Constantin Brancusi : The Essence of Things Book

It's hard to imagine a more perfect depiction of love than "The Kiss," Constantin Brancusi's blocky stone sculpture of a nose-to-nose, belly-to-belly couple bound by encircling arms. Brancusi's powerful elemental shapes, carved from stone, wood, and marble, remain touchstones of modern art. But compared to contemporaries like Picasso and Modigliani, the Romania-born artist, who died in 1957, still remains something of an enigma. A slender, attractively designed book, Constantin Brancusi: The essence of things examines the artist's folkloric cultural and artistic heritage, his years in Paris and his revolutionary sculptural language. Along the way, the essayists attempt to refine the standard view of Brancusi as the poster boy for "truth to materials"-?the self-reliant peasant who struck a blow for modernism around 1907 by cutting directly into the stone block and responding to its unique qualities. Unfortunately, many of the scholarly adjustments to the legend come across as nitpicking footnotes that don't illuminate the bigger picture. (So what if his father was a small landowner in a poor Romanian village, not a real peasant? Why must we therefore view his self-identification with humble folk as a phony public image?) Yet the book contains key insights into Brancusi's stunning reductions of human and animal form, some from the artist himself. About his large marble "Fish" from 1926-?a smooth oval shape with a single facet?-he wrote, "When you see a fish . . . you think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through water. . . . Well, I've tried to express just that." While a reproduction of "Fish" appears in a small photo alongside the text, quite a few of the works discussed by the essayists are not illustrated at all. Even when Brancusi is supposedly boiled down to his "essence," as in this book, it seems a shame not to grant him a better showing. The 37 full-sized color plates correspond with the contents of an exhibition organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (where it is on view through September 19, 2004). ?Cathy Curtis