Word: brancusi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Brancusi did not mingle with the café crowds, but he was obviously aware of what was going on. Upon receiving a commission to do a funerary monument in Rumania, he began work on a kneeling bronze woman. Starting with a violently agitated figure that Rodin might have been proud to acknowledge, Brancusi went through several successively simplified versions until he arrived at the motionless Prayer he finally cast. Though still conventional in form, the mourner's classic calm and smoothed-over details foreshadow aspects of Brancusi's mature work...
...final breakthrough came later in the year when he carved The Kiss. Nothing could be less like Rodin's voluptuous lovers than these stolid, blocklike figures. Where Rodin's lovers flicker and twist, Brancusi's lovers face each other straight on and are barely scratched on the surface of the stone. The tender surface of Rodin's burnished bronze palpitates with life; Brancusi's pitted limestone is all idea...
...Brancusi had found his own style. From then on, he began those drastic reductions of natural shapes that left the human head an egglike form on which the features are barely traced, that found in a delicate wafer of blue, mottled marble the poetic essence of fish, that outlined in metal and stone the soaring flight of a bird...
Peasant Vigor. For a sculptor whose working life spanned more than 50 years, Brancusi's approximately 200 extant pieces do not constitute a large body of work. Once Brancusi found a motif that delighted him, he characteristically repeated it over and over again, subtly altering and refining its shapes and using different materials to give it new substance. There are 16 versions of Bird in Space. Not all his works, however, share Bird's elegant abstraction or the witty sophistication of Princess X, a subtly phallic take-off on the society-portrait bust. In his native Rumania, Brancusi...
...word is human. There is something endearing about ambition that limits itself to work so well within the bounds of art and finds a lifetime of satisfaction in the transformation of simple animal forms into elegant shapes. When old age stopped him from working, Brancusi spent his days fondling his precious "children," as he called his sculptures, covering them with dust cloths every night. And when he willed them to Paris' Museum of Modern Art, he did so on the condition that they be displayed in an accurate reconstruction of the crowded Montparnasse shack in which he-and they...