Art & Life—What’s the Relation; or, What Can We Learn from the Work of Constantin Brancusi?
“In art subtraction is for the purpose of addition; one leaves out in order to see more.” —Eli Siegel
The first time I saw an image of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space in a sculpture class at Missouri State University, and later saw the actual piece at the Museum of Modern Art, it’s bold polished bronze and subtle curve, its upward thrust and delicate point, simply took my breath away. I thought it was beautiful. Brancusi’s work is some of the important and innovative sculpture of the 20th century. Works he carved in stone, wood, and cast into bronze became the hallmark of modern abstract sculpture, influencing artists such as Henry Moore, David Smith, Christo and the contemporary architect Frank Gehry. According to The Oxford Companion to Art:
“His originality was one of the most important influences in abstract sculpture during the first half of the 20th century. He reduced natural forms to their ultimate simplicity both of volumes and of planes and could embody the essence of a concept in metal or stone. His portraits have the same simplicity of essential truth.”
Brancusi is known for forms that are basic and minimal, yet it is this “very simplicity,” writes Eric Shane that contains “the ultimate complexities of Brancusi’s art.” We are in the midst of simplicity and complexity every day. What is the relation of the simplicities and complexities of art to our lives? The answer is in this principle of Aesthetic Realism stated by Eli Siegel: “The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.”
Brancusi, Constantin, Bird in Space, 1928, Polished Bronze, 58 x 8 ½ x 6 ½ inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
In our thoughts about situations and people, we leave out and add on, take away or embellish, and as we do is our purpose on behalf of respect for the world? —which is the purpose of art, or is it contempt? The work of Brancusi puts the opposites of simplicity and complexity together in a new and beautiful way and is a means for us to learn how to have a purpose in life that has the good will of art.
In His Art, He Left Out in Order See More
Constantin Brancusi, who lived from 1876 to 1957, was born in a rural peasant village in Romania. As a child he worked as a shepherd. Upon leaving home at age 11 he trained as a carpenter and studied art in Craiova and Bucharest. In this early work, Portrait of Nicolae Darascu, we can see his classical training in anatomy and portraiture. He arrived in Paris in 1904 on the cusp of an artistic revolution and his close friends included Picasso, Duchamp, Modigliani and Man Ray.
In his Paris studio Brancusi entertained fellow artists of the Parisian avant-garde yet lived much as a Romanian peasant. During World War II, he also did something courageous—he hid members of the French Resistance in his home. His work was influenced by the folk tales of his native country and also by the philosophic ideas of Plato.
L: Brancusi, Constantin, Portrait of Nicolae Darascu, 1906, Bronze, height: 25 ¼ inches, Romania Museum of Art, Bucharest. R: Brancusi in his studio 1833-34
For a short time, he worked as an assistant to the great sculptor Rodin, whose forms and surfaces accented a rough complexity. But in his own work Brancusi simplified surfaces to express what he described as the “suggestion of infinity.” Though his sculptures became more abstract, he said it was not the abstraction he was after. His main objective was to get to “the essence of things.” The essence is a thing’s most simple and fundamental form and its most eternal, what relates it to all complex reality. Don’t we see the triangular points and thinness of line of a rooster’s crest and leg in The Cock (below left); the eternal circle in the wide round open mouth of a baby’s cry in Newborn (below center); and the enclosed roundness and extension of a turtle in Flying Turtle (below right)?
Brancusi, Constantin: The Cock, 1924, Wild Cherry, 47 ⅝ x 18 ¼ x 5 ¾ inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. The Newborn, Version 1, 1920 Bronze, 5 ¾ x 8 ½ x 5 ¾ inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Flying Turtle, 1940-45, White Marble on limestone base, 12 ½ x 36 ⅝ x 27 1/8 inches, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.
In his great essay “Art as Selection,” Eli Siegel explained: “To get to the essence of anything you have to leave out something.” “In art … subtraction is for the purpose of addition; one leaves out in order to see more.” Brancusi did leave things out, but what he included, as critic Albert Elsen wrote, brought a “new beauty” to sculpture!
In the work of 1930 titled Fish, the artist has left out eyes, scales and gills, yet what remains are two fundamental and eternal aspects of fish: horizontality and buoyancy. The artist positions this blue-grey slab of marble on the horizontal, the direction of a fish’s body. It appears to be so simple but look at the subtle complexity in its contour and the way it is balanced. On the left it extends forward, rounds into a smooth curve, and on the right rises on an upward diagonal to a subtle point. Doesn’t this suggest the head and fin of fish? It does!
And amazingly Brancusi makes this smoothly shaped form of marble, which measures almost 6 feet from left to right and is a mere 5½ inches thick, seem to float. Balanced on the smallest section—only 6 inches in diameter—of a three-part base, the light color of limestone and white marble, and the way the largest section is suspended, adds to the feeling of buoyancy. The light veins running horizontally through the dark marble convey movement and watery flow. Brancusi said he wanted to express the floating body of fish and “the flash of its spirit.”
Fish, 1930, Grey Marble, 21 x 71 inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
In life, like many people, I often omitted things to aggrandize or protect my own ego. Brancusi’s purpose as artist was completely different. He eliminated details all to see more the essential form of what a thing is. I think this is the reason his works make for such a sense of pleasure and awe.
My Early Mistakes about Simplicity & Complexity
As a child I loved looking at a book with color photographs showing the complex diversity of the American earth: the giant California redwood trees, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls and the Arizona desert. Meanwhile, I preferred to see the town where I grew up, Springfield, Missouri, as plain and boring in comparison, while I also felt the diversity of things in my life was confusing. My parents Don Ellison and Beverly Burk worked long hours, my mother as a nurse and my father as a night clerk, and both had the daily chores of caring for the horses and cattle we owned. When we sum up people we make them simpler than reality intended and like many children, I made that mistake. I felt that my parents’ role in life was to gratify my every wish. And, I saw myself as a very complex and mysterious being, a cut above other people. I was aware of the friction between my parents and grandparents that made for anger in our home. But, rather than trying to understand the human complexity in my family, I secretly had scorn, while I outwardly went after their praise and approval, which often was easy to get.
I felt most proud when I achieved something I had worked hard for, like solving a proof in geometry class or playing Für Elise on the piano. But, generally if things didn’t come easy I got angry and took shorts cuts, like reading the first and last chapters of a book hoping the teacher wouldn’t ask about the middle part. But the short cuts that I thought would make things easy, usually made them more complicated, and I ended up feeling ashamed. At times I felt life was just too complex and thought of moving to a little cabin in the woods. But, when I thought of all the things I would have to leave behind, like electricity, my hair dryer, movies, my car, friends, that solution didn’t satisfy either. In college as I studied art and sculpture, I loved learning about the richness of art history. But, when a teacher described my work as naïve, I was devastated, and worried that I was incapable of having complex thought and feeling about reality, and that also included my hope to care for a man.
When I began to study Aesthetic Realism, I learned that the thing most interfering with and complicating my life was my own contempt. In an early consultation I was asked: “Do you like to see the world as complex as it is?” I didn’t. My consultants asked: “Do you get impatient with problems?” Yes, I certainly did, and they explained: “People have a tendency to see education as one indignity after another because it means we don't know something already. Do you think this matter of complexity is a question of life and also of art? Do you see it as a beautiful question or as a burden, an insult?”
I saw it as a burden and insult. And as a means of encouraging my everyday thought, my consultants asked me to think about how art puts these opposites together. I began to see the true relation of simplicity and complexity in persons I had so wrongly summed up. I was assigned to write, for example, a soliloquy of my father at age 18 and an entry for an imaginary Biographical Dictionary about my mother Beverly Burk. As my study continued, I began to feel more hopeful about love, and I will say more on that subject later. What I was learning is described in these sentences by Eli Siegel from Self and World:
“The self has in it the drive towards simplicity, for it must be one. It has in it the drive towards multiplicity, for the world is various, and the self grows by meeting more and more and arranging more and more.”
Brancusi as artist, saw the relation of complexity and simplicity as a means of getting to beauty, but from what I have read of his life, it seems that he went for a kind of exclusiveness that made him deeply separate from people, in fact, as his life went on, he became something of a recluse.
Art, People & Love—Aesthetic Realism Shows the Relation!
In his essay “Art as Selection” Mr. Siegel explains that “an arrangement of circles, ovals, straight lines, [and] planes” in a person, “can be more representative of reality…than the ambitions of that” person. This describes what we see in the portraits by Brancusi. Mlle. Pogany is an arrangement of circles, ovals, straight lines and planes. When this work appeared at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, it was ridiculed as “a hardboiled egg balanced on a cube of sugar.” But we can ask, has Brancusi simplified her features in order to see her with less meaning or more? I believe that the artist was trying to see eternal form in Margit Pogany, a Hungarian painter with whom Brancusi fell in love because of what he called the “particularity of her eyes.” In this sketch of her we can see how the artist has accented those eyes.
Brancusi, Constantin: Mlle. Pogany Drawing. Mlle. Pogany III, 1931, White Marble, 17 1/16 x 7 ½ x 10 ½ inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Composed within the simplicity of the oval, a form that Brancusi used repeatedly throughout his work, Mlle. Pogany is a drama of severity and softness, reverence and pride. Poised delicately on her arm, it sweeps upwardly around the curve of her head, returning to the point at which it began. Her bowed head seems heavy with thought but the way it is suspended and on a slight tilt and the curves defining her eyes, all make for energy.
I believe that Brancusi as a self was troubled about welcoming a certain rich complexity. Evidence of this is in the fact that he referred disparagingly to the work of Michelangelo as “muscle and beefsteak.” Though as artist he tried to see eternal form in women, in life I think he was confused and pained by how he thought about women. He was described by a woman he was close to as possessive. To possess a person is a way of wrongly simplifying that person, dismissing her possible complexities, her relation to everything else and I think this went on in the mind of Brancusi.
Meanwhile, there is his famous work titled The Kiss. It is one of the best-known works of modern sculpture, and in it, I believe, Constantin Brancusi as artist is kindly and with humor giving critical form to mistakes that he and others have made in the field of love. A kiss is simply the lips of two people meeting, but as everyone knows it is often accompanied by a great complex drama of human emotion.
Originally The Kiss was commissioned as a tombstone for a couple about whom Brancusi said he wanted to show, not their external form, but something essential to all “couples who love each other on earth before leaving it.” In this simple and compact rectangle of limestone we see two figures, kissing. The arms of the man and woman enclose each other in a tight embrace—they do seem to possess each other—but look at how their horizontal line makes for width and extension.
Both figures are equal in size and equally share the stone they inhabit, neither is the superior, adored one, as I once wanted to be. Their intimate lips become an abstract form joining them across the vertical groove which separates and defines their profiles. Their eyes are focused on each other and yet their eyes together create one large circular eye that looks out. Is Brancusi as artist saying that two people have to relate their care for each other to the outside world?
Brancusi, Constantin, The Kiss, 1916, Limestone, 23 x 13 x 10 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art
I once felt that love meant having a man totally devoted to me and I resented his relations to other things—such as his family and friends, sports and subjects he studied in school. I wanted all those things left out of a relationship and had no idea this had anything to do with the pain I gave and got in love. My consultants asked me, “Do you equate love for a person with exclusion of the world?” I did and learning that a man is his relation to the world made love, the real thing, possible in my life. When I fell in love with Jaime Torres, I also fell in love with his relation to his native Puerto Rico, Latin music and food, his knowledge of science and so much more. And he has been a good friend in criticizing, with humor, my desire to make things both easier and more complicated in order to have less feeling, not more. Today, after many happy years of marriage we are grateful to continue learning in the professional classes we attend taught by the Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss.
The Oneness of Simplicity and Complexity in Beauty
is What We Most Want in Our Lives
Simplicity, said Brancusi, “is complexity resolved” and he worked to get to that simplicity. As artist he was impelled to see more, creating many versions on a theme, each work a unique and new inspiration. As I was preparing for this paper, I saw I had wrongly thought that the Bird in Space at the Museum of Modern Art was the only Bird in Space. How surprised and criticized I was to learn that Brancusi, over a span of 40 years, created over 28 works on the theme of the bird. The series began with Maiastra, which is a magic golden bird that is part of Rumanian folk lore. In this work of 1910, the form of bird is simplified but still definable as bird. Maiastra evolved into Golden Bird, Yellow Bird, Bird, and then Bird in Space.
Brancusi, Constantin, L-R: Maiastra, 1912, bronze, 24 inches high. Des Moines Art Center. Bird, 1923–1947, blue-grey marble, 35 1/8” high, 19” diameter, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel. Yellow Bird, 1919, yellow marble, 36 ½” high, 20 ½” diameter, Yale University Art Gallery. Golden Bird, 1919. bronze, 38” high, base 48 1/8”, The Art Club of Chicago, Chicago. Bird in Space, 1923, marble, 56 ¾” x 6 ½” diameter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
About the birds Brancusi said: “It is not birds I sculpt, it is flight.” “I don't think I'll ever succeed. I love whatever rises.” Within a singular and simple form—slender and upright and curving, resides a complexity of proportion that can scarcely be seen in photographs. Each Bird in Space has a different ratio of height and circumference of the whole, to the height and thickness of its footing. Brancusi expressed this form in white and black marble, and bronze. Each rough cast received from the foundry he himself did the painstaking task of hand polishing it, which sometimes took months.
I think one of the most beautiful works of 20th century sculpture is Bird in Space that resides at the Museum of Modern Art. In “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites,” Eli Siegel asks this about opposites which are the very essence of its beauty: simplicity and complexity:
“Is there a simplicity in all art, a deep naiveté, an immediate self-containedness, accompanied perhaps by fresh directness or startling economy?—and is there that, so rich, it cannot be summed up; something subterranean and intricate counteracting and completing simplicity; the teasing complexity of reality meditated on.”
Brancusi, Constantin, Bird in Space, 1928, Polished Bronze, 58 x 8 ½ x 6 ½ inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
There is a startling economy here—one form with a continuous, unified surface, and yet there is intricacy in the way that form widens and narrows. Our eye seems first to go to the area of widest circumference and from there soar upward to that delicate point. But where does this flight begin? Look at the footing, so small in comparison to the whole that it’s easy to miss. Within that footing is “the teasing complexity of reality.”
Its height is crucial to the balance and grace of the piece. It tapers upwards, but then there is a point where it slightly widens as if the weight of the upper form is pressing down on it. And at its thinnest point, downward push and upward thrust meet, and from there the flight takes off.
I am grateful to say that as my mother Beverly Burk and I recently looked together at this work, as she was recuperating from knee surgery, it was she—the woman I once so stupidly summed up—who pointed out the importance of that almost nonexistent thinness. In all its simplicity, Bird in Space cannot be summed up and that is its beautiful message to us: do not sum up reality.
I love Aesthetic Realism for showing that there is a rich and thrilling relation between art and life. The essence of both are the opposites. “All beauty,” explained Eli Siegel, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
—For Further Reading—
Works by Eli Siegel available at the Aesthetic Realism Online Library