ART: FUNK AND CHIC

THIRTY YEARS BEFORE his death in 1957, there had ceased to be any doubt of Constantin Brancusi's status as a modernist master. He devoted a long life to distilling extremes of formal perfection from a narrow range of motifs. This perfection is never frozen: it always contains some organic character, an affinity to life and therefore to change. "I never seek what to make a pure or abstract form," Brancusi said. "Timelessness,'' "wholeness,'' "essence,'' "aliveness": such words inescapably recur in what has been written about him over the past 70 or 80 years. They are well-worn tokens, rubbed smooth by use, but you can't visit the Brancusi retrospective that is now in its last weeks at the Philadelphia Museum of Art without feeling how his work revives them.

Organized by three curators--Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell and Ann Temkin--the exhibition is beautifully installed, with every piece given its due of light, air and space. It contains more than 100 sculptures in wood, stone and marble, together with the remarkable bases Brancusi made for them and backed up with a host of photographs that document the life in his Paris studio. (Since Brancusi took his own photos, they contain important clues about how he meant the pieces to be grouped, viewed and interpreted.) Already seen in Paris, the show won't go anywhere after Philadelphia; this is the last chance to see it.

Brancusi was born in 1876, in a small village in Romania. He completed a long and thorough training in sculpture in Bucharest before reaching Paris, almost penniless, in 1904. He even worked briefly as a studio menial for Auguste Rodin before quitting in the realization that, as he later put it, nothing grows under great trees. Throughout his life, legends stuck to Brancusi like burrs; he was apt to be seen as a peasant sage, a Carpathian exotic (to most Parisians, Romania barely qualified as part of Europe). And he seemed even more of an original to American collectors, who, fervently egged on by Marcel Duchamp, were his chief support.

But, in fact, he was an artist of immense sophistication, the friend of Duchamp, Erik Satie, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. His work, with its flowing contours and obsessively refined surfaces, was one of the main sources for Art Deco style. Imagine the top of the Chrysler Building carved from oak, and you have something very like his sculptural bases. As Rowell points out in the catalog, guests in his Paris studio would be regaled with homemade sheep's milk cheese and a glass of iced champagne--funk and chic together, essential Brancusi. He loved contrasting the rough with the smooth, the hyper-refined freehand curve with the lump and the block. And when those sleek organic forms, half-volatilized in light, rise up from their wooden pedestals, you think of the resurrection of glorified bodies.