SCIENAR Project Agreement number 2008-2254/001-001 CTU-MECOAN

Brâncuşi’s Quest for the Essence

A multimedia reading of Pavel

Şuşară’s Essay The revolt of the non
figurative
• Dispute with historical statuary
Resorts to:
1. Protohistory beyond the horizon of idolatry
and magic
2. Byzantine roots
3. Purism and tri-dimensional axioms
 But before, he proved the perfect mastery of the
accepted language, historical conventions, instruments
and techniques.

• From Academism to Impressionism

 Academism

Vitellius Portrait of Dr. Carol Davila

 Impressionism

Portrait of Painter Dărăscu Torment

Final test of Anthropocentrism= Declaration of
war against the same phyllosophy

The Flayed Body

 The Flayed Body

• Flayed body represents in itself a “last will” of

the anthropomorphic statuary up to Rodin
from which Brâncuşi departed in such a way.
The subsequent line is, in fact, what
insidiously and cynically is announced by this
work. A slow, gradual and polymorphous
execution.
1. Protohistory, archaic times, horizon of
idolatry and magic.

The Kiss Wisdom of the Earth

Monolithic, antiretoric, made by direct carving

Reconnects the statuary to vaguely Neolithic

times
Proposes a reading of the statuary much
closer of a Space of Innocence

The Kiss Wisdom of the Earth

 2. Resort to the Byzantine origin

Characteristic of Byzantine Art:

• Austerity

• Exterior Drapings
 The Prayer

• Brâncuşi retains from the

Byzantine decorative
pattern, the inner austerity
and the monumental,
indescribable sense of the
sacred.
• No elementary description
• No individualizing
suggestion
• Resorbs the substance in
terms of atitude
3. Purism and tri-dimensional axioms

The Fish The Seal

The Turtle
3. Purism and tri-dimensional axioms

Mademoiselle Pogany

Princess X
 3. Purism and tri-dimensional axioms

Flash of its spirit

mark the
•“When you distance
see a fishthat
you he hasthink
don't taken from
of its the do
scales, classical
you? You think of
approach in sculpture.
its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made
•fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or
reveals its permanent quest for the essence.
shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.“
Constantin Brâncuşi
 Science and Art
Brâncuşi and Coandă were colleagues in Rodin’s studio.

Coandă built the first jet airplane in 1910

Brâncuşi begun the cycle of Birds contaminated by the idea of flying.

Flying-what a bliss!
The most ample and profound struggle of
sculpture with itself - Birds

Maiastra Yellow Bird Bird in Flight

Bird

“Măiastra-writes Serge Fauchereau-it is

reduced to essential; there are no more
feathers, feet, wings and open beak…[…]
the bird of Brâncuşi evolves toward a
gradually greater abstraction, to the point
when it is no more than flight and song”.
From Flayed Body to the Bird in Flight

It is found the resume of the whole

statuary and the sheer drama and
richness of an incompatibility
 Understanding Brâncuşi’s approach
aforistic and non-visual
• Brâncuşi, the aforistic and non visual, the one
who made Sculpture for the blind:
 Classical sculpture
Did not like the anthropomorphic classical sculpture before him

Reasons:

Discursivity
 Understanding Brâncuşi’s approach
aforistic and non-visual

• The origins:
• Eastern world
• Full of Myths, Symbols, Archetypes
• God and Man are not representable in
sculpture
• (No sculpture in Romania until the end of
the19th Century)
 Understanding Brâncuşi’s approach
aforistic and non-visual
The area where from he came

Wooden architecture Grave Stone

This fundamental incompatibility with classical sculpture pushed him
into a life long quest for the essence of things. His life long search was
contemporary with search and discoveries in modern physics at the
beginning of thentieth Century proving in a way that Science and Art
have sometimes similar approaches.
• Presentation arranged in ITC by Gheorghe Samoilă. The content of this
presentation is taken from the CD-ROM Brâncuşi edited in 2005 by ITC,
subject to copyright under conditions mentioned in this CD-ROM.