Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi uses stone, marble and metal to cut straight to the essence of things, writes Aidan Dunne
For another week or so, two great names in 20th-century sculpture, Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) and Donald Judd (1928-1994), share a floor of Tate Modern in London. Then Judd retires from the scene and Brancusi has the place to himself for a while.
At first glance the work of the humble Romanian carver, a bearded peasant in clogs, has nothing in common with Judd's impassive, machine-tooled components. Blank and empty and relentlessly formulaic in their repetitive sequences, Judd's works look as alien and opaque as art from Mars.
One could say that Brancusi's polished marble carvings, his abstracted heads and torsos, were as alien to the sculptural language of their time as Judd is to Brancusi's rough-hewn wooden columns. Against the rapt, expressive naturalism of Rodin's celebrated couple, Brancusi's own The Kiss is an uncompromising block of stone roughly incised with lines that embody only the most rudimentary figuration.
Yet despite their manifest differences, Brancusi's work, with its reductionist aesthetic, is strikingly, unmistakably related to Judd's world. There is something terrifying about that world - and it is too much or, more accurately, too little for many people - but love it or hate it, a visit to the Tate show is a remarkable, memorable experience. All the more remarkable to walk from the Judd and see Brancusi wrestling obsessively with forms that anticipate minimalism.
Brancusi is widely known for relatively few works, for certain colourful biographical details, for his spot of bother with US customs in 1926 and for the fact that his studio, carefully preserved, can be visited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where he spent almost all of his working life. The preservation of his studio as an artefact is not as odd as it sounds given that the last years of his life were largely devoted to its organisation and presentation as a work in itself. His own photographs of his sculpture and studio form an important part of his oeuvre.
Many successful artists like to mythologise their origins and such is the case with Brancusi. His background was certainly not as impoverished as he liked to maintain. There is evidence that he was, as he claimed, restless from an early age, and anxious to get away. As New Frontiers, the current exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland demonstrates, the early years of the century witnessed significant cultural traffic between Eastern and Western Europe. Certainly Romanian legend and tradition remained integral to the form and vision of Brancusi's work as it evolved over time, and his growing stature in Romania was important to him both personally and in other, practical ways.
Part of the myth is that, already highly regarded as a potential monumental sculptor, he walked the breadth of Europe to reach Paris in 1904. It's possible he did just that. Rodin was impressed enough with him to take him on as an assistant in 1907, but he left after only a month. We know Brancusi as a carver - "Direct cutting is the true road to sculpture . . ." - and Rodin took him on as a marble carver, but it was only around this time that he began carving stone for himself.
The Kiss, apart from being, surely, a riposte to Rodin, was part of a vogue for a return to the Gothic. Several of the most beautiful pieces in the show come from this period. They include the Gothically inclined sandstone Danaide which normally resides in Bucharest, and the stunning, naturalistic Head of a Sleeping Child in white marble, which is part of the Pompidou's extensive holdings of his work.
As the many examples of these motifs make clear, Brancusi obsessively worked and reworked an idea, simplifying and refining an image and making numerous closely-related variations on a theme. Two of these obsessive motifs got him into different kinds of trouble, one of them becoming the subject of a famous court case. Princess X is derived from a view of a woman looking in a mirror but the end result is unmistakably and elegantly phallic. The French authorities certainly thought so when, despite Brancusi's protestations, they removed it from exhibition in 1920 on the basis that it offended public decency.
Vitally for Brancusi, he had found supportive buyers in the United States from about 1912, including a major patron, the collector John Quinn. But when customs officials seized a bronze Bird in Space in 1926, on the basis that it was a piece of decorative metal and not art and was hence liable for heavy duty, their action triggered a court battle that hinged on nothing less than the definition of art. The owner of the piece, Edward Steichen, decided to take the customs men on, and eventually won.
From 1917 or thereabouts Brancusi found another recurrent form, one that more than any other relates him directly to Judd and his contemporaries. The Endless Column is a pillar of identical, repeated rhomboids, radical in its level of abstraction and in its formal implications. He used it in a variety of contexts, most famously in 1935, in his innovative and influential monument to those killed in battle defending the Romanian town of Tirgu Jiu during the first World War. One can see how he was attacked by critics for his mathematical reductionism, for the fact that he was "devastated by a passion for pure forms".
Given all this, what is most surprising about the exhibition is the evidence it provides of the co-existence of two apparently opposing sides to Brancusi's artistic character: the reductionist connoisseur of simplified, polished form as against the rough carver, self-consciously in pursuit of the "primitive". They often coincide in an individual piece.
He played endlessly with arrangements of coarse, carved wood columns as complicated plinths for the more elegant stone carvings and metal casts. Some observers find this duality hard to reconcile with his reputation as a precursor of minimalism, but that reputation is surely well deserved.
Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things is at Tate Modern, London until May 23rd. Donald Judd closes there on April 25th