Project 2: Popup Books based on a 3D Creative

For our second project, we also transitioned from flat design to sculpture through paper engineering: popup books. But since we're such serious artists, our project needed to be based on a 3D creative from an approved list.

I chose Constantin Brancusi, one of the pioneers of the abstract movement. He worked mainly in marble, bronze, and wood, and I saw the 2004 Guggenheim exhibit of his work when I first moved to New York.

More than you ever needed to know about Constantin Brancusi

Posted by   Lisa Brunet  at Tuesday, February 17, 2015 12:52:49 PM

(Since I wrote this up over a week ago, might as well post it!)

Constantin Brancusi 1876-1957

Brancusi was born to Romanian peasants in 1876, and learned woodcarving growing up as a shepherd without a formal education. He left a rough home life at the age of eleven. After becoming a household servant in a large town, an industrialist who was impressed by his constant woodcarving entered him in art school. Brancusi had to learn to read and write on his own, and studied at Romanian art schools from age 18-25. At 29, he began study in Paris at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and showed a sculpture at the Salon d’Automne at 30. He spent much time in Paris and in Romania, often visiting India, Egypt, or the rest of Europe, and regularly showing in New York. He became a French citizen in 1952, and died at 81 in Paris.

Paris provided innovative company for an artist. Brancusi's group of friends included other well-known artists in Paris: Marcel Duchamp, Matisse, and Henri Rousseau. He also spent time with Dadaists in the early 1920’s. True to his woodcarving roots, Brancusi created prototypes in wood and final sculptures in marble, bronze, and oak. The Romanian sculptor pioneered abstraction with heavy primitivisttendencies and hints of futurism and expressionism. The sleek lines of his simplified forms also fit Art Deco sensibilities of the time. He considered himself a realist, sculpting the pure essence of an object or person. Art student Margit Pogany features in a series of Mademoiselle Pogany and Danaidesculptures, and he refines her form down to the essence of a muse in general for The Muse.

Brancusi’s early work 1906-1910 (The Kiss, Suffering, A Child, Wisdom) sometimes showed greater detail, sinuous lines, and rough textures like Auguste Rodin’s art, but he quickly abandoned texture and unnecessary detail for highly polished, sleek forms on rough-hewn wood and limestone bases. While Brancusi left Rodin’s studio after briefly assisting him as a young artist, saying that he could not grow “under a big tree”, Isamu Noguchi would later grow under Brancusi as an assistant in 1927, learning to carve wood and stone from the Romanian master. 

Brancusi didn’t explain his work, making it more mysterious, but some characters and influences (like The Sorceress, a 1916 wood sculpture) came from Romanian folk art. Brancusi worked differently in different mediums: when he worked in wood, he showed stronger Expressionist tendencies creating exaggerated emotional representations of specific deities or Romanian folk characters. In metal and stone, Brancusi created archetypal forms (first-forms, heroic models, the “heroes and legends”, “gods and monsters” version of a trope). They were simplified, architectural forms meant to embody the essence of beauty, or calm, sleeping figures, or the essence of flight and grace.

The abstract and primitivist art movements developed concurrently with Freudian and Jungian psychology. In 1921, Jung published “Psychological Types.” While he originally traveled to Africa in search of unspoiled “primitive” religion to influence his new psychotherapy and psychology, language barriers prevented Jung from feeling he learned anything from “primitive” culture that provided breakthroughs. It wasn’t until 1937, when Jung traveled to India, that he was finally able to converse easily with another culture, and Hinduism shaped his philosophies on symbolism and the unconscious. 

Brancusi was familiar with the writings of Buddhist teachers. In 1933, the maharaja of Indore, YeshwantRao Holkar, commissioned a private sanctuary. Brancusi created his oak sculpture King of Kings in 1938, originally titled Spirit of Buddha, to stand in this sanctuary.  Art movements at the time were also very interested in primitivism, the unconscious, and early archetypes. Gaugin’s style, heavily influenced by Tahitian art, inspired Brancusi and seems like it prompted him to study primitive art himself, but he did not talk or write about his art, so nothing’s certain.

Is it art? Abstraction met some roadblocks as some countries struggled to embrace the movement. After shipping a 1918 version of Bird in Space to New York for a gallery show, Brancusi was told that US customs had declared the piece “household goods and appliances” instead of art, arguing that it did not look like a bird. Art is exempt from customs fees, and Brancusi took legal action. Brancusi v. United States, a case over whether Brancusi’s 1918 Bird In Space fit the definition of art or not, rewrote the legal definition of art in the United States. The judge ruled in favor of declaring Brancusi’s abstracted essence of flight art, and the definition of fine art was expanded to include more than representational art, to keep up with the times and include new art movements.