Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [100]
Georges Rouault’s relationship with his dealer, the famed avant-garde champion Ambroise Vollard, was not exactly tension free. Rouault had too many overly ambitious (namely, unfinished) projects in progress at once. Vollard, whom Cézanne called a “slave driver,” was always nagging him for finished work to sell.
Once Rouault nearly burned alive. Dressed as Santa Claus to amuse his children, the cotton padding in his costume caught fire from candles on the Christmas tree. His hands were seriously burned, a clear set-back to his work. Vollard, ever the taskmaster, was unsympathetic. “You’ve been through fire!” he said. “Your painting will be all the more beautiful.” But after Vollard’s death, to show how little he cared for money, Rouault burned several hundred unfinished canvases in a factory furnace.
Rouault, “The Old King,” 1916-37, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. This figure of an aging Biblical king shows Rouault’s trademark blocks of deep color bordered by massive block lines like stained glass.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SCULPTURE: A NEW LOOK
Sculpture soon caught up with the current of antirealism that swept twentieth-century painting.
BRANCUSI: THE EGG AND I. The greatest Modernist sculptor was Rumanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), who shaved away detail almost to the vanishing point. “Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds — all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape,” British sculptor Henry Moore said. “It has been Brancusi’s mission to get rid of this undergrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.”
Brancusi saw reality in terms of a few basic, universal shapes: the egg, the smooth pebble, and the blade of grass. Whatever the subject, from 1910 he simplified its form — in wood, marble, or metal — into these elemental shapes. “Simplicity is not an end in art,” Brancusi said. “but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself in drawing nearer to the reality in things.”
Brancusi showed his independent spirit early. He left home at age 11 to work as a shepherd and wood-carver. He then made his way from Bucharest to Paris on foot. When he arrived in France in 1904, he was offered a job as assistant to Rodin, the reigning king of sculpture. Brancusi refused, saying, “No other tree can grow in the shadow of an oak.”
Brancusi was first to abandon the accepted practice of letting professional stonecutters do the actual carving of a sculpture. In 1907 he began carving stone directly, saying his hands followed where the material led. Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whose studio was below Brancusi’s, recalled a constant tapping like a dripping faucet that kept him awake. It was Brancusi, continually chipping away until he reached an absolute bedrock image. “Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave,” Brancusi said.
Brancusi, “Bird in Space,” c.1927, MoMA, NY. This work represents not on actual bird but the concept of flight. “What is real is not the external form,” Brancusi insisted “but the essence of things.”Although Brancusi’s sculptures abandoned recognizable images entirely, he drew his themes from nature before reducing them to the most concentrated, elemental kernel.
BRASS TAX
When “Bird in Space” was brought to the U.S. for a Brancusi show, a customs inspector refused to exempt it from duty as a sculpture. He insisted it in no way resembled a bird and was, therefore, not a work of art but a hunk of metal to be taxed as raw material. Another official had less trouble with the sculptor’s work. When a Brancusi sculpture was denounced in Paris as obscene and a policeman come to haul it away, the gendarme offered this appraisal: “I see nothing indecent; this looks like a snail.”
MODIGLIANI: THE PRIVILEGE OF GENIUS
Italian artist Amedeo Madigliani (1884-1920) is known primarily for paintings of reclining nudes. All the figures have long, thin necks, sloping shoulders, tilted heads with small mouths, long noses, and blank slits for eyes. In addition to his originality in painting, Modigliani