Until then, Constantin Brancusi had been barely known to me. I now revere him as a wholly original genius, in sculpture and drawing, and as a key figure in that paradoxically non-parochial movement, the Ecole de Paris. If he had been only a minor associate of the movement, of questionable artistic stature, there would still have been an aura of legend about him. The feats of his youth alone would have singled him out.
Born in rural Romania in 1876, Brancusi left home at the age of ten or 11, on an impulse that seems almost to have been a prophetic calling. He was not heard of for the next six years. In his gadabout teens, challenged to make a violin, he did just that, examining another instrument, puzzling out how to align the grain of the wood to achieve a classical richness of tone. After several years of menial employment, he enrolled at art school, and as a graduate student modelled a life-size, écorché human figure sufficiently accurate to be of use to medical students. In his early 20s, he set off on foot for Paris, with his flute for company.
He reached the capital city of art in 1904, for a while contemplated apprenticing himself to the great Auguste Rodin, but at last decided against it on the grounds that “nothing of significance grows under the shade of a large tree.” A fund of folksy wisdom, reinforced by steely independence of purpose, seems to have been part of his natural equipment. Rodin, he opined, sculpted “in beefsteak”—that is, in the decadent Renaissance manner, lavishing undue care on the virtuoso treatment of musculature and flesh. He himself was on a quest for something purer, truer, stronger; both of the earth and spiritually fulfilling...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine
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