Nr. 4 (21) anul VI / octombrie-decembrie 2008 - ROMDIDAC

makes the bird metamorphosize into a beautiful woman. Irrespective of their
original source, Brâncu[i’s sculptures reduce all details, which might have
made the representation look realistic, to the essential form of the object.
The later versions, which were exhibited in New York and Chicago in 1927,
modified the initial position of the bird with the neck bent forward into a more
elongated form. The bird’s head is pointing upward and makes it look like
it is struggling to fly. Other versions, usually called Golden Birds, are even
more slender as if they were propelling themselves into the air. The marble
versions were placed on wooden footings recalling the Endless Column from
the Romanian park in Târgu-Jiu or the fragments from his studio in Paris.
From the first Mãiastra (1910) to the last Bird (1940), the shape became
more and more abstract, loosing the contours which might have identified as
a bird. Brâncu[i challenged the status of sculpture by using an arched shape
to suggest the abstract idea of flight in the absence of a body performing the
act of flying. Representing the non-representational, the sculptor went back
to the Romanian simplistic representations of birds in peasant carpets. He
had to transplant the flat geometric shape from the woven multi-colored fabric
into a tri-dimensional monochromatic body.
These qualities of Brâncu[i’s sculptures were praised in Dorothy Dudley’s
comprehensive critique from The Dial, February 1927:
The first impression was of beauty and real, shapes strong and
important, phases of sphere, disc, shaft, blade, oval, and branching
trunk. Surfaces scintillant, flaming, natural; varyingly warm and cool, not
hot or cold, nor dry or lush, but living. To one staying to know them, birds,
fish, heads, torsos spoke out of these polished marbles and bronzes and
seasoned naked wood. The planes of all were subtle and precise; a look
of ease possessed them. At different heights in the room they balanced
on their bases, cubic, circular, rhomboid, cross-shaped, with a measure
known to jugglers. (1)
Not only does her extensive article follow the traces of Negro art in his
artworks, but it also emphasizes the Romanian background. For Dudley, as
for all the other American journalists who had written about Romania before,
Brâncu[i’s native country is “pastoral,” “remnant of the first Rome,” “a small
fiery fairy-tale of a country.” (5) She herself promotes the already beaten up
clichés of a primitive, but noble heritage. The most insightful part refers to
the influences of Romanian folk art on Brâncu[i:
Shining wheat fields, brilliant stitched borders on sheer white goods,
intricate carvings and tapestries derive from sun and dew of stars. The
people are artist farmers and workmen, who loll close to the ground or work
in patterns up a little into the air, in a gently obscene ∂sic!∑ loam-like hum
of stories shot through with wilder music. To this birth maybe Brâncu[i’s
sculpture owes its primeval strength, as of ancient things-dawn, fields,
planets.
Then these shapes of his have grown in the open web of civilized life
known as Paris. (6-7)
The same appreciations of his simple exoticism can be traced back to
Jeanne Robert Foster’s Note on the Mane and the Formal Perfection of His
Carvings: New Sculptures by Constantin Brancusi in Vanity Fair from the 1922.
If one takes into account the circulation of 99,000 issues and the fact that
Foster’s articles were usually intertwined with very popular advertisements,
there is no doubt that Brâncu[i’s works and his Romanian heritage had
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