Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 45))

Charles H. Caffin in the New York American:
In the galleries of the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth avenue, is an exhibition of sculpture
by Constantine Brancusi.
Visitors to the International Exhibition will remember his portrait of Mile. Pogany,
which was jocosely styled “the egg-shaped lady.” That was in plaster, as also was the head
of the “Sleeping Muse.” Here both pieces have been rendered in marble by the sculptor him-
self, and the latter is also shown in a version in bronze. Among the other pieces are two female
heads and a legendary bird.
Nothing so purely abstract in expression has been created in modern sculpture. One must,
in fact, go back to the Egyptian, or possibly to the Chinese sculpture of the Sung period, to
find any counterpart. Yet, while these pieces by Brancusi recall the impersonal, abstract
qualities of ancient art, their expression is singularly modern in its subtlety and even intimacy
of suggestion.
In the “Sleeping Muse,” for example, the expression is of sleep, sleep so light that the flutter
of a flower’s petal would awaken it. It is the sleep of the spirit, the suspense that precedes
creative imaginations, and its emanation envelops like the quietude of night even the externals
of the head. The piece, when you accept its language, is exquisitely, poignantly beautiful.
Those who admired the “Pogany” in the plaster—and they were many, despite the
levity of the heavy-minded—will find in the marble even more sensitiveness of suggestion.
While its principles of construction are simplified to an almost pure geometrical application
of the sphere and tangents, nothing but the feeling of an artist of singularly rare sensations
could have created the rhythms into which the lines and planes successively melt.
If any one doubts that it represents on the part of Brancusi a series of excursions into
principles of abstract expression and not merely the adoption of certain tricks of form, a com-
parison of it with the other heads, in some particular such as the modelling of the eyes, should
remove the doubt. For, while the treatment is always merely suggestive, the quality of sugges-
tion varies in each case.
The bird is strangely heroic. Its masses and curves are reduced to the utmost simplicity,
and in consequence are the more salient in their actual constructiveness. It represents the
most imposing kind of architectonics applied to a natural form. It is noble in conception and
masterful in its technical rendering. And it is so because method and imagination alike are
profoundly sculptural.
Mr. McBride in the New York Sun:
Those who didn’t “see” it last year at the show of international art ought to this year.
Now that it finds itself in the sympathetic guardianship of Mr. Stieglitz in the little gallery
of the Photo-Secession, at 291 Fifth avenue, which seems to have no secret architectural differ-
ences from other galleries and yet has the faculty of showing off modern wares that seem dubious
in other places to extreme advantage, like the tailor’s mirror in which you never can locate the
imperfections that you fancied in the glass at home, the Brancusi art seems to expand, unfold
and to take on a startling lucidity.
But a few short months ago there were jeers for the “Mile. Pogany” and the “Is it an
egg?” witticism threw the philistines into such paroxysms of uncontrolled glee that a considera-
tion of the “Sleeping Muse” had to be postponed. It is impossible to reason with people in the
grip of a passion, whether for laughing or weeping. It is perhaps impossible ever to reason the
adverse into an appreciation of a work of art. Art is felt, not understood. All the talk and
loud shouts in the world won’t cause you to like a picture that you are convinced you loathe.
But the laughers are finally stilled through sheer weariness of their own laughter. The thought
imprisoned in the bronze at last speaks, and soon, if the idea be a pretty one, there is an audi-
ence so large for it that the fatuous laugher becomes an object for mild pity. People laughed
at Beethoven! It is difficult for us now to see upon what they pinned their joke.
Brancusi, Beethoven! They are not precisely mates. Beethoven never laughed, or at
least if he did you were more frightened than at his thunder. Brancusi laughs. Beethoven
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