Word: constantine
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THIRTY YEARS BEFORE his death in 1957, there had ceased to be any doubt of Constantin Brancusi's status as a modernist master. He devoted a long life to distilling extremes of formal perfection from a narrow range of motifs. This perfection is never frozen: it always contains some organic character, an affinity to life and therefore to change. "I never seek what to make a pure or abstract form," Brancusi said. "Timelessness,'' "wholeness,'' "essence,'' "aliveness": such words inescapably recur in what has been written about him over the past 70 or 80 years. They are well-worn tokens, rubbed...
...time the Belgians ceded independence to Rwanda in 1962, the foundations for slaughter had been laid. "When there is a rupture of authority, that creates a situation that is apocalyptic by nature and leads to fear and anguish," says Professor Francois Constantin, head of the East Africa Research Center at the University of Pau in France. "In Rwandan society, the fault of an individual becomes the fault of a group. A whole family is held responsible for a prejudicial act committed by an individual and can be eliminated. In a traumatic situation, fear and uncertainty can lead to collective murder...
...focal point of the exhibition is Constantin Brancusi's Marble Hand of Mademoiselle Pogany, a beautifully stylized and impossibly elegant sculpture which, which emphatically being "hand", proclaims with equal volume "form," "body," "tool," and so on. Its placement at the origin of the two axes of the show is entirely appropriate, because it is the most obviously ambiguous work in the room. This is not to say that the other objects in the show are easily pigeon-holed. Indeed, once put behind glass under the even light of an exhibition, even the tools used for installing the show take...
Behind Puryear's work one also sees, as a pervasive presence to whom constant homages are paid, Constantin Brancusi. Of all 20th century sculptors, Brancusi did the most to combine a reductive, Modernist sensibility with the language and techniques of vernacular carpentry. There are echoes of the great Romanian right through this show, from the roughly notched beam like a huge crosscut-saw blade in Some Tales, 1975-77, to the somber egglike or coffin- shaped forms of Maroon, 1987-88, or Lever...
...extravagant in praise of cultivated scallops, raised on Cape Cod -- "beautiful, absolutely delicious." Al Falchi, who owns the Waterfront Restaurant in San Francisco, buys farmed fish because "you never know how long a wild fish has been sitting on the boat." Perhaps the last word should go to Paul Constantin of New Orleans, who has ridden the catfish wave at his nouvelle Creole restaurant, Constantin's. "Tourists come here to give different foods a shot," he observes. "Look, if they'll try raw oysters, they'll try anything...