Constantin Brancusi was one of the most celebrated sculptors of the modern period.
The decline in reputation that often takes place after an artist’s death did not happen to him. Since the sculptor’s passing in 1957, less than a month after his 81st birthday, the estimation of his achievements only has risen.
In fact, Brancusi is one of the few artists of the 20th Century whose stature has grown with every discovery about him.
Arguably the most important of these discoveries were the 1,250 photographs Brancusi bequeathed to the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Reproductions of a few of the pictures had appeared as early as 1921, in the first article written about Brancusi’s sculpture. But it was not until 1977 and an exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Center that the depth of Brancusi’s activity became known to photographic specialists.
Two catalogs presenting selections from the archive followed in short order, and a severely edited version of the first American museum exhibition of the pictures appeared in 1980 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
By now, of course, the books are out of print and the exhibition long has faded from memory. So a new show of 75 Brancusi photographs at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery is both welcome and enlightening.
Much of the exhibition’s interest comes from the fact that 70 years after Brancusi began taking the pictures in earnest, there still is no critical consensus on them.
Man Ray, the artist-photographer who helped Brancusi buy a camera and advised him on its use, said his photographs were “amateurish.”
Marielle Tabart and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, curators of the Brancusi photographic archive, found it was “as integral to the comprehension of his work as Delacroix’s journal or Van Gogh’s letters were to their painting.”
John Coplans, organizer of the first American exhibition of the photographs, saw the pictures’ virtue in a “Cubist syntax (that makes) the sculptural objects . . . appear to be almost irrelevant.”
Sidra Stich, coordinator for the present exhibition, proposed that photography was for Brancusi “a primary means of relating to work in progress; a means of being able to study form under varying conditions of light and shadow; a means of seeing diversities in surface texture and relationships between the sculpture and its pedestal; and a means of controlling the asymmetry and spatial dynamics of simple shapes.”
Sidney Geist, the world’s foremost authority on Brancusi, wrote that the sculptor photographed only as a hobby.
Such differences have persisted because the pictures are not quite what one would have expected from the sculptor or, for that matter, from any other modern artist who made photographs of works of art.
Paul Strand and Walker Evans both photographed sculpture, and their crisp, cool views became pretty much the standard. But Brancusi clearly was not interested in a detached observation of aesthetic objects. He was up to something else.
With a few notable exceptions-portraits of other artists, such as the composer Erik Satie-Brancusi’s photographs are of his studio, his sculptures, his drawings and paintings, and himself.
The world at large did not creep into the pictures, and when Brancusi did photograph a landscape, it was only as a setting for his art.
Occasionally, he brought some foliage into the studio and it found its way into a photograph. But this was so rare that it appears as a dramatic intrusion. Everything else in the pictures-fireplace, bed, armchair, even work clothes-Brancusi created himself.
Many of the photographs are of individual pieces of sculpture, taken in slightly different lighting or from different points of view. The exhibition includes a number of these series, indicating how intensely Brancusi approached each subject in an attempt to convey their “essence” or specific character.
His pictures also present several sculptures crowded together, and though they may not appear so, they are as rigorously planned as the others. Here are, in effect, Brancusi’s family portraits, assembling members of the unruly brood to testify, at least in part, to the fecundity of the creator.
When Man Ray first visited Brancusi’s studio, he wrote, “I was overwhelmed by its whiteness and lightness.” Yet few of the sculptor’s photographs give that sensation. Most of them are gray and dark, smokily atmospheric.
The grouped sculptures often are in the midst of so much shadowplay that a viewer has difficulty sorting them out, determining where one begins and another ends. And the textures of Brancusi’s materials-metal, wood, stone-seem closer together than they really are, as if suggesting alchemical transmutation.
This is the image of the artist’s studio as sorcerer’s lair, as Romantic a conception as any from past centuries. Brancusi clearly was in thrall to the image but conveyed it only through his photographs, where sculptures participated in a drama they could not supply on their own.
There Brancusi functioned as a stage-and-lighting director, creating richly Romantic illusions about his life and art. In later years, such illusions helped gain for him a tremendous respect. He became almost a mythic figure, working out of the darkness toward a new, singularly modern sort of purity.
The means Brancusi used to build the myth were more old-fashioned, relying on well-worn symbolism and soft-focus camera techniques. So while his sculpture was ahead of his time, his photographs were behind. Brancusi was, after all, a man of the 19th Century.
At least, that is what we conclude if we are generous. But the atmosphere of Brancusi’s photographs also lends itself to another interpretation: that he was simply technically inept. And, indeed, this was Man Ray’s opinion when in the early 1920s he saw some of the pictures and found them “foggy, over- or under-exposed, streaked and stained.”
The description fits many of the vintage prints in the exhibition, which at times are staggeringly bad. How Brancusi, the perfectionist, accepted them is difficult to comprehend. Stich writes in her catalog essay that he did not care about print quality, and that is all too apparent. But poor technique gets in the way of his larger vision, allowing only hints of what he is after while keeping him from achieving it.
On occasion, one of the photographs might show a clear enough intention to carry us along until we can fantasize the finished result. Which is what most of the writers on Brancusi’s photographs have done. But few of the pictures are a credit to photographic art. They merely indicate the directions in which Brancusi wanted to go, and because we already know the myth he meant the photographs to serve, we don’t really mind going the rest of the distance by ourselves.
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Organized by Didier Imbert Fine Art in Paris, “Constantin Brancusi: The Photographs” continues at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, 1967 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, through April 18. Thereafter, the show will travel to California, Nebraska, Arizona and the District of Columbia.
