single gesture are to tbe eye. To wbicb the composer Ned Roremreplied: "Yes, but is tbe same cbord really the same, since each rep-etition occurs witbin a constantly sbifting, asymmetrical rbvthm, andtbe chord's "meaning' shifts accordingly?" This, I think, sums up theEndless Column's meaning—tbe repeated elements, having beenmodeled before casting, would bave been bound to bave slight shiftsin meaning—and sums up its enduring, miraculous presence in ourown time.