FUNK AND CHIC

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Brancusi was after a healing wholeness. He didn't care about "truth to material," but he did strive to make the action of the hand and the movement of thought one. He believed that every aspect of sculpture--whether rough, like his urgently hewn oak and walnut carvings, or exquisitely nuanced, like his marble head or bird forms, polished to the point where light and substantial weight become mysteriously the same--needed to be manual before it could be whole.

He loathed the fragmentation of Picasso's work and had no taste for the open, pieced-together asymmetry of Constructivism. Form for him is always closed and unitary, though different forms could be added to one another to make a whole, as in the interplay between sculpture and base. And he especially loved form that spoke of life or awareness at their origins: primal, self-enclosed, a marble egg floating in its own space like a cell, an egglike head lying on its side, filled with what the poet Octavio Paz called "the dreams of undreaming stone."

Oneness had a moral value for Brancusi, as both the origin and the aim of consciousness. It is marvelously expressed in sculptures like Sleeping Muse [III], 1917-18: the ovoid head inflected only by the ghost of a mouth, the delicate V of a nose and the incisions of hair, one of which follows an existing flaw in the veined marble. Part of the magic of his work is its sensitivity to material. Substance and metaphor fuse.

So it is with his Fish, 1930: a 6-ft. blade of mottled, blue-gray marble, which floats above a circular "pond" of creamy limestone. It resembles a large weather vane, and, in fact, it is mounted on hidden ball bearings, so that it can turn. The form of the blade is very pure and yet somehow indeterminate; it has no trace of fins, gills or other fishy attributes. It is more like the shadow of a fish in perfectly clear water, a gray flicker cast on the riverbed below, whose pebbles are suggested by the white streaks and mottling within the stone itself. Thus one has the strange impression of both looking at an opaque, polished stone form and gazing into transparency. It isn't a trick; the effect rises, swims into view, from the physical nature of the marble, and yet it is extraordinarily poetic, even dramatic.

Brancusi's most original use of traditional material arose from his handling of polished bronze. No earlier sculpture had made such a feature of polish. Bronze was patinated--treated with chemicals to give it a warmly dark surface. This obscurity, folding deep shadows into what was already dark, was part of its accepted expressive power. It conveyed density, invited touch.

Brancusi gave bronze a new dimension by bringing it to a mirror shine, as in the Birds or the golden curves and lobes of Princess X, the sculpture whose supposedly phallic qualities caused such a foofaraw in Paris in 1920. (It would always infuriate Brancusi that Princess X was interpreted as a penis and testicles rather than a woman's head, neck and breasts, but of course the sculpture is richer for its double meaning.) Because his work was deeply influenced by classical Indian and Khmer sculpture, it may be that the Eastern practice of gilding the effigy of the Buddha--gold being a symbol of supreme reality--prompted his use of high polish. But there is no doubt about its results.