ART: FUNK AND CHIC

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On the one hand, he could come up with images like his versions of the Bird in Space, those pure blades of stone or polished bronze that, soaring upward from their delicately flared connections to the base, are among the greatest images of transcendence in modern art--and that, even today, make the Concorde look like a Sopwith Camel. But he could also be as funny as Joan Miro, carving big wooden teacups, portraying the formidable matron Agnes Meyer as a black-marble visitor from Easter Island, and translating Nancy Cunard's chinless profile into a swell of bronze topped with a fat worm of a chignon, sitting on a carved-oak base, whose stacked lobes probably refer to the African bangles with which this socialite encumbered her anorexic arms.

It was one thing to be a peasant and quite another to draw on sources in folk culture, and Brancusi's "primitive" interests matched those of other Europeans, starting with Gauguin. Brancusi's own Tahiti was his childhood and youth. He remembered peasant Romania very well. Its big-boned craft shapes--lintels, shallow wooden arches, the massive oak screw threads of rustic presses for oil and wine--are preserved in his carvings, where they mingle with disguised quotations from African sculpture. The folk-legend of Maiastra, a miraculous bird with shining golden feathers that guided a prince to his imprisoned lover, helped to inspire his prolific series of bird sculptures. His Endless Columns, those stacks of notched hourglass units that could be piled up to tree-height or to heaven (late in his life, Brancusi had fantasies of building one more than 1,000 ft. high), derived from grave markers in village cemeteries.

But this folk source doesn't explain Brancusi's spiritual aims in making them: he seems to have thought of the endless column as a link between man and God. Nor does the source account for the columns' strictly modernist power. Brancusi's decision to make a modular sculpture out of identical rhomboids, without a fixed end, opens on a world of sculptural possibility that hadn't existed before and was later to be colonized by American Minimalism. The list of sculptors whose work carries traces of Brancusi's dna is almost as long as those columns: Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, William Tucker, Claes Oldenburg, Christopher Willmarth and so on to Scott Burton, who made sculpture as furniture and thought Brancusi's bases were as self-sufficient as his carvings. It seems strange, though, that Minimalists should have picked up on Brancusi's processes, such as the stacking of units, without paying the least attention to his spiritual ambitions. Whatever else Minimalism was about, it wasn't the aliveness and metamorphic intensity of Brancusi.

On occasions, Brancusi was a brilliant manipulator of peasant "artlessness"--a fiction but a powerful one. For example, The Kiss, 1916, is an archetype of erotic modern sculpture. The two figures, minimally distinguished within the single block by the slight softness of the woman's breast and belly and the length of her hair, are united in substance: one flesh, or at least one stone. Their joined profiles make an ogival arch, with one split eye. The hair frames this like water running down a roof. It is an incredibly compressed image, just this side of absurdity.