The Message of Constantin Brancusi for Our Lives: Do Not Sum Up Reality!
The first time I saw Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space, with its bold polished bronze and subtle curve, its upward thrust and delicate point, it took my breath away. I thought it was beautiful! Its utter simplicity continues to be astounding and yet, it is this “very simplicity,” wrote the critic Eric Shane, that contains “the ultimate complexities of [Brancusi’s] art.”
Simplicity and complexity are matters we are in the midst of every day. How easy it is to sum up something, or judge things according to how simple or difficult they are. I have made these mistakes, including as a teacher, and I’ve seen the students I taught at LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts, make them too. I learned there is a relation between the way simplicity and complexity are beautifully together in art to what we hope for in our lives. The answer is in this great principle of Aesthetic Realism stated by its founder Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” This is the basis of my teaching and the reason that I and my students were able to see that the oneness of simplicity and complexity in Brancusi’s work had something central to teach us about our lives.
The Oxford Companion to Art describes Brancusi as “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.” The artist said that simplicity was “complexity resolved,” and he worked his whole life to get to what he described as “the essence of things.”
“To get to the essence of anything,” Eli Siegel explained in his 1941 essay “Art As Selection,” “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 brought a new beauty to sculpture!
We can see many different ways the artist eliminated details in order to get to the essence of form in the 28 individual works he created over a span of forty years on the theme of birds. Yet, “It is not birds I sculpt, it is flight,” he said. All are slender, upright, curving, yet each has a unique drama of thick and thin, and a complex ratio of height, width and circumference. Brancusi’s search for the essence of things was impelled by the desire to give form to reality’s structure with respect, which is the purpose of all art.
Left to Right: 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 1.2 diameter. Yale University Art Gallery. Golden Bird, 1919, bronze, 38” high, base 48 1/8, The Art Club of Chicago. Bird in Space, 1923, marble, 56 ¾ x 6 ½ diameter, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We Can Learn from the Purpose of Art
In life, we can dismiss or leave out to lessen the meaning of things and people, which is contempt—“the false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the greatest opposition to both art and life.
Like many people, I didn’t like it when things were complex and often got impatient and angry when they were. When I began to study Aesthetic Realism, I began to learn how the art I loved could teach me about myself. I was asked: “Is the matter of complexity a question of life and also of art? Do you see it as a beautiful question or as a burden, an insult?” I did see it as a burden and insult, and was encouraged to study how art puts these opposites together. And I began to be more interested in the relation of simplicity and complexity in persons I had wrongly summed up, my parents for example.
Brancusi did not see complexity as a burden or insult. No, he as artist, saw the relation of complexity and simplicity as a means of getting to beauty. His Bird in Space of 1928 at the Museum of Modern Art is one of the great works of 20th century sculpture. In Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? Eli Siegel asks this about these opposites which are the essence of its beauty:
“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.”
In Bird in Space there is a startling economy—one form with a continuous, unified surface, and yet there is great subtlety in the way that form widens and narrows. Our eye seems to go first to the area of widest circumference, a mere 6½ inches, then upward it soars to a height of 58 inches, culminating in that delicate point that seems to become one with all space. 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 upward, but just before arriving at the thinnest point, it widens slightly as if the weight of the upper form is pressing down. Downward push and upward thrust meet, and from there the flight takes off.
Students are thrilled to learn through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method that art and education have the same purpose: “to like the world through knowing it.” This has been invaluable to me as a self, a visual artist, and teacher, enabling me to encourage students not to settle for the easy thing, as I once did, but through welcoming greater complexity of thought about the world, becoming more like sculpture, unified and free. In its rich simplicity, the message of Brancusi’s Bird in Space is: do not sum up reality!
Constantin Brancusi. Bird in Space. 1928. Polished Bronze, 54 x 8 ½ x 6 ½. MOMA