SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

47. Women who are menstruating or in afterbirth cannot make bread. Until recent times they
could not enter a church.
48. Tiberiu Alexa, personal communication, Baia Mare, April 1996.
49. Balas, ibid., p. 36.
50. “Customs and meanings of Easter,” Siua, May 4, 2002 (tr. G. Tillman)
51. Shanes, ibid., pp. 74-76.
52. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the
Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 86: “As early as 1912 the
critic Jacques Doucet realized that the subtlety of these near egg forms by Brâncu_i was
accentuated by slight impressions and textures that interrupted otherwise symmetrical
surfaces. If the ovoid form, polished and gleaming, is the perfect collector of light, then
any imperfection on its surface would act as a premonition, a visual hint of the forces of
internal organization harbored within.”
53. Tismana monastery, founded in 1375, the oldest monastery in Romania, is located very
near Brâncu_i home village of Hobi_a (Dan Richardson and Tim Burford, Romania : The
Rough Guide, 1995, p. 101). The frescos, extant in Brâncu_i’s childhood on the walls of
the church, have been removed and are now part of a little museum display ina separate
building on the grounds of the monastery.
54. Brâncu_i applied for French citizenship, giving up his Romanian passport, a few months
after the Academy of the Popular Republic of Romania rejected the artist’ offer to donate
to the “ . . . Art Museum of the Republic of the works by the sculptor Brâncu_i, around
whom are gathered all the anti-democrats in the field of arts” (Brezianu, ibid, pp. 12).
55. c. 1948, according to, Brezianu, ibid., pp. 12: “Ten years after making this present to his
country—the communist regime, through its handymen, offended him repeatedly,
beginning with the unsuccessful attempt of the major of Tirgu Jiu to pull down the
Column, inorder to be melted . . . . “ In a lengthy interview with Claudia Ploscu
(published in Adevarul Literar si Artistic, nr. 570, June 6, 2001), Plscu collects more
horror stories about Brâncu_i scholarship in Romania, quoting Bogdan: “Our
Traditionalists and nationalists of all stripes, and laster on Communist dogmatists rejected
Brânsu_i, counting him a foreign body, an eccentric Western product, a status that, in
general, discontinued at the threshold of the sculptor’s final years.”
56. Brezianu, ibid,. p. 13.
57. See, for example, Catalina Bogdan-Mateescu, Brâncu_i ‘s Targu Jiu Monument: An
Interpretation (Bucharest: Romanian Cultureal Foundation, 1995)j; Barbu Brezianu,
Brâncu_i in Romania (1974; rev. ed., 1999); and Dan Grigorescu, Brâncu_i (1977). The
year 2001 was declared “Brâncu_i Year in Romania” by the national government.
58. Please note: the Romanian studies are often translated and simultaneously published in
English and French by Romanian publishers. See, for example: Paul Rezeanu, Bråncu_i
la Craiova (Bucharest: Editura Arc 2000, 2001. The text is in Romanian, French, and
English. A number of Western studies also acknowledge the Romanian folkloric context
of Brâncu_i’s work, including, for example: Eric Shanes, Brâncu_i (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1989.) One of the better studies is: Edith Balas, Brâncu_i and Romanian Folk
Traditions (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 1987). None, however, re
exhaustive.
59. “The Brancusian Universe in an exceptional exhibition at the Sibiu Village Museum,”
Romania Libera, July 20, 2001 (tr. G. Tillman): “The organizers at Sibiu present objects
of great heritage value . . . the whole constituting an essay on the relationship of Brâncu_i
creations to Romanian folklore traditions, a relationship whose authenticity is found as
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