It is certainly understandable why Carmen Gimenez, the curator of the Constantin Brancusi show at the Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue.
Constantin Brancusi
By Harriet Zinnes
Sleeping Muse I 1909ââ¬â10. Marble, 6 3/4 x 10 7/8 x 8 3/8 inches (17.2 x 27.6 x 21.2 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966.
It is certainly understandable why Carmen Gimenez, the curator of the Constantin Brancusi show at the Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue. New York City, through September 19, 2004), titles the exhibition “The Essence of Things.” The sculptural objects not only have a kind of pristine or perhaps more accurately primary construction, but they also suggest a purity of line, a visual language that is minimal and understates gesture and form. Doing away with the decorative leads to an essence, a core, an objectification. Eliminating illusionism and representation as, for example, the earlier Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian had done, what Brancusi achieves is a set of works concentrating on form, color and materials. His project reaches beyond beauty, perhaps toward a call for political and social change.
Certainly much of this work was influenced by African and ancient European art. Using marble, limestone, bronze and wood, this Romanian artist (1876-1957), who had walked to Paris from his native country, soon established his own studio and encouraged by Auguste Rodin turned from his influence to create figures widely acknowledged as icons of Modernism. It is not strange that he was a close friend of such artists as Amedeo Modigliani and Marcel Duchamp.
The Guggenheim exhibits more than thirty of the artist’s rare sculptures, which have already been exhibited in London. Here is the added bounty of a first public showing of the recently discovered Brancusi sculpture Sleeping Muse(1909-10). This marble work, like so many of the artist’s sculptures, simultaneously evokes sensuousness and the passionlessness of death. We see a figure without vitality, devoid of existence, yet an embodiment, a being that is as sensuous as is the artist’s 1920 powerful veined marble Sculpture for the Blind.
