José Maria Faerna

Sleeping Muse by Romanian born sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)

Brancusi – A coffee table book with dozens of photographs and forty color plates of the artist’s work. Also included are a ten short essays by art critic Jose Maria Faerna. Below are quotes from the essays along with my comments. If anybody is unfamiliar with Brancusi, I highly recommend this book you in all likelihood will find at your local library or within the library system. If not, there are affordable copies available through amazon.

“Even as a young man, Brancusi, who was born in 1876, had felt the irrepressible urge to run away. As he wrote in his later years, “The revolving earth, the blowing wind, and the drifting clouds are my real home and my only family.” For Brancusi, contemplation of the world always amounted to a speculation about sculpture.” ---------- Other than perhaps reconnecting with family and friends, I could never understand how fully mature adults can be homesick from a particular city or country. I’m of a mind with Brancusi – as long as I can walk outside and look up at the sun and walk along sidewalks in safety, I am completely at home anywhere. And I love how Brancusi always linked his philosophical reflections with his capacity to create sculpture, which speaks to how a true artist is someone who lives and breathes their art twenty-four-seven, lives on the side of refined, aesthetic perception as a totally absorbing mode of being in the world.

“Reality,” Brancusi once said, “resides not in the external form of things but in their innermost essence. This fact entails the impossibility to express anything real while lingering on the surface of things.” --------- This is the spirit of both Platonism and also the simplicity of much Eastern art – to penetrate to the heart, to capture the universal in the particular, the clean line at the center of the natural world.


THE KISS – “This strikingly stark sculpture represents a man and a woman tightly holding each other as if they were a single compact unit. Its symmetrical composition as well as the simplicity and purity of its lines are extremely original.” ---------- When I was in my freshman year at a university in Kentucky, during a lecture in front of 200 students, my English instructor said this sculpture portrayed how silly the act of kissing looks. I didn’t say anything but even then I didn’t understand how the instructor reached such a conclusion. Personally, I find the act of two people kissing beautiful and I think this Brancusi sculpture captures the sensitivity of two people coming together as one. By the way – I wonder what Ms. Campbell, that English instructor, would find beautiful in sculpture – perhaps some Civil War Memorial with soldiers standing at parade rest; to my mind, a type of sculpture memorial good for pigeons to perch on.


BIRD IN SPACE – “My whole life,” Brancusi is known to have said, “has been devoted to searching the essence of flight . . . Flying is such sheer joy!” With this sculpture, Brancusi has created a smooth form whose soaring aerodynamism is solely suggestive of flight, without resorting to any realistic detail whatsoever." ---------- When I had an opportunity to view this sculpture face-to-face in a museum, I felt the urge to run my finger up and down the smooth curve top to bottom. It is said that Piet Mondrian attempted to paint a rainbow as pure geometry. There is definitely a similar spirit in Brancusi with the curve capturing movement, especially flight. If one of Mondrian’s Red, Blue and Yellow Compositions could be magically melted down into a sculpture representing soaring geometry, it just might resemble Brancusi’s Bird.


THE NEWBORN 1: “In the case of the ovoid,” Ezra Pound wrote, “I imagine Brancusi wholly absorbed by the notion of a pure form, a form completely independent of all earthy weightiness and endowed with a life as autonomous as that of any geometric form.” ---------- Anytime I see an egg or an ovoid stone, I associate such with this Brancusi sculpture and imagine how one could shape the object into a compelling work of art. Such is the power of Brancusi, a creative eye to spur others on to an expanded vision.


SOCRATES: “What was truly important to Brancusi, what he aspired to with uncompromising rigor, was the most congruous correspondence between the materials employed in each work of art and the idea that the piece sought to evoke. This idea would have to arise from matter itself.”---------- Another mark of a true artist – respect for material. If a piece of sculpture was to be carved from wood, Brancusi worked with the grains and the wood’s feel and texture. With this particular wood sculpture, I can almost see Brancusi in his studio, in the very act of carving.


SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO: “Brancusi preferred that no one else take pictures of his works or his studio. He also shot photographs of himself, both at work and at rest, in a considerable number of self-portraits.” ----------- Ever the artist. He desired his vision of himself captured in photographs be the vision for the general public. I can appreciate and respect his judgement since with rare exception I myself have not enjoyed the photographs other people have taken of me – and I’m not even an artist.


BRANCUSI’S STUDIO: “Inside the studio – as documented by countless photographs taken by the artist – his works were indeed arranged with the upmost care so as to reveal their mutual relations.” ---------- Brancusi’s vision was total – not only his individual sculptures are important but the way they are positioned together in the space of his studio. And, along with this, how they are captured in the space of his studio via a photograph. For Constantin Brancusi, nothing but nothing was outside the box of art.… (more)

Sleeping Muse by Romanian born sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)

Brancusi – A coffee table book with dozens of photographs and forty color plates of the artist’s work. Also included are a ten short essays by art critic Jose Maria Faerna. Below are quotes from the essays along with my comments. If anybody is unfamiliar with Brancusi, I highly recommend this book you in all likelihood will find at your local library or within the library system. If not, there are affordable copies available through amazon.

“Even as a young man, Brancusi, who was born in 1876, had felt the irrepressible urge to run away. As he wrote in his later years, “The revolving earth, the blowing wind, and the drifting clouds are my real home and my only family.” For Brancusi, contemplation of the world always amounted to a speculation about sculpture.” ---------- Other than perhaps reconnecting with family and friends, I could never understand how fully mature adults can be homesick from a particular city or country. I’m of a mind with Brancusi – as long as I can walk outside and look up at the sun and walk along sidewalks in safety, I am completely at home anywhere. And I love how Brancusi always linked his philosophical reflections with his capacity to create sculpture, which speaks to how a true artist is someone who lives and breathes their art twenty-four-seven, lives on the side of refined, aesthetic perception as a totally absorbing mode of being in the world.

“Reality,” Brancusi once said, “resides not in the external form of things but in their innermost essence. This fact entails the impossibility to express anything real while lingering on the surface of things.” --------- This is the spirit of both Platonism and also the simplicity of much Eastern art – to penetrate to the heart, to capture the universal in the particular, the clean line at the center of the natural world.


THE KISS – “This strikingly stark sculpture represents a man and a woman tightly holding each other as if they were a single compact unit. Its symmetrical composition as well as the simplicity and purity of its lines are extremely original.” ---------- When I was in my freshman year at a university in Kentucky, during a lecture in front of 200 students, my English instructor said this sculpture portrayed how silly the act of kissing looks. I didn’t say anything but even then I didn’t understand how the instructor reached such a conclusion. Personally, I find the act of two people kissing beautiful and I think this Brancusi sculpture captures the sensitivity of two people coming together as one. By the way – I wonder what Ms. Campbell, that English instructor, would find beautiful in sculpture – perhaps some Civil War Memorial with soldiers standing at parade rest; to my mind, a type of sculpture memorial good for pigeons to perch on.


BIRD IN SPACE – “My whole life,” Brancusi is known to have said, “has been devoted to searching the essence of flight . . . Flying is such sheer joy!” With this sculpture, Brancusi has created a smooth form whose soaring aerodynamism is solely suggestive of flight, without resorting to any realistic detail whatsoever." ---------- When I had an opportunity to view this sculpture face-to-face in a museum, I felt the urge to run my finger up and down the smooth curve top to bottom. It is said that Piet Mondrian attempted to paint a rainbow as pure geometry. There is definitely a similar spirit in Brancusi with the curve capturing movement, especially flight. If one of Mondrian’s Red, Blue and Yellow Compositions could be magically melted down into a sculpture representing soaring geometry, it just might resemble Brancusi’s Bird.


THE NEWBORN 1: “In the case of the ovoid,” Ezra Pound wrote, “I imagine Brancusi wholly absorbed by the notion of a pure form, a form completely independent of all earthy weightiness and endowed with a life as autonomous as that of any geometric form.” ---------- Anytime I see an egg or an ovoid stone, I associate such with this Brancusi sculpture and imagine how one could shape the object into a compelling work of art. Such is the power of Brancusi, a creative eye to spur others on to an expanded vision.


SOCRATES: “What was truly important to Brancusi, what he aspired to with uncompromising rigor, was the most congruous correspondence between the materials employed in each work of art and the idea that the piece sought to evoke. This idea would have to arise from matter itself.”---------- Another mark of a true artist – respect for material. If a piece of sculpture was to be carved from wood, Brancusi worked with the grains and the wood’s feel and texture. With this particular wood sculpture, I can almost see Brancusi in his studio, in the very act of carving.


SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO: “Brancusi preferred that no one else take pictures of his works or his studio. He also shot photographs of himself, both at work and at rest, in a considerable number of self-portraits.” ----------- Ever the artist. He desired his vision of himself captured in photographs be the vision for the general public. I can appreciate and respect his judgement since with rare exception I myself have not enjoyed the photographs other people have taken of me – and I’m not even an artist.


BRANCUSI’S STUDIO: “Inside the studio – as documented by countless photographs taken by the artist – his works were indeed arranged with the upmost care so as to reveal their mutual relations.” ---------- Brancusi’s vision was total – not only his individual sculptures are important but the way they are positioned together in the space of his studio. And, along with this, how they are captured in the space of his studio via a photograph. For Constantin Brancusi, nothing but nothing was outside the box of art.… (more)