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

is godlike, primeval, ungentlemanly. Brancusi is suave, witty, elegant and rococo. There is
no reason whatever for linking them save that their loves spell their loves with a B and both
were mocked. If one must find a musical affinity for Brancusi, Rameau is nearer. But must
one? He is more literary than musical.
One naturally seeks for comparisons for most of our modern artists among the musicians,
for the continual search for the abstractions of beauty that goes on among our new men is only
to be matched by the “absolute” in music that fascinated even the apostles of the leitmotif
among our composers. One would wish that modern art would not borrow so much from music.
One would wish that painting and sculpture might develop more strictly within their medi-
umistic limitations, or progress by adding more and more restrictions to method.
But what have one’s private opinions to do with an age whose rallying word is “liberty”?
An age in which all barriers are down; an age in which the women wish to be men; every country
wishes to be like its neighbor, and an expert is required to tell the difference between an aristo-
crat and a democrat? With everything “upon the level” what’s the use of kicking because paint-
ing has become another form of music? Or because sculptors take on the license of poets?
Those who deny “progress and liberty” will deny Brancusi. Those who are interested in
life as it is and are more interested in the actual, unsolved, confronting problems of the day
than in the completely solved, tabulated, indexed problems of the long dead past will accept him.
Those who can bear to look at Brancusi’s sculptures, however, will find it difficult to under-
stand the shudders of the philistines. They are not after all so very abstract. There is a tangible
subject to each work. “Mile. Pogany” is, if you will, a delicious piece of satire as soulful and
ecstatic as dead Lady Angela in “ Patience.” She leans her amusing head upon her hands and
bends forward properly “yearning” at the, to us, inaudible Bunthornish strain. The eyes in
such creatures dilate until they are all of the lady that the watchers at the comedy see. Brancusi
has dilated them until we see nothing but eyes. But what of that? Pray let us be consistent
for once. It is an abstraction, but since we understand it what’s the harm? Our ultra-moderns
complain that it is too easy, that they “understand” it, in fact. If that should prove to be its
fault, it is a fault that will make its appeal to all Academicians.
“Mile. Pogany’s” ear is a droll ellipse and may worry beginners in modern art study, but
the same individual who will be astonished at such an ear in modern art admires exactly the
same sort of art convention in a Chinese jade. As the light strikes it now in the little gallery
it is very like jade. The whole piece of marble is delightful as stone, and the artisan has cut it
with fine appreciation of its quality. The “touch,” to apply still another musical term to
Brancusi’s chisel, is extraordinarily caressing. Few pieces of modern stone cutting come up to it
in “preciousness,”and none that we have seen eclipse it. Certainly Rodin’s do not. Sculptors
who have any love for their trade as such and know in theory what “respect for the marble”
is will concede this success to Brancusi.
The new piece, the “Danaide,” is far more subtle and refined than the “Mile. Pogany.”
Why she smiles we do not know, this Danaide. Is she the one who didn’t murder her husband
upon her wedding night or one of those who did ? It is a most elusive smile, difficult to translate,
but charmingly high bred. A Japanese noblewoman would smile like that just before commit-
ting hari-kari. From every point of view the lines as lines are good. The swollen neck does not
explain itself to us, but in another light “it might,” as the young person in “General O’Regan”
says. The hair is suggested in a most interesting way and the tenderness of execution is even
more marked than in “Mile. Pogany.” “Mile. Pogany” has the advantage in marbles, though.
J. Edgar Chamberlain in the New York Evening Mail:
Several pieces of the sculpture of Constantine Brancusi are on exhibition at the gallery
of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue. Brancusi is a sculptor of Roumanian origin and
inspiration, who for many years served as a workman in the atelier of Rodin. It was perhaps
in that atelier that he gained the inspiration for his most extraordinary work, the head of Mile.
Pogany, which, in a plaster cast, figured as one of the most wildly exciting features of the Inter-
national or Armory show a year ago.
This is the head which people called “the egg”; it is a round, smooth ovoid, provided with
a thin, straight, wedge-like projection which does duty for a nose, and marked with two large
rudimentary secondary ovals which suggest eyes.

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