FUNK AND CHIC

By ROBERT HUGHES

THIRTY YEARS BEFORE his death in 1957, there had ceased to be any doubt of Constantin Brancusi's status as a modernist master. He devoted a long life to distilling extremes of formal perfection from a narrow range of motifs. This perfection is never frozen: it always contains some organic character, an affinity to life and therefore to change. "I never seek what to make a pure or abstract form," Brancusi said. "Timelessness,'' "wholeness,'' "essence,'' "aliveness": such words inescapably recur in what has been written about him over the past 70 or 80 years. They are well-worn tokens, rubbed smooth by use, but you can't visit the Brancusi retrospective that is now in its last weeks at the Philadelphia Museum of Art without feeling how his work revives them.

Organized by three curators--Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell and Ann Temkin--the exhibition is beautifully installed, with every piece given its due of light, air and space. It contains more than 100 sculptures in wood, stone and marble, together with the remarkable bases Brancusi made for them and backed up with a host of photographs that document the life in his Paris studio. (Since Brancusi took his own photos, they contain important clues about how he meant the pieces to be grouped, viewed and interpreted.) Already seen in Paris, the show won't go anywhere after Philadelphia; this is the last chance to see it.

Brancusi was born in 1876, in a small village in Romania. He completed a long and thorough training in sculpture in Bucharest before reaching Paris, almost penniless, in 1904. He even worked briefly as a studio menial for Auguste Rodin before quitting in the realization that, as he later put it, nothing grows under great trees. Throughout his life, legends stuck to Brancusi like burrs; he was apt to be seen as a peasant sage, a Carpathian exotic (to most Parisians, Romania barely qualified as part of Europe). And he seemed even more of an original to American collectors, who, fervently egged on by Marcel Duchamp, were his chief support.

But, in fact, he was an artist of immense sophistication, the friend of Duchamp, Erik Satie, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. His work, with its flowing contours and obsessively refined surfaces, was one of the main sources for Art Deco style. Imagine the top of the Chrysler Building carved from oak, and you have something very like his sculptural bases. As Rowell points out in the catalog, guests in his Paris studio would be regaled with homemade sheep's milk cheese and a glass of iced champagne--funk and chic together, essential Brancusi. He loved contrasting the rough with the smooth, the hyper-refined freehand curve with the lump and the block. And when those sleek organic forms, half-volatilized in light, rise up from their wooden pedestals, you think of the resurrection of glorified bodies.

On the one hand, he could come up with images like his versions of the Bird in Space, those pure blades of stone or polished bronze that, soaring upward from their delicately flared connections to the base, are among the greatest images of transcendence in modern art--and that, even today, make the Concorde look like a Sopwith Camel. But he could also be as funny as Joan Miro, carving big wooden teacups, portraying the formidable matron Agnes Meyer as a black-marble visitor from Easter Island, and translating Nancy Cunard's chinless profile into a swell of bronze topped with a fat worm of a chignon, sitting on a carved-oak base, whose stacked lobes probably refer to the African bangles with which this socialite encumbered her anorexic arms.

It was one thing to be a peasant and quite another to draw on sources in folk culture, and Brancusi's "primitive" interests matched those of other Europeans, starting with Gauguin. Brancusi's own Tahiti was his childhood and youth. He remembered peasant Romania very well. Its big-boned craft shapes--lintels, shallow wooden arches, the massive oak screw threads of rustic presses for oil and wine--are preserved in his carvings, where they mingle with disguised quotations from African sculpture. The folk-legend of Maiastra, a miraculous bird with shining golden feathers that guided a prince to his imprisoned lover, helped to inspire his prolific series of bird sculptures. His Endless Columns, those stacks of notched hourglass units that could be piled up to tree-height or to heaven (late in his life, Brancusi had fantasies of building one more than 1,000 ft. high), derived from grave markers in village cemeteries.

But this folk source doesn't explain Brancusi's spiritual aims in making them: he seems to have thought of the endless column as a link between man and God. Nor does the source account for the columns' strictly modernist power. Brancusi's decision to make a modular sculpture out of identical rhomboids, without a fixed end, opens on a world of sculptural possibility that hadn't existed before and was later to be colonized by American Minimalism. The list of sculptors whose work carries traces of Brancusi's dna is almost as long as those columns: Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, William Tucker, Claes Oldenburg, Christopher Willmarth and so on to Scott Burton, who made sculpture as furniture and thought Brancusi's bases were as self-sufficient as his carvings. It seems strange, though, that Minimalists should have picked up on Brancusi's processes, such as the stacking of units, without paying the least attention to his spiritual ambitions. Whatever else Minimalism was about, it wasn't the aliveness and metamorphic intensity of Brancusi.

On occasions, Brancusi was a brilliant manipulator of peasant "artlessness"--a fiction but a powerful one. For example, The Kiss, 1916, is an archetype of erotic modern sculpture. The two figures, minimally distinguished within the single block by the slight softness of the woman's breast and belly and the length of her hair, are united in substance: one flesh, or at least one stone. Their joined profiles make an ogival arch, with one split eye. The hair frames this like water running down a roof. It is an incredibly compressed image, just this side of absurdity.

Brancusi was after a healing wholeness. He didn't care about "truth to material," but he did strive to make the action of the hand and the movement of thought one. He believed that every aspect of sculpture--whether rough, like his urgently hewn oak and walnut carvings, or exquisitely nuanced, like his marble head or bird forms, polished to the point where light and substantial weight become mysteriously the same--needed to be manual before it could be whole.

He loathed the fragmentation of Picasso's work and had no taste for the open, pieced-together asymmetry of Constructivism. Form for him is always closed and unitary, though different forms could be added to one another to make a whole, as in the interplay between sculpture and base. And he especially loved form that spoke of life or awareness at their origins: primal, self-enclosed, a marble egg floating in its own space like a cell, an egglike head lying on its side, filled with what the poet Octavio Paz called "the dreams of undreaming stone."

Oneness had a moral value for Brancusi, as both the origin and the aim of consciousness. It is marvelously expressed in sculptures like Sleeping Muse [III], 1917-18: the ovoid head inflected only by the ghost of a mouth, the delicate V of a nose and the incisions of hair, one of which follows an existing flaw in the veined marble. Part of the magic of his work is its sensitivity to material. Substance and metaphor fuse.

So it is with his Fish, 1930: a 6-ft. blade of mottled, blue-gray marble, which floats above a circular "pond" of creamy limestone. It resembles a large weather vane, and, in fact, it is mounted on hidden ball bearings, so that it can turn. The form of the blade is very pure and yet somehow indeterminate; it has no trace of fins, gills or other fishy attributes. It is more like the shadow of a fish in perfectly clear water, a gray flicker cast on the riverbed below, whose pebbles are suggested by the white streaks and mottling within the stone itself. Thus one has the strange impression of both looking at an opaque, polished stone form and gazing into transparency. It isn't a trick; the effect rises, swims into view, from the physical nature of the marble, and yet it is extraordinarily poetic, even dramatic.

Brancusi's most original use of traditional material arose from his handling of polished bronze. No earlier sculpture had made such a feature of polish. Bronze was patinated--treated with chemicals to give it a warmly dark surface. This obscurity, folding deep shadows into what was already dark, was part of its accepted expressive power. It conveyed density, invited touch.

Brancusi gave bronze a new dimension by bringing it to a mirror shine, as in the Birds or the golden curves and lobes of Princess X, the sculpture whose supposedly phallic qualities caused such a foofaraw in Paris in 1920. (It would always infuriate Brancusi that Princess X was interpreted as a penis and testicles rather than a woman's head, neck and breasts, but of course the sculpture is richer for its double meaning.) Because his work was deeply influenced by classical Indian and Khmer sculpture, it may be that the Eastern practice of gilding the effigy of the Buddha--gold being a symbol of supreme reality--prompted his use of high polish. But there is no doubt about its results.

First, it dissolved the sculpture into a purely optical event. You don't imagine yourself touching the metal; it would be impertinent. You don't wonder whether it's heavy or light; you just see it rise. But you are also aware of what's reflected in its lower half--the room, people moving, colors. The upper part, aiming for the sky, is free of such sublunary accidents. It blooms and sparkles with light and is drawn upward. Light contradicts mass.

The history of art is full of sculptures that signify aspiration--through gesture, expression, movement. But this is different. The aspiration is part of the substance. No sculptor had embodied such a feeling before.