Word: brancusi
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With his peerless instinct for composition, Weston could soon reconfigure the female nude to find the fracture lines of Braque or the seamless forms of Brancusi. But it took a personal and artistic crisis in 1923 to push him beyond ingenious deployments of volume and line. He took off for Mexico with his lover Tina Modotti and one of his sons. He spent the next three years rubbing shoulders with the muralist Diego Rivera, dodging the postrevolutionary turmoil and making pictures under the Mexican sun that specifies every object it falls upon. Among them were a series of vivid head...
...degree to which sculptors angled their work away from the accepted forms of social communication via the human figure. Not because they lost interest in the figure -- on the contrary, the years 1900-1950 were rich in figure sculpture and body-haunted objects by Matisse, Picasso, Archipenko, Brancusi, Miro, Calder, Giacometti and others -- but because they did not want to serve the social consensus in the way that statuary did. Consequently, few public commemorative sculptures made in the past 75 years have any real importance in the modernist canon; and conversely, modern public sculpture is mostly banal in the extreme...
...scholarly energy has gone into displaying the continuities between 19th and 20th century art and correcting the myth that the modern art that mattered represented a wrenching break with the past. Without the culture of the salon and the Academy, no Matisse; you cannot imagine a work like Constantin Brancusi's Caryatid, 1940, without its triple root in the peasant woodcarvings of the artist's native Rumania, his study of African sculpture and his passion for the archaic Mediterranean...
Perhaps one should take Rousseau more on his own terms. The Paris modernists --Jarry, Apollinaire, Picasso, Delaunay, Brancusi--hailed his work because of its fierce, astringent poetry, but also because it seemed to have predicted their own conscious concerns: the interest in popular art like the prints known as images d'Epinal, the invented exoticism, the mode of composition in flat planes, but above all the ideal of the untutored eye unobstructed by academic culture, registering the world with the clarity, as the cliche used to run, "of a child or a savage." Rousseau's innocence might have been invented...
Neither he nor any of his contemporaries cared much about the social background or specific religious meanings of the work - and probably the more lowbrow avantgardists, like Maurice de Vlaminck, mentally reduced it all to mission ary-stew, bone-in-the-nose cliche. Not even Brancusi, whose borrowings of African motifs were of the most exalted refinement (as in Madame L.R., 1914-18, whose domed "head" comes from a Hongwe reliquary figure), had an "anthropological" interest in his sources. To him they were pure form...