Art: Master of Form

Rumanian-born Constantin Brancusi is one of the 20th century's great sculptors, but only now, at 79, is he getting his first comprehensive one-man show in a major museum. For the event, Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum assembled 59 of his works in gleaming brass, rough-hewn wood and egg-smooth marble (opposite). Included are seven pieces never before seen in the U.S., lent by the sculptor from his tumble-down Paris studio where he has lived and worked for the past 30 years. Although the sculpture ranges over four decades, from his turn-of-the-century, huddled female figure, almost Oriental in feeling, to his smooth-backed Flying Turtle, there is nothing dated. With its freshness and elegant simplicity, Brancusi's work still holds its own with any of today's modern sculpture.

Embattled Bird. Brancusi first burst on the U.S. scene when his work was shown at Manhattan's storied 1913 Armory Show. In 1927 he made art history when U.S. Customs decided that "metal," not 'art,'' was the proper classification for his highly polished, curving brass column

Bird in Space. The case, taken to court, became the most celebrated of its day, with newspapers deriding Brancusi's Bird as everything from a "lean banana" to a "white panatela cigar."

Artists and art lovers rushed to Brancusi's defense. Asked caustically if a good mechanic could not polish up a brass rail and pass it off as art, Sculptor Jacob Epstein replied: "He can polish it up, but he cannot conceive of the object. That is the whole point." The court agreed. Its decision : objects which portray abstract ideas (in this case, "flight"), rather than imitate natural objects, may be classified as art.

Why the Brouhaha? Brancusi's surprised reaction to the 1927 trial was: "Why do they make all this brouhaha? It is true that my work is no longer academic. It once was." Peasant-born Brancusi had first proved himself when he won a scholarship and became a prizewinning art student at Bucharest's School of Fine Arts. But he soon abandoned the academic approach: "In art school we study the past only in its decadent moments—that is, after the creative faith has died out of it." Brancusi went off to Paris, worked briefly with famed French Sculptor Rodin then struck out on his own.

For Brancusi, the effort to find a new creative faith became an attempt to abstract from nature its essential form extracting the suggested form from within the stone or wood itself. Said he: "I think a true form ought to suggest infinity. The surfaces ought to look as though they went on forever, as though they proceeded out from the mass into some perfect and complete existence."

Pure Joy. In his search for such forms Brancusi drew his inspiration from the simplest biological forms, from the fairy tale legends of his native Rumania and the early, crude but forceful sculpture of Egyptian, Indian and primitive Negro art.