Lecture 47: Modern Sculpture—Rodin and Brancusi
with different-colored patinas, from black to silvery-gray to the more familiar
shades of green. Looking at details of a cast in the Rodin Museum in Paris,
we see ¿ gures in the back, including a young man with extended arms. His
gesture echoes the expression on his face—incomprehension. Approaching
the next corner, we see an erect ¿ gure on the right, the back of the old man
whom we’ve seen from the front, and a tormented, despairing ¿ gure on
the left, grasping his head in his hands. We now turn to The Kiss (1886).
Originally part of The Gates of Hell, this piece was removed early on and
became the artist’s most popular independent work.As we move on to Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), compare Rodin’s
version of this subject with Brancusi’s The Kiss (1916). Brancusi was born in
Romania but worked in Paris from 1904. He is the pioneer abstract sculptor
of the 20th century. Brancusi’s The Kiss is witty, warm, and lovable. It carries
as much conviction as Rodin’s Kiss does, although it has left the ideal realm
for the world of chunky humanity.Our next sculpture is Bird in Space (Yellow Bird) (1923–1924). Just as
Seurat and others had surrounded their pictures with frames painted white or
other colors, disdaining the pseudo-French Rococo frames that dealers and
wealthy clients preferred, so, too, did Brancusi control the presentation of his
sculptural ¿ gures. Brancusi repeated the basic theme and form of the Bird in
Space 17 times using different materials. This one was the ¿ rst marble Bird
in which the conical footing at the tapering bottom of the bird was carved
from the same piece of marble as the body itself. Another version of this
theme is Bird in Space (1932–1940). The metal versions of the Bird have a
more ethereal quality because of the highly reÀ ective surface. Light striking
the long convex shape tends to dissolve the contours into an unstable gleam,
obscuring the perception of its absolute shape. Next, we see Mlle. Pogany I
(1912–1913). This sculpture is meant to capture a puri¿ ed, primitive essence.
“Simplicity,” wrote Brancusi, “is not an end in art, but one reaches simplicity
in spite of oneself by approaching the real meanings of things.”As Brancusi had emulated the perfect ¿ nish of machine-made objects, so,
too, Naum Gabo (1890–1977) and his brother Antoine Pevsner decided
that art must accept the technology of the modern age and its materials. But
their style, which they called Constructivist, was anti-materialistic. We see