(piano music)
- [Dr. Zucker] We're in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
in a room devoted to the work of Constantin Brancusi,
an artist who redefined sculpture in the modern age.
- [Dr. Harris] Sculpture at the turn
from the 19th to the 20th century.
The great figure who stands out is Auguste Rodin,
but still very much within that narrative tradition
of the 19th century.
- [Dr. Zucker] Rodin broke all kinds of rules
in terms of the way he handled surface,
fragmented the human figure
and took issue with the classical ideal
of the human body.
We can see that for instance in Walking Man.
Brancusi comes as an outsider to modernism
and to the art establishment in Paris.
He was Romanian.
He did go to the academy in Bucharest
but made his way as a young man to Paris.
- [Dr. Harris] So it's important to remember too
that Paris really is the center of the art world
for the 19th century.
It's the poem of what we think of as modern art
and in a way, at the end of the 19th century
we see artist wanting to leave Paris
to finds other traditions.
There's this interest in something that was thought of
as a more primitive or more true.
- [Dr. Zucker] And what's so interesting
is that Brancusi brings that notion
of a kind of primitive truth to Paris
rather than having to leave Paris to find it.
He comes from Romania
where there was a long standing peasant tradition
of stone carving and wood carving.
A kind of folk art.
And while Brancusi, himself, worked briefly
in Auguste Rodin's studio,
when Brancusi was more established,
the younger artist Isamu Noguchi would work with this master
and one of the things that Noguchi took form Brancusi
was the artist regard for the nature of the object,
finding its internal spirit, its structures.
- [Dr. Harris] We clearly see that here
in this limestone sculpture called The Kiss.
It's easy to fall into thinking,
oh this looks like something a child could do.
This is so simple, it's so block-like.
The forms are not carefully detailed
in their depiction of the human body.
Especially if you think about the academic tradition
that someone like Rodin is coming from.
- [Dr. Zucker] Where there's a careful articulation
of movement musculature of the anatomy.
But here what we have instead is an attempt
to retain the materiality.
This came from a block of stone.
Look at the turn of the elbows,
and yes, of course, arms do turn at right angles
but here those right angles are aligned
with corners of the block.
- [Dr. Harris] It's almost surprising
to find those arms continuing around.
- [Dr. Zucker] And lovely the way
those hands clasp each other
and hold the other figure tight.
So much so, that these figures,
which are each defined only by the single incised line
that separates the two without which
they could almost be read as a single figure.
- [Dr. Harris] Except that of course the figure on the right
we read as a woman because the line makes it an arch
so we read those as breasts.
- [Dr. Zucker] She is ever so slightly thinner than he is.
Her eye slightly smaller,
but the eyes also join together
to create a single, almost cyclopean eye
in the middle of the forehead.
And the mouths which are lips reaching to each other,
are here singular.
- [Dr. Harris] Brancusi is making something
that reveals the structure of the limestone.
We even have that sense in the simplified carving
of the hair.
And there's also something in that idea of the union
of these two figures of male and female coming together,
something primitive, something truthful,
something about the human condition.
- [Dr. Zucker] I think there's a real honoring
of the material nature of this block.
He's leaving it raw.
It's not just the cubic quality,
it's the surface, which is allowed to be rough.
Look especially at the hair.
We can use the term primitive
but I think it's also archaic.
It's hearkening back to the tradition before the classical.
- [Dr. Harris] So outside of that academic tradition,
you go to the academy,
you learn how to sculpt.
You learn how to make a human figure.
You study human anatomy.
You learn how to polish stone
so that it has a high degree of sheen.
- [Dr. Zucker] How radical this must have been
after 3 or 400 years from the Renaissance
to the high polished sculptures
of Bernini during the Baroque period
to the academic art of the 19th century.
Were the technical facility was at a high point
to return to a basic beautiful form.
This was not the first version of The Kiss.
This is actually the fourth
and it was commissioned by an American collector
who was interested in acquiring the first
but Brancusi said it wasn't available.
- [Dr. Harris] And it's important
that it's not on a typical base
that we think of for sculpture.
- [Dr. Zucker] In fact, the artist didn't even want it
on the piece of wood that we see it on in the museum.
He wanted it directly on the ground.
He said it would be a kind of amputation
if it was placed on a platform.
This is important to the idea
of taking sculpture out of the academic realm
where sculpture had always been accorded a kind
of high status put on a high pedestal.
The avant-garde has rejected the sophistication
of the urban experience looking instead
for truth in nature.
- [Dr. Harris] Well you can say that
that is he very definition of the avant-garde,
rejecting the authority and strictures
of the academy and finding an alternative
that speaks more genuinely to the time
that the artist lives in.
(piano music)