Volume 35, Number 1 · February 4, 1988
White Magic
By John Golding
Brancusi
by Radu Varia
Rizzoli, 319 pp., $75.00
Brancusi
by Pontus Hulten, by Natalia Dumitresco, by Alexandre Istrati
Paris: Flammarion, 335 pp., fr495
In many respects Brancusi is the art historian's dream. He and Picasso, in very different ways, are the two artists who did most to change the face of sculpture in the first half of this century—white magic, black magic, as a critic once observed. Many see him as the greatest sculptor of our time. Yet although he lived to be eighty-one he produced relatively little: some two hundred and twenty works all told, if we exclude the original works in plaster that were subsequently transformed into marble or wood or cast in bronze. Most of the early, more conventional, pieces have been lost. There was only one sharp break in his work, which occurred in 1907, the year of the Demoiselles d'Avignon, which marks the most important single turning point in twentieth-century art. After that his work evolved with beautiful symmetry and inevitability.
Review, 6205 words
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