Alexandra Parigoris

'Debating Brancusi in the 1940s and the Invention of Brancusi'

AFTER BRANCUSI
Proceedings of the International Conference organized in the frame of the project
The Saint of Montparnasse from Document to Myth.
A Century of Constantin Brancusi Scholarship.

Edited by Irina Cărăbaş and Olivia Niţiş

Bucharest, UNARTE, 2014 ISBN: 978-606-720-022-5

Debating Brancusi in 1940s Romania and the
invention of Brancusi1

by Alexandra Parigoris
It seems apt in a confer-
Alexandra Parigoris is Visiting Research Fellow at the School
ence celebrating the contri-
of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the Univer-
sity of Leeds. She is a member of the Conseil Scientifiquebution of Barbu Brezianu to
the field of Brancusi studies
of the Musée Rodin in Paris and a trustee of the Infinitului
Foundation in Bucharest. She received her PhD in 1997 and that one should propose
has lectured at Queens University in Canada,
a theme dealing with the
University of York in the UK, the Art Institute of Chicago and
the University of Leeds, where she was also a Henry Moore sculptor and his homeland.
Post-Doctoral Fellow. She has published extensively on To look into the sculptor’s
reception in the Roma-
Brancusi in journals, exhibition catalogues and in the Centre
Pompidou Series: Les Carnets de Brancusi. nian press of the 1930s
and 1940s is a tribute to
Brezianu who, remarkably, trawled through countless libraries to produce what is
still an outstanding historiography of writings about Brancusi in Romania.2
The latest donation of Brancusi (dation) archives at the Centre Pompidou
places older art historians in the unenviable position of having to reconsider how
they initially received the story of Brancusi and his art. Whilst this may at first ap-
pear as problematic, it is only so for those who attempted to ‘give real events the
form of a story’ in the first place. Here, I wish to make the distinction, in terms of 20
narrative theory, between authors who set out to tell a story and those interested
in exploring the trappings of how the story came to be told. The problem arises
when a form of writing which pursues dramatic effects and ‘gives real events
the form of a story’ claims the status of empirical neutrality. At best this form is
unaware of its artifice, at worst it is using ‘the story’ for other, self- interested
ends.3 What is clear is that ‘Brancusi’ in the twenty-first century emerges as an
artist whose work and persona were understood from a number of contradictory
perspectives – famously encapsulated in the heated debates opposing Sidney
Geist and Ionel Jianu.4 But perhaps it is now possible to look again at this narra-
tive and consider the question of how one story came to dominate another.
This paper will focus on the debate that arose around the figure of Brancusi in
Romania in the politically charged 1940s between Petru Comarnescu and Petre
Pandrea: the former’s “Valoarea Românească și Universală a Sculpturii lui C.
Brâncuși” appeared in the State-controlled Revista Fundațiilor Regale in June
1944 and the latter’s “Brancusi” chapter in his book, Portrete și Controverse of
1945. The terms used by both authors to make sense of their compatriot and his
success in international circles will be examined by focusing on the issue of per-
spective in historical narratives. The confounding example that Brancusi offered
to both will be assessed against the backdrop of his idiosyncratic self-fashioned
persona in Paris and the historical developments occurring in his homeland. The
paper will argue that the historiography of Brancusi in post 1950s literature can
be traced back to debates that were prevalent in Romania in the late 1930s and
1940s before the regime change. It will conclude by highlighting areas which
have not been sufficiently examined such as the context of his published self-
portraits.
 Though written in the forties, the two essays need to be read in the
context of the late 1930s when Brancusi travelled to Romania to complete the
installation of his ‘monuments’ at Târgu Jiu and attend the commemorative cer-
emonies.5 Both essays reflect the mind-sets of the authors who belonged to the
Romanian educated, urban middle class, the one still attached to right-wing na-
tionalist ideals of Romanianness, the other speaking with a more left-wing, class
conscious voice.6 Both, however, shared pre-conceptions about a class that was
still dominant in the country: that of the Romanian peasant.7 In this context, we
shall see the terms ‘peasant’, ‘shepherd’ and ‘mountain folk’ used interchangea-
bly, reflecting the generalised view of city dwellers who looked at their indigenous
population as their ‘other’, but also, according to Katherine Verdery, revealing an
ideology bent on ‘ruralising and indigenizing the national essence.’8
We shall see that the reception of Brancusi and his art will also be inex-
tricably entwined with the ideological discourse about the Romanian peasant that
was promoted by Dimitrie Gusti and his sociological studies, sponsored by the
regime. Gusti’s reports tempered the damning data collected by researchers on
the field with optimistic euphemisms. Thus we read in his 1937 pamphlet, on the
educational aims of Les Fondations Culturelles Royales de Roumanie, the follow-
ing claims: ‘The villager is less able than the city dweller to make himself heard.
In essence conservative, he is not immediately aware that he is not progressing.’9
The consequences of this mind-set about a class which was held to be inarticulate
and thus not able to speak for itself10 is all too familiar, but we shall argue that this
contributed to skewing the reception of the returning Brancusi to his homeland in
the late 1930s, and distorting the writing of his posthumous history.
21 In 1938, a number of journalists were able to meet and speak with Bran-
cusi in Bucharest at the Hotel Bulevard during his second and last trip back to Ro-
mania for the final consecration of the monumental ensemble in Târgu Jiu. It was
in the course of these meetings that Brancusi famously let off steam and declared
his dismay at seeing the 1925 Jalea monument to Spiru Haret. According to these
articles, Brancusi judged the statue of the former minister ‘wearing a frock coat
and lined up with other dignitaries in front of the university, an architectonic and
plastic horror.’11 It is worth noting that Brancusi had originally been the first choice
for this commission, but when he proposed a commemorative fountain, the offer
was withdrawn.12
Even though Brancusi’s grievances and recriminations regarding institu-
tional art patronage were far from unsophisticated, one suspects that journalists
confronted for the first time with Brancusi’s speech, a mix of French and unpol-
ished Romanian jargon according to Pandrea, were disconcerted in their expecta-
tions: Brancusi would not have corresponded to their idea of a Romanian artist liv-
ing in France, and returning to his homeland after a highly successful international
career. This is what we shall turn to first.
As accounts in the Romanian press indicate, Comarnescu and Pandrea
were not the only journalists to meet the sculptor in 1938.13 What holds our at-
tention is the amount of space devoted in all the articles to Brancusi the man, and
the lengthy discussions about his origins; this, in spite of, or because of the fact
reported at length in a number of articles, that the 62 year-old sculptor had had a
sound education as an artist and had achieved considerable fame abroad. Clearly
his modest origins – which all ascribed to the peasant class [țăran] or shepherd
[păstor] – fascinated and perplexed as much, if not more, than his actual works.
Few were as derogatory to Brancusi as the long anonymous article
that appeared in the Bucharest Timpul (19 October 1938) entitled “Constantin
Brîncuși (sic) un Țăran ca oricare altul” [Constantin Brancusi a peasant like any
other], which stated flatly that Brancusi was part and parcel of the literary and
artistic bazaar of any man of the world proud to be well informed’.14 This reflected
the cultural views of a class threatened by the cosmopolitan outlook of their own
westernised elites, the Romanian beau monde which had travelled. Most, such as
the poet, Radu Boureanu, in his article “Cu Constantin Brancusi, o clipă afară din
timp” [With Brancusi an instant outside time] in the Bucharest Romania (9 Novem-
ber 1938), were fascinated by the sculptor’s appearance, writing that his features
resembled ‘the visage of God as iconography had taught us to contemplate that
unseen face.’15 The musicologist, Emil Riegler-Dinu, could not resist elaborating on
his initial encounter using similar terms in an article titled “Povestește Brancuși”
[Brancusi stories] in the Bucharest daily, Ora 7 Seara (27 October 1938): ‘An
«entrez» led me to expect a man living in France. Instead inside, I was confronted
by a grandfather with badger-like eyes and a grey beard, an old monk or an old
Romanian shepherd.’16 Riegler-Dinu went on to compare Brancusi to Peer Gynt,
the ill-fated hero of Ibsen’s late nineteenth century satire,17 who returned home
remorseful but wiser after a long and eventful life of misadventures: ‘this old Gor-
jan Peer Gynt shepherd...young in spirit, with dreams of a huge pasăre măiastră
[magical bird] for the country’s metropolis, which will proclaim forcefully to the
heavens the joy of liberated matter.’18 Thus what should have been an occasion to
praise the triumphal return of a local artist – who had gained a worldwide reputa-
tion – was turned into an allegory of fall and redemption drawn from nineteenth-
century folklore, furthermore Norwegian folklore!
The theme of ‘return’ was a favourite topic in literature, inherited from 22
the Romantic period, which often cultivated sentiments of longing: the Romanian
Dor which is sometimes equated to the German Sehnsucht. But here Riegler-
Dinu makes use of the formulaic redemptive return to make allowances for the
sculptor’s art, whose style few could understand. Thus the abstraction inherent in
a work such as the Bird in Flight, which was known to Romanians from the 1928
US court case,19 is explained as ‘matter freed from its chains’ [descătușare de
materie].20
Pandrea also makes ‘return’ the kernel of his 1938 article, “Brâncuși sau
reîntoarcerea la solul natal” [Brancusi’s return to his native soil] in Ora 7 Seara.
However, he is critical of the way the theme was deployed as a mere literary gam-
bit in Romanian literature as it did not reflect, according to him, Brancusi’s situa-
tion. ‘Were we to seek proof in the domain of sociology, law or even philosophy?
It would be pointless and demonstrate nothing but the coincidence of a great spirit
at a given time, an interesting phenomenon in the latest psychology of Romanian
creativity.’21
But his views did not preclude him from resorting to primordial hyperbo-
le when discussing the sculptor or his works in Romania. The article focuses curi-
ously on the Gate in Târgu Jiu, which is described at length as though ‘this’ were
the monument commemorating Gorj resistance during WWI – not the Column of
the original commission. Expressive passages claim that the Gate’s shape reflects
the hardness of the Gorj mountains and the vigour of its people.22 The Gate’s
French and Roman lineage of triumphal arches is, according to Pandrea, given by
Brancusi an original stamp infused with Romanian spirit [suflet].23 ‘In Brancusi’s
poarta one reads the past, present and future of invincible and advancing moun-
tain people.’ And further, ‘just as a troiță [cross placed at crossroads in rural areas]
 is a symbol of devotion, the Gate is a calling card dating from the time of barbaric
invasions, a calling card of the civilisation of a people knowing that water flows but
stone remains.’24 The mixed metaphor of ‘calling card’ with its urban and worldly
(read Western) connotations sits awkwardly with the elemental rawness implied
by ‘barbaric invasions’, but the effect was probably fully intended. Nevertheless,
we also see Pandrea praising Brancusi in equal measures as a sculptor of genius
and ‘as the son of Oltenian mountain people’. On the other hand, the return is
a qualified ‘return’ as ‘an adopted son of Paris [who has] returned to his original
source to refresh his inspiration’. The article ends with a column [unei columne
fără sfârsit] hailed as ‘the work of a world famous son of a Gorjan shepherd’.
The authors may have been predisposed to judge Brancusi in this way,
due to the influence of earlier published accounts: such as Apriliana Medianu’s
1930 interview with Brancusi, which discusses his ambitions to have a large Bird
erected in Bucharest25, or Paul Morand’s famous introduction to the catalogue of
Brancusi’s 1926 exhibition in New York at the Brummer gallery. The latter was in
circulation in Romania since the late twenties.26 Journalists who knew this text
appear to have taken to heart Morand’s famous formula: ‘The extreme freedom
of Paris has allowed Brancusi to remain the least “Parisian” of artists, and what
is indeed rarer still, the least “Parisian” of Romanians’. By appearing to admire
the sculptor’s authenticity, Morand and Romanian critics were only confirming
their prejudices towards the sculptor’s origins. They were faced with the fact that
Brancusi had not only returned to create works that commemorated a significant
event in national history, but he had done so in a style that had little to do with Ro-
manian art of the period, and worse reflected to those who knew, western foreign
23 influences. Thus the critics’ initial encounter may have been mediated by accounts
which established a plausible and irrefutable context for a sculptor with whom
they were not very familiar: it was not merely uninformed that they approached
Brancusi, but rather through a variety of prejudicial lenses.
Comarnescu did not write anything in 1938, but his friend Ionel Jianu
did, in Jurnalul Doamnei (15 November 1938) with “O lecție de artă – o lecție de
viață” [A Lesson about art – a lesson about Life.] This article stands out in our
account because of the role its author will play in the subsequent historiography
of Brancusi, and because of the lasting bonds of friendship he maintained with
figures such as Comarnescu and Mircea Eliade.27 Furthermore Jianu’s is the
only article illustrated with a signed and dedicated photograph: a (self) portrait of
Brancusi working in his Parisian studio – a photograph whose significance we shall
address presently.28 This long article also gives more space to Brancusi’s words
than any other interview and confirms the Jianu’s claims, later in life, that he had
talked with the sculptor until late in the night.29 It is certainly telling how the same
accounts of the sculptor’s life recur from interview to interview, detailing the main
events of his training in Romania; but here Brancusi also includes the tale he had
published in the 1925 Paris-based This Quarter magazine, “Histoire de Brigand”.
Although Jianu reiterates Brancusi’s claims that he does not like talking about his
art ‘because his works stand on their own and do not need explanations’ (Brancu-
si’s quoted words), the article offers the most extensive coverage of the sculptor’s
views on art of all the 1938 articles in the Romanian press. Brancusi explains his
move away from an academic tradition, which he claims the American press had
misrepresented, and enunciates his thought: ‘For me art is not about overcoming
or appreciating reality but on the contrary about entering the true reality [realitate]
in the only way that matters.’ The article ends with ‘Fame [Gloria]? It’s a burden,’
– but, adds Jianu, a burden ‘carried with a resigned smile by this hardy [viguros]
Oltenian who has conquered the world with his art’.30 Thus we see that Jianu also
subscribed to the same class conscious prejudice as the other authors.
What is most remarkable from this survey is that the one work which
formed part of the original commission for Târgu Jiu was curiously the least dis-
cussed in the press. There is little to no mention of the Column in any of the 1938
articles, and Jianu’s is no exception. Pandrea’s article is symptomatic of virtually all
the reports in focusing on the Gate at the expense of the Column, which only gets
a mention at the end of the piece. Even photographs of the Column were rare.
The Târgu Jiu Gorjanul reproduces a small image titled ‘Coloana Recunoștinții’
with one of the Gate, titled Gate of Peace [Portalul Păcii] in the Târgu Jiu public
gardens. Of the Bucharest press articles, only Timpul reproduced the same Gor-
janul photograph of the Column with the wording: ‘In Târgu-Jiu was erected the
famous Endless Column [Coloana nesfârșită] which is considered Brancusi’s most
brilliant work.’ In most articles, even the Gate is illustrated with a photograph of its
plaster maquette taken by Brancusi.31 As this photograph had first appeared in the
1937 article by Claudia Millian and was in circulation, the authors may have known
of it.32 This is also the case for illustrations in Jianu, Riegler-Dinu (who includes
a photo of the 1914 Prayer) and Boureanu. The latter also illustrates a Bird in
Space – titled ‘Pasărea măiastra’, a Sleeping Muse and the Wisdom of the Earth
[Cumințenia Pâmântului], in an article that reports the Column’s designation as
‘without end’ [fără de sfârsit.] This array shows that Romanian critics in 1938 were
not well informed of the sculptor’s most recent works.
We can only speculate on the reasons why the most important compo-
nent of the commission – The Column – was overlooked in these accounts. This 24
might be because few had braved the long journey from Bucharest to Târgu Jiu
to see the monuments erected there. Was it that the Column’s rigorously pared
down cast iron structure, which required the skills of an engineer and a consider-
able labour force to erect, did not lend itself to narratives praising the qualities of
an artist reflecting indigenous art and sensibility? Or must we read between the
lines and view their silence as a reflection of the troubled times in Romania? Had
journalists kept away from ceremonies in Târgu Jiu which, by 1938, had become
increasingly political?33 Notwithstanding these speculations, what we do neverthe-
less witness in all these writings is the extraordinary unanimity in their appraisals
of the sculptor.
If the 1938 articles focused on finding ways to make sense of Bran-
cusi’s international persona and looked at works which could be best equated
to the perceived definitions of Romanianness, Comarnescu’s essay, “Valoarea
românească și universală a sculpturii lui C. Brâncuși”, which appeared in June
1944 in the state controlled Revista Fundațiilor Regale, took these views to
astonishing ends. As the title declares, the (perceived) Romanian elements of
Brancusi’s sculpture were now not only an undisputed fact but were part of the
very essence of Romania.
Comarnescu’s 32-page study is in part a survey of Brancusi’s works and
shows a remarkably up-to-date awareness of the critical literature on the sculp-
tor and the philosophy of art in general. The opening reference to the Socratic
dialogue in Valery’s Eupalinos ou l’Architecte, which discusses the difference
between a work of art and a work of nature, could not be more appropriate to
a consideration of Brancusi’s abstraction in a period when discussions of art
focused on the issue of significant form.34 But what is astonishing are the lengths
 the critic goes to give the sculptor’s oeuvre a gloss of Romanian autochthonism.
Thus the sculpture, the artist and the land (Romania) enter into a curious dance,
according to Comarnescu’s definition of the peasant world-view for whom ‘nature
does not awaken an aesthetic response but carries a deeper significance, of
indissoluble communion with the world’. This belief is seamlessly transposed to
the artist himself: ‘In Brancusi’s art resonates the instinctive echo of prehistoric
man’s first encounter with the cosmos – a pure communion of man and stone.’35
Brancusi’s anti academic stance, evoked in Jianu, is now recast as
‘anti carnal’ and compared to the Romanian peasant’s historic prudery when it
comes to matters of the flesh. According to Comarnescu this is due to Brancusi’s
Christian faith which views the body as the site of sin, or even a revulsion in the
face of idolatry’.36 In an earlier 1934 article, Comarnescu had compared Brancusi’s
divinely inspired creations to ‘day three and five of the book of Genesis’, in other
words the creation of plant and animal life, carefully omitting any reference to hu-
man representation. Now, in “Valoarea…”, the onus was placed on emphasizing
the Romanian and primitive character of Brancusi’s sculpture, ‘which belongs to
our ‘village’ phase (situated) between nature and civilisation’. Here we recognise
echoes of Gusti: ‘It is from its villages that Romania still draws its most valuable
qualities: […] a rich and textured language, which is rooted in a still living folklore
that provides the creative force for renewal; a faith in God and his Church, tradi-
tions to which the peasant holds dear above all else.’38
But more was at stake in “Valoarea…”: Comarnescu had to reaffirm
values which were now coming under attack by Petre Pandrea in an article the
previous year in Meridian. Pandrea claimed the sculptor was not only a peasant
25 but a proletarian, uprooted in Paris – [tragedia desrădăcinatului social].39 Thus
Comarnescu declared from the very beginning of his essay: ‘the case of the
sculptor Constantin Brancusi constitutes a typical example of uncomprehending
condemnation, showing how a large part of criticism, especially that which sets
the tone of esthetical appreciation, is not familiar with the specifically peasant phe-
nomenon. Nor how in a period of nationalist assertion [revendication], we judge
with irrelevant criteria, according to clichés drawn from a sprinkling of European
aesthetic education, ten years behind the times and applied superficially where it
should and should not be.’40
We must not underestimate the tenets of this debate. Pandrea pro-
posed a view of Brancusi and his originating province of Oltenia that was not
derived from any transcendental source but was grounded in the reality of its
conditions and a Marxist view of class struggle. Although much less histrionic,
Pandrea’s text ended up just as strained and inflated in its praise for the region
and its famous citizens, resorting to over-elaborate explanations of the unavoidable
social reality, concluding that Oltenian sensibility was ‘bi-polar’: ethnically close to
the archaic values of the peasantry but in social politics, progressive.41
In fact, to argue Brancusi’s case, Pandrea goes to some lengths, making
a distinction between desrădăcinare and des-țărare. Desrădăcinare (from ‘root’),
is a word that exists in the Romanian language, though spelt today with a ‘z’. It
means up rootedness. Des-țărare, on the other hand, is a word coined by Pandrea
using the word țară, here homeland, as root.42 Thus, according to Pandrea, ‘the
displaced [des-țărare] student is curious; an avid reader who manages to cope and
has an outlook of tender irony, whilst the uprooted [desrădăcinare] is nostalgic and
sentimental.’ And furthermore, ‘the former despises the latter’. Quite a damn-
ing distinction, but ‘Brancusi’s sculpture belongs to that of displaced [des-țărare],
which brings new social political elements into the Bourgeois world, and is framed
in European movements of primitivism which discovered ‘negro’ music and art’.43
After taking issue with Comarnescu, implying that his notions of the
Romanian peasant were drawn from literature, such as the social types created by
Romanian writers, like the figure of ‘Dan’ invented by Alexander Vlahuță, or Mihai
Eminescu’s dissolute bohemian.44 Pandrea claimed that Brancusi represented
rather the ‘fusion of the archaic Oltenian peasant and the modern revolutionary
artist’, living in Paris, where he had remained ‘spiritually, at a distance from the
bourgeois Franco-Romanian community’.45
The essay includes extensive ‘fragments of conversation’ with Brancusi
and relates the sad view the sculptor held of the artist’s place in society: ‘freed by
the French Revolution from a status of luxury servitude, only to become enslaved
by the world of commerce’. About ‘work’, Brancusi made the following claims: ‘I
have worked a lot but I hate work. Work is a blasphemy, only loved by slaves.’46
Pandrea, after listing the possible outlets for a peasant, ranging from:
1. ‘assimilation’ [asimilarea], moving into one of the dominant classes (haute
bourgeoisie and middle class) 2. ‘anchoring oneself to the proletariat’ [ancorarea
în proletariat], finding salvation and becoming a socio-political militant and 3. ‘anar-
chism’ [anarhismul], concludes: ‘Brancusi is neither degenerate [maladiv] nor evil
[malefic]’.47 According to Pandrea then, what we see in Brancusi is a superior form
of anarchism, a peasant who has remained faithful to traditional values in spite
of living in the continent’s most refined of artistic communities. The sculptor’s
ensuing psychological pain has been subsumed in his work.’48 So for Pandrea, in
the final analysis, nothing in Brancusi’s long reported conversation was able to
furnish him with a more nuanced view of the sculptor, and the sculptor was once 26
again measured using the ‘peasant yardstick’, albeit the Oltenian peasant’s unique
features of character and independent mind-set.
What is remarkable is that both these critics, well informed about Bran-
cusi’s career and circle in Paris, could not see the sculptor through any other lens
than that of his social class defined according to their ideology as either a peasant
embodying essential values rooted in the Romanian soil or as a potential agent of
political and social unrest.
The subsequent turn of events in the history of Romania would mar-
ginalise both authors: Comarnescu for his ‘unhealthy’ bourgeois affiliations (he
was never a member of the Iron Guard), and Pandrea for his anti-Stalinist views,
and associations with a Romanian faction of the communist party, seeking more
autonomy from Moscow.49
It is the consequences of this ongoing debate that interests us here.
Ionel Jianu ended up in Paris and was able to start a publishing house, Arted.
This fact is crucial to my argument. For it is through Arted’s publications that
Comarnescu and Jianu’s version of Brancusi’s Romanianness came to dominate
Brancusi’s narrative in Western Europe and North America.50 We must not under-
estimate the impact that Jianu’s 1963 monograph ‘Brancusi’, published in both
French and English, had on the sculptor’s reputation. Jianu’s account would come
to dominate because in spite of Geist’s reservations, no other book provided a
narrative of the sculptor’s life, with descriptions of ‘the Romania, Brancusi had left
as a young man’. The ‘story’ proved irresistible, and was reinforced with Mircea
Eliade’s contribution, ‘Brancusi et les mythologies’ (1967), which added the stamp
of academic authority, as Eliade was by this time professor in the Divinity School
at the University of Chicago.51 Eliade had never met Brancusi, as he admits in his
 journal,52 and had probably not seen the Column in Târgu Jiu before his departure
for Portugal in 1940. Brezianu’s 1976 catalogue, of carefully collated facts, was
some time off and when it did appear, was not widely circulated outside special-
ised academic libraries.53
Thus, William Tucker could write in The Language of Sculpture of 1974
that Jianu provided a ‘vivid and apparently quite accurate account of Brancusi’s
childhood and schooling in Romania.’54 In the same vein although arguing other
issues, in The Originality of the Avant- Garde of 1983, Rosalind Krauss cites what
she terms Brancusi’s dictum – ‘When we are no longer children, we are already
dead’ – to reinforce her argument about the myth of originality that pervaded
current critical discussions of avant-garde bronze sculpture. Brancusi’s aphorism
was chosen because it provided Krauss with a convenient metaphor for originating
narratives that she thought all could recognise and agree with. She would have
us believe that the above sentence reflects Brancusi’s desire to proclaim the ‘self
as origin’ because ‘it possesses a kind of originary naiveté.’55 This arguably both
misread the form that an aphorism takes and misunderstood Brancusi’s message.
In this instance, the sculptor might not be enunciating a ‘parable of absolute self-
creation’ but bemoaning the loss of the capacity to wonder, to be curious, to be
experimental and to try things out.56
But more importantly, by substituting a narrative of timeless universals,
such accounts actually remove Brancusi from any coherent historical representa-
tion by substituting a narrative of timeless universals. What is lost is any effort to
restore some sort of cultural specificity to the narrative of his interactions with his
homeland, particularly the context of his ‘return’ to work there in the late thirties.
27 This is the last point I would like to consider, by examining a series of images.
An official group photograph taken at the Romanian embassy in Paris in 1937
shows Brancusi seated, next to Dimitrie Gusti, amongst prominent Romanian
writers, artists and scholars gathered for the World Fair.57 This document prob-
lematizes simple accounts of the sculptor’s life. Is Brancusi merely playing along,
humouring the pomp and circumstance of officialdom? Then there is the film foot-
age, shot by Brancusi during this visit: it depicts the landscape seen from the train,
Oltenian locals in rural dress and, as part of the ceremonies, some of the youth
organisations performing gymnastic drills in starched uniforms.58 Lastly, a surviving
official photograph, taken in Târgu Jiu in 1938 at the dedication ceremony, depicts
the sculptor standing arms down, firmly behind his back, in front of a crowd of
onlookers giving the Carol II salute, modelled on the Fascist salute.59 Though the
filmed images suggest that the sculptor was as much an onlooker and recorder of
Romanian rural life as Gusti and his class, or as any foreign spectator, the image
of Brancusi, ‘arms held firmly behind his back’, indicates that his participation had
definite limits. These records, which give us a far more complex picture of the
sculptor, have to be added to his narrative because, if anything, they refute claims
of his ‘ingenuousness’ and ‘humility’. We shall see that Brancusi, behind and
in command of the camera, was not so much aware of or even impeded by his
origins as able to manipulate them to his advantage. His photographs are not only
part of his artistic legacy, they are also his testimony, one that needs to be read
and analysed as much as admired.60

That Brancusi took a deep interest in what was written about him is
evidenced by the press cutting services he employed throughout his career. In this
context, it is significant to note that he read and marked out several passages of
the Comarnescu article that the author had sent him in 1946.61
 Surviving photographs show just how early Brancusi was aware of
the camera and the possibilities of posing for a picture: whether it was ironically
bowler-hated, half-reclined amongst his fellow students at the Bucharest School
of Fine Art in 190162, or in a hiking dress posing in his Paris lodgings for an article
praising his work by Octavian Tăslăuanu in Luceafarul in 1907.63 But it is the nu-
merous self-portraits which circulated in the Parisian and American press from the
1920s onwards which support our argument. These were only discerned as ‘self-
portraits’ when the originals had been studied in the Brancusi archive, revealing the
camera shutter cord in full evidence – a feature airbrushed away in the published
images.64 Brancusi disseminated these images knowingly, often to illustrate articles
written by his friends in support of his work.65
One of these appeared in L’Intransigeant in 1929 accompanying an article by
Maurice Raynal and Tériade (signing Les Deux Aveugles – the two blind men) entitled
“Brancusi, Rafiné Paysan du Danube”, overflowing with rustic metaphors:

‘This ancient axe, with cutting virtues, masks here the happy, bearded
shepherd like face of the sculptor Brancusi. Like a woodcutter, confined to a
room far from his native forests, he explores wood to extract the rough and
essential shapes of this ‘Colonne infinie’ which he dreams of erecting one day
in sufficiently vast Public Square with a sufficiently high sky […]
Brancusi, who remains very attached to the strength of the soil, to patriarchal
and peasant customs, eating on a stone table carved by himself, sleeping in
a wooden crib that he has hollowed out in century old trees, Brancusi is none
the less the most refined and the most modern of men.’66
28
The tone of the entire passage is gently ironic and evidently playing to its
audience. But it is this ‘play’ that we witness being misunderstood in the writings
of his Romanian critics, who swallowed the act entirely. The self-portraits are not
only evidence of Brancusi’s intelligence, his early grasp of the mechanisms of press
and publicity, but also of his desire to be the master of his own reception. Thus we
witness the workings of an artist constructing his image and narrative. And like all
constructs, we need to be wary and recognise the artifice – the play.
A contemporary example by a living artist may help to elucidate the para-
dox of interpreting such images and such acts. Let us consider the self-portrait by
the British artist Gillian Wearing, who responded to the Guardian Weekend’s invita-
tion to personalities to send to the English magazine selfies – photographs taken of
themselves by themselves using their mobile phones. Wearing sent one with the
caption, ‘I took loads of selfies between 1988 and 2000, on a polaroid. I love their
immediacy. This is a new one taken on my phone. I’m wearing a mask of myself
smiling’.67 Of all the famous entrants featured in the issue, she was the only one to
gesture explicitly at the artifice of the medium. As an artist whose œuvre had ex-
plored the constructed nature of portraits and self-portraits, she was well placed to
return a knowing and playful picture. But her selfie went much further. Gillian Wear-
ing covering her face with ‘a mask of her own face smiling’ is subtly destabilising.
The mask confronts us with our expectations of a photographic portrait, which is
expected to provide a true likeness of the sitter – one that reflects the reality of the
sitter.
Wearing’s ‘mask of her face smiling’ underscored the deceptive nature
of this photographed image, since in declaring that it is a made up ‘reality’, it marks
the distance that always reigns between a created act, the purview of the artist, and
 the space of the spectator that is the domain of reception. As in ancient drama, the
‘mask of myself smiling’ is a prop that signals to the audience that they are viewing
an ‘act’. Wearing’s selfie not only highlights the artificial nature of any image but
also lays bare the automatism of the act of posing – when the photographer calls
out ‘say cheese’ and the concomitant act of viewing, which automatically expects
to see: ‘a face smiling’. In Brancusi’s case, the self-portraits appeared to represent
the expected image of a peasant.
What Jianu and other Romanians’ reaction showed was that Brancusi’s
self-portraits might have missed their mark. The knowing constructions of an im-
age such as the one in ‘Brancusi, raffiné paysan’, or the one given to Jianu with
a dedication, were taken at face value. Brancusi had offered a representation of
himself disguised as working at his art, and this was accepted as the reality of
his origins as a peasant, because they expected to see the image of the peasant,
which they mistakenly believed Brancusi still embodied.
This touches upon the paradox of the self-portrait or of any constructed
image. Are we so sure that our viewers will understand the message that is
conveyed, and see us as ‘we would have them see us’? This paradox is exposed
in Wearing’s case by the photograph of herself ‘wearing a mask of herself smiling’
which pre-empts the image’s reception by laying bare the automatic, un-thinking
reaction of a viewer, and ultimately his or her prejudices.
But how can we be so sure that Brancusi is ‘acting’, wearing a ‘mask of
himself as worker’ in the many self-portraits that he sent out for publication? To
determine this, we need to look at the context of the place in which these ‘acts’
came about and the community for which they were meaningful: Paris and Bran-
29 cusi’s circle in the 1920s.
Francis Picabia, a Parisian friend and fellow artist, described the games
they were engaged in mocking the slavish preconceptions of the public in a text
appropriately titled ‘Pithécomorphes’ (a term invented by merging the Pithecan-
thropus or ape-man with the Greek morphé – form) which appeared in the 1922
Dada periodical, Littérature:

‘The Muslim is excited by the nudity of the female face, the European by her
calves; the clever artist excites the public in the same fashion. He does not
want to have his works shown, but he does not hide himself. On the other
hand, he hides himself but exhibits his works. The best of the two is that
which has been least used. I dedicate this thought to my good friends Brancusi
and Marcel Duchamp. FAMILY FEELING HAS MADE MAN CARNIVOROUS.’68

By including Duchamp and Brancusi in his revelatory conspiracy, Picabia

was defining members of a select group of artists who remained always at one
remove from their public, throwing them the odd bone but never revealing their true
selves. That Brancusi had fashioned a mask of himself was well understood by his
inner circle, which were appraised of the codes of their shared knowledge and thus
understood how the act was being played out. This illustrates the challenges that
Brancusi’s reception posed to Romanian critics who, unaware of the antics of the
Parisian avant-garde, took the act at face value – reading as ‘content’ what was only
a disguise or ‘the method of representation’, to cite Hayden White again.
The 1926 Brummer exhibition catalogue furnishes further clues in the two
very telling poems included in the long version: Mina Loy’s Golden Bird and Jeanne
Robert Foster’s Constantin Brancusi.69 Loy’s poem is the most famous, but we
should not overlook Foster’s, a more prosaic poem, which describes in the stanza
headings in French (L’Ouvrier, L’Homme, L’Arbre, Le Portrait and Diner Avec Bran-
cusi) some of the layers of Brancusi’s persona and life in his Impasse Ronsin studio.
For our present argument, two stanzas are of particular interest: L’Ouvrier and Le
Portrait. L’Ouvrier situates the sculptor in the traditional romantic setting of creativity
– ‘an Olympian cave’ – and discusses the materials that Brancusi works with – old
wood, marble and bronze – without ever mentioning the term ‘peasant’, ‘shep-
herd’ or even ‘mountain man’. ‘Ouvrier’ is the term with which Brancusi dedicated
one of his self-portraits to Foster, signing in the third person: ‘mon ouvrier – à
Madame Jeanne Robert Foster’, referring jokingly to himself as his own worker or
assistant.70 The dedication, as in the stanza title, suggests that Foster was prob-
ably familiar with these connotations. Thus, in this case, the mask is of ‘himself
engaged in the act of creation; ‘Ouvrier’ then denotes an art intimately linking con-
ception and practice. The term ‘ouvrier’ also bears some relation to the wording
he uses in his letter to Milița Petrașcu accepting the Târgu Jiu commission in 1935
comparing himself to ‘an apprentice on the eve of becoming a master’ [un ucenic
în ajunul de a deveni calfă].71 This is the language of the itinerant craftsman at
the time of the Cathedral builders, a period enjoying a revival of interest in occult
circles.
The stanza, Le Portrait, offers an insight into how this circle still regarded
photography. I quote it in full from the American:

Le Portrait
Papier ivoire, blank, a satin glaze,
“À Madame, Votre ami 30
Constantin Brancusi.
I am sending you my portrait,
Papier ivoire, blank, a satin gaze;
I could not please you
With lies of the sun or of pencil.
All that I am to you is here for you;
You will see me as I would have you see me.
I shall not ask you how you will precipitate my likeness;
I trust you.”

The stanza describes the photographic process by which an image ap-
pears on paper. The term ‘precipitate’ refers to the photographic chemicals, but also
carries echoes of the lost science of alchemy which fascinated Foster and her circle,
and for whom photography seemed to be its modern equivalent.72 Though Foster’s
poetry is of a different order to Mina Loy’s, the language, in both, is the same –
albeit that Loy’s ‘aesthetic archetype’ carries more corporeal connotations. The
poems describe a narrative that could be applied to the photograph given to Jianu,
whose setting must be read more as ‘Olympian’, the work of Loy’s ‘peasant God’
rather than that of a ‘peasant’ tout court in some Romanian pastoral setting.73
Both Foster and Loy mixed in theosophical circles as did Duchamp, Picabia
and Brancusi’s American collectors, Katherine Dreier and the photographer Edward
Steichen.74 Just as in order to fully understand these poems we need to recover
the cultural sphere of their language and the codes with which they operate, so too
must we view the photographs and not relegate them to the status of documents
representing a viewed reality. Focusing on this question takes us beyond the scope
of this paper, but it is perhaps worth noting that it may have been the fascination
 with Brancusi’s Romanian roots that kept a very significant culture and its language
out of the Brancusi historian’s remit.75
Let us look again at the testimony of a Romanian commentator in the
Jianu circle, one who unwittingly may have narrowed the field of investigation of
Brancusi: Mircea Eliade. Reading through the evidence in his journals, it is possible
not only to trace the impressive depth and range of his readings as a young man
– encompassing theosophy and occultism – but more pertinently to witness his
gradual disenchantment and eventual dismissal of these beliefs as bogus ‘lucubra-
tions’.76 By moving away from these concerns and by constantly deriding their
advocates as naïve and fanciful, Eliade effectively cut himself off from a system of
beliefs which was almost foundational amongst all classes of Europe and America,
and particularly strong amongst those friends and patrons of Brancusi. But as most
psychologists agree, beliefs and faith have little to do with scientific accountability.77
Thus when Eliade turned his attention to the sculptor, his perspective was
firmly rooted in Romanian peasant folklore, writing in his diary in 1962, ‘what I would
like to know is how [Brancusi] managed to rediscover this megalithic concept [axus
mundi], which disappeared from the Balkans more than two thousand years ago
and survived only in religious folklore.’78 Later in his essay ‘Brancusi et les Mytholo-
gies’, he evoked ‘anamnesis’ to justify Brancusi’s inspiration and ascribed to archaic
periods the motifs and concerns which the sculptor shared with many in his Parisian
circle.79
Let us end with Roger Vitrac, the French writer and former Surrealist.
When writing the introduction to the catalogue Brancusi’s second exhibition at the
Brummer gallery in 1933, he used this occasion to shed light on the precarious
31 understanding the press and the general public had of Brancusi’s work in the wake
of the US court case. Describing the culture the sculptor belonged to in Paris, Vitrac
wrote: ‘Brancusi participates in the modern spirit, that the prewar period did not
bother to define; that the war left temporarily undefined, but that our postwar critics
have, alas, undertaken to kill by trying to give it a thousand different meanings. […]
What, today, is left of that spirit, personified in France by its true champion: the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire? A few inconsistent notions, difficult to unify, and a handful
of free, independent men, among whom Brancusi occupies a place in the foremost
rank.’80
In conclusion, we cannot underestimate the complexity of Brancusi’s
story that has been subject to manipulation by the artist himself and, as this essay
has attempted to show, been put to the service of a national Romanian narrative
throughout and beyond his lifetime. Exploring the reception of his work and person
in Romania has meant confronting the values of a class that desperately wanted to
see the reflexion of its ideology in the man and his work.
What these critics and subsequent historians failed to account for was the
authorial voice of Brancusi. His reported ‘silence’ was readily type cast as that of the
‘class, which could not speak for itself’, according to their prejudiced views. Thus
their construed opinions of Romanian peasants became the key to their percep-
tions of Brancusi’s art and image, ignoring the reality of a life lived in Paris and the
countless opportunities that this truly international location offered to artists. A close
examination of the contexts of his reception informs us a great deal about the sculp-
tor. For not only do we arrive at a more complex picture of this ‘ingenuous, simple
man’ but we are able to add a necessary corrective to a reading of his biography
in terms of a sequence of episodic narratives, which the publication of his archive
inadvertently spawned.
 The degree of transformation undergone by Brancusi in his progress from
his Craiova days to the centre stage of the Parisian avant-garde serves to make clear
the extent to which Brancusi’s sophisticated persona was an extension of and play
with elements of ‘his’ Romanian background. The construction of this pose was not
only a matter of artifice but an attempt at self-understanding as well. This, I believe,
is what has been insufficiently understood in the to and fro around Brancusi’s
sources and even less so in the relationship between artist, work and presentation.
Brancusi’s Romanianness was perhaps rooted in Paris after all.

ILLUSTRATIONS

copyright copyright

Brancusi, self-portrait, 1922 32

Private Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2014
Gillian Wearing selfie in Simon Hattenstone
”Shoot me now” Guardian Weekend,
3 August 2013. © the artist, courtesy
Maureen Paley, London

copyright

Official Reception presumed at the French Embassy in Paris 1937

© Archives of the University Museum, Bucharest
 Notes
1
I would like to thank Ioana Vlasiu and the organisers. I wish to thank also the chair of our
session, Doina Lemny, for her continued interest in my work, ever since we exchanged
our PhD dissertations, completed and defended at the same time in 1997. This paper is
drawn in part from the discussion of Brancusi’s self-portraits in my dissertation: Alexandra
Parigoris, Constantin Brancusi, A Peasant in Paris: A Study of the Persona and Work of
Constantin Brancusi from a Post-Symbolist Perspective, PhD University of London, 1997.

2
Barbu Brezianu, Brancusi in Romania, Bucharest, 1976 and reprinted, 1999.

3
I am using the terminology and critical thinking of Hayden White to discuss this issue.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation, Baltimore and London, 1997, p. 26 - 57.

4
The former claiming that Brancusi’s imposing intellectuality was indebted to his career in
Paris, and the latter that he never relinquished the thought process of the Romanian
peasant. See Sidney Geist, Brancusi, A Study of the Sculpture, New York, 1967 and Ionel Jianu
and Constantin Noica, Introduction à la sculpture de Brancusi, Paris, 1976.

5
For those unfamiliar with this commission, what is referred to today as the monumental
ensemble in Târgu Jiu began with the commission for a war memorial from a charitable
association, The League of Gorj Women headed by Arethie Tătărescu. Mrs Tătărescu, on
the recommendation of her friend, the sculptress Milița Petrașcu, approached the sculptor
in 1935. The Gate was only added to the commission in 1937 and the Table in 1938. See
Alexandra Parigoris, “Brancusi and his Return to Romania” and Sorana Georgescu-Gorjan,
“From Dream to Reality: Construction of the Endless Column” in World Monuments Fund,
Brancusi’s Endless Column Ensemble, Târgu Jiu, Romania, London, 2007.

33 6
Comarnescu’s essay, “Valoarea românească și universală a sculpturii lui C. Brâncuși”, Revista
Fundațiilor Regale, June, 1944 written and published just before the fall of Marshall Antonescu’s
dictatorship, reflects as we shall see right wing nationalist positions, whilst Pandrea’s is much
more left leaning as it appeared shortly after, during the interim of Groza government, nominally a
coalition government under King Michael, but already dominated by the Communist party. For a
general history of Romania, see Keith Hitchins, Rumania 1866-1947, Oxford, 1994.

7
Henry L. Roberts, Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State, New Haven and
London, 1951. This remains a very useful study for our topic because of the detail it gives
of the Tătărescu regime under Carol II and the war years under Marshall Antonescu.

8
Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in
Ceaușescu’s Romania, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1991, p. 48-50.

9
Dimitrie Gusti, Les Fondations Culturelles Royales de Roumanie, Bucarest, 1937, p. 17.

10
Katherine Verdery, op. cit, p. 57. Note in this context, her citation of Paul Păun, “Elitele
conducătoare”, Cuvântul liber 2 (43):4, 1935.

11
Petre Pandrea, “Brâncuș sau reîntoarcerea la solul natal”, Ora 7 Seara, 10 November, 1938.
p. 160 – 161. Comarnescu also cites this discussion but engages differently with its content.
See Petru Comarnescu, op. cit., p. 635

12
See Marielle Tabart and Doïna Lemny, L’Atelier Brancusi: La collection, Paris, 1995. A letter
from Morțun to Brancusi, in the Fonds Brancusi, confirms the incident, communicated by
Doina Lemny at the Unesco Table Ronde Brancusi colloquium, Paris, 2007. It emerged
after the publication of Doïna Lemny and Cristian-Robert Velescu, Brâncuși inedit,
însemnări și corespondență românească, București, 2004.

13
All the press cuttings cited (except those in Luceafărul and Gorjanul) were read in the
Brancusi archive at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, Paris: Fonds Brancusi,
 Argus de Presse, B54. Petru Comarnescu’s long essay is in Fonds Brancusi BGF, Coupures
de Presse 1923-1957. Pandrea’s chapter is quoted from a photocopy that Sidney Geist
gave me in 1985. All translations from Romanian and French are my own. When
photographs are cited, they will be given locations of publication, unless they feature as
illustrations in the text. If photographs were taken by Brancusi, they will be identified by
their inventory number at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, thus:
Legs Brancusi 1957 Ph.

14
Anonymous, “Constantin Brîncuși (sic) un țăran ca oricare altul”, Timpul, 19 Oct. 1938.
The article later repeats ‘un țăran ca oricare altul. Ăsta a fost și așa a rămas.’ [A Peasant
like any other, thus he was, thus he remains.]

15
Radu Boureanu, “Cu Constantin Brancusi, o clipă afară din timp”, Romania, 9 Nov. 1938.

16
Emil Riegler-Dinu, “Povestește Brancuși”, Seara, 27 Oct. 1938.

17
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was a typical late nineteenth century tale of fall and redemption with
the hero eventually returning a broken old man to his native Norway to find forgiveness. Its
popularity was also due to Edvard Grieg’s musical score written at the behest of Ibsen.

18
Emil Riegler-Dinu, op. cit. Riegler-Dinu also comments in the caption under the photo,
reproduced in the article, of Brancusi on a camel taken in Egypt: ‘Here is the Peer Gynt of
Gorj travelling by camel to the Pyramids.’

The author of the Timpul article also cites the US court case to reinforce the point that
19

Brancusi’s work was unintelligible.

20
Cristian-Robert Velescu argues convincingly that the reference to ‘descătusărea de
materie’ could be evidence of Brancusi’s involvement with the occult. But I would venture
to add that this might be taking the review to ‘read into’ Brancusi’s work iconography that 34
was only intelligible to a narrow group, at the expense of understanding the ironic tone of
the review in its context. See Cristian-Robert Velescu, Brancusi alchimist, Bucharest, 1996.

21
Petre Pandrea, op.cit.

22
Ibid.

23
Ibid.

24
Ibid.

25
Apriliana Medianu, “Maestrul Brâncuși”, Curentul, 6 Oct. 1930.

26
This catalogue was well-known in Romania. Brancusi gave an illustrated copy in 1935 to
Ștefan Georgescu-Gorjan, the engineer who would work on the Column, presently in the
collection of his daughter, Sorana Georgescu-Gorjan. Brancusi also gave a copy to Milița
Petrașcu, the sculptress who had met Brancusi in Paris during her studies in Bourdelle’s
atelier and who went on to introduce Brancusi and his work to the patron of the
monuments, Arethie Tătărescu. Sections of the Morand text also appeared in H. Blazian,
“Sculptorul Constantin Brâncuși”, Adevărul, 9 Oct. 1930.

27
The three founded a literary group, Criterion (1933-34), and much later would publish
together Témoignages sur Brancusi, Paris, 1967. It should be noted that Jianu was Jewish,
thus again a straightforward categorisation of Eliade’s views and the extreme right-wing
position of Criterion remains problematical.

28
This was a print of a self-portrait of ca. 1922, Legs Brancusi 1957, Ph712.

29
This is corroborated in the letter Comarnescu sent to Brancusi in 1946 with his Valoarea article.
See Doina Lemny and Cristian-Robert Velescu, op.cit. p.162-3.
 30
Ionel Jianu, “O lecție de artă – o lecție de viată”, Jurnalul Doamnei,15 November 1938.

31
This image is Legs Brancusi 1957Ph 225

32
Claudia Millian, “Sinteză și spirit românesc”, Gorjanul (Târgu Jiu), 8 Nov. 1937.
Although many of the metaphors used by Pandrea in his 1938 article seem to echo Millian,
who also reads the forms of the Gate as primeval and an expression of the Romanian soul
(summarised in her title), he stops short of the excessive religious references. For Millian,
paraphrasing the title of one of his early works, Brancusi is the sculptor of ‘earth’s wisdom’
and his stone door opens for us the road to the ‘heart’ of earth and to Paradise. The
photograph here is a print of the full face view of the maquette of the Gate of the Kiss,
Legs Brancusi 1957, Ph225. A three quarter view of the same maquette, Ph226, was also
in circulation in Romania.

33
This point is difficult to substantiate. Although George Tătărescu had had to step down as
Prime Minister in December 1937, the commission, that had originated from his wife
continued unhindered, probably because it was not funded by the government but by a
network of rich Romanian industrialists, who were Arethie’s close friends. See Alexandra
Parigoris, Brancusi and his Return…This does not make the idea of commissioning a
monument in Târgu Jiu any less part of a nationalist mind-set, but it does usefully
problematize the cultural landscape under Carol II.

Further on, Elie Faure is cited. Comarnescu had encountered these ideas not as History
34

of Art but as aesthetics whilst studying for his PhD at the University of Southern California,
completed in 1931 and titled, The Nature of Beauty and its Relations to Goodness.

35
Comarnescu, already in his PhD thesis, had expressed reservations about Durkheim’s
sociological views that asserted that society and the interactions that resulted were
responsible for the development of human values, writing: ‘aesthetic imagination, being
35 free, changes or develops its states more quickly than the fixed institutions of societal
environment.’ Comarnescu, The Nature…, p.174.

36
Petru Comarnescu, Valoarea …, p. 632

37
Petru Comarnescu “Un Desen”, Criterion, Dec. 1934.

38
Dimitrie Gusti, op. cit. p.16. My translation from the French.

39
Comarnescu cites this article in a footnote at the beginning of Valoarea …, p.628,
footnote 1.

40
Ibid., p. 627.

41
Petre Pandrea, op. cit. p.120.

42
I wish to thank Irina Cărăbaș for this information, which goes a long way into
understanding Pandrea’s sometimes cryptic thinking.

43
Ibid. p.125-6.

44
Ibid. p.143.

45
Ibid. p.147.

46
Ibid. p.173.

47
Ibid. p.144.

48
Ibid. p.148.

49
Pandrea would survive the purge and see his writings published again in the sixties just
 as Comarnescu was able to publish again, though he never held any secure university or
research position like Barbu Brezianu.

50
From the 1960s, Comarnescu had somewhat tempered his views. Gone are the cosmic
outburst and universal abstractions, and we find him writing, ‘We believe that Brancusi
peasant should be considered an outlook – a special way of approaching the values of life
and of art – a simple (more elementary) ability of living more closely connected with
elementary facts, of communion with nature.’ Further on, he states, ‘to say that Brancusi
remained all his life a peasant – is rather a metaphor than a fact’. Nevertheless, he would
still equate the firm discipline of the artisan to the spiritual purity of the peasant. See
Petru Comarnescu, “The Universal and National Elements in the Work of Constantin
Brancusi”, Rumanian Review, XXth Year, no.1, 1966. It should be noted that both Pandrea
and Comarnescu’s versions could be and were adapted to the requirements of national
ideology in Ceaușescu’s Romania analysed by Verdery. For the cultural context of Romania
under Communism, see Magda Cârneci, Art et Pouvoir en Roumanie 1945-1989, Paris,
2007 and its extended version in Romanian, Artele plastice în România 1945-1989, Cu o
addenda 1990-2010, Bucharest, 2013.

51
This appeared in Petru Comarnesco, Mircea Eliade and Ionel Jianou, op. cit.

52
See Mircea Eliade, Journal II: 1957-1969, Chicago and London, 1989, p. 167 (entry 10 July,
1962.)

53
Since then, major accounts have either dismissed this aspect of Brancusi’s story or taken
Brezianu’s pragmatic enquiry further without however examining how the narrative came
about. Of the main academic publications to date concerned with this question, see Anna
C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art, London and New Haven, 1993
and Sanda Miller, Constantin Brancusi: A Survey of his Work, Oxford, 1995. Edith Balas
first raised queries about Brancusi’s claims in her Brancusi and Rumanian Folk Traditions,
New York, 1987. I pursued this question in my thesis by looking at the publication and 36
dissemination of Brancusi’s Self Portraits, see Alexandra Parigoris, op.cit. Chapter 3: “A
Peasant in Paris“ and in my lecture, “Le Retour de Brancusi, étranger”, delivered in French
in 2007 on the occasion of a Unesco Table Ronde in Paris, chaired by Doina Lemny.

54
William Tucker, The Language of Sculpture, London, 1977, p.42 and note 2, p.161.

55
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge
and London, 1985, p.157.

56
Ibid. My emphasis.

57
This photograph is in the archive of the University Museum, Bucharest. The late Sanda
Tătărescu Negropontes confirmed the location, and I thank Ioana Vlasiu for the information
about the World Fair in Paris.

58
See Philippe-Alain Michaud, Brancusi Filme, 1923-1939, DVD, Paris, 2011.

59
The photograph, taken by an unknown photographer, survives in the Legs Brancusi, see
the exhibition catalogue Brancusi, Paris and Philadelphia, 1995, p.384.

60
This section of Brancusi’s output has curiously not been addressed in the otherwise
exemplary essays of Brancusi, Film, Photographie, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011.
Doina Lemny looked at the some of the aesthetic operations in the self-portraits in her
“L’autoportrait photographique ou l’art de sculpter son image” in Erwin Kessler (ed.), Text
Image: Perspectives on the History and Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Publications, Bucharest,
2008.

61
The text is heavily underlined in pencil with additional ink markings in the margins, and p. 628 in a
different hand and in ink in the margin, ‘Clive Bell’, and p. 655 next to the underlined passage,
‘Brancusi cancels the difference between natural beauty and artistic beauty …’ the word
‘Kalokegathon’.
 62
See Barbu Brezianu, Brancusi in Romania, 1999, p. 22

63
This image is a print taken from Legs Brancusi 1957 Ph810 and was one of three portraits
photographs that the sculptor had made of himself: one in his sacristan costume (Ph811),
one in his work clothes (Ph809) and the one published in the article. See Paris and
Philadelphia, Brancusi, 1995, op. cit., p. 374

64
Sidney Geist first published some of these unaltered images in Délicatesse de Brancusi, Paris,
1985.

65
See Marielle Tabart and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Brancusi photographe, Paris 1979 for a
meticulous source hunting of the publication locations of Brancusi’s photographs
p. 117-123.

66
Les Deux Aveugles, “Brancusi, Raffiné paysan du Danube”, L’intransigeant, 12 Dec.,
1929. My translation from the French. The photograph reproduced is Legs Brancusi 1957,
Ph 833.

67
In Simon Hattenstone, “Shoot me now”, Guardian Weekend 03.08.13, p.32-36.

68
Francis Picabia “Pithécomorphes”, Littérature, 2ème série, no.6, 1st Nov. 1922.
My translation from the French.

69
Both had appeared previously. Mina Loy’s in The Dial 73, Nov.1922 with a photograph of a bronze
Bird in Space by Brancusi. Jeanne Robert Forster’s poem was first published as ‘Constantin
Brancusi: Roumanian (sic) Sculptor’ in the volume of her collected poems, Rock-Flower,
New York, 1923, p.59-62. A signed copy was given to Brancusi in 1923 and survives in the Legs
Brancusi 1957. It should be noted that Loy’s poem was often reproduced in accounts on
Brancusi, amongst which V. G. Paleolog, C. Brancusi, Bucharest, 1947, p.40.
37 70
This inscribed photograph was in the collection of David Groband was illustrated in Didier
Imbert Fine Art, Brancusi: Photo Reflexion, Paris 1991, p.106. It is a print of Legs Brancusi
1957 Ph823 dated 1922.

71
The original Romanian text of this letter, long believed lost, was discovered by Sorana
Georgescu-Gorjan in the archives of the Romanian Academy, who went on to discuss
the numerous translated renditions of the text. See Sorana Georgescu-Gorjan, “Ala grăit-a
Brancuși (III)”, Brancusi (Târgu Jiu), new series, no. 2/2013, p. 8-9, which reproduces
the letter in facsimile. Up to this time, scholars had relied on Barbu Brezianu’s translation
in “Pages inédites de la correspondance de Brancusi”, Revue roumaine d’histoire de l’art,
no. 2, 1964.

72
According to Glyn Thompson, classical Alchemy and photography are analogues in that
both depend on Actinism for the transmutation which each represents – since both
depend on a supposed phenomenon which asserts that chemical changes can be induced
in substances through the action of rays of sunlight. See Glyn Thompson, “Marcel’s
Condescending Condensations” and “All that Remains of a Life Well Obliterated:
Duchamp’s Esoteric Aspiration”, online at Academia.edu, last retrieved 23 March 2013.

73
This was certainly how Margherita Andreotti, inspired by Loy’s poem, described a print
of the same photograph dedicated to Jianu (Legs Brancusi 1957, Ph712) in her “Brancusi’s
Golden Bird: A New Species of Modern Sculpture”, The Art Institute of Chicago Museum
Studies, vol.19, no.2, 1993. Legs Brancusi 1957, Ph 712

74
Foster, a close friend of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley shared their interest in
the Occult. See references in Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo, The Life of Aleister Crowley,
Berkeley, 2002 and Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley, The Biography, London, 2011. I wish
to thank Glyn Thompson for drawing my attention to this documentation.

75
Of course this situation was fast being readdressed in the Brancusi literature since the late
1980s in the work of Friedrich Teja Bach, Constantin Brancusi, Metamorphosen Plastischer
 Form, Cologne, 1987 and his Brancusi: Photo Reflexion, Paris, 1991. Velescu op. cit. looks
at the motifs in Brancusi’s œuvre but focuses less on the ideas that circulated in Brancusi’s
Dada and American circle in Paris.

76
See for example, Mircea Eliade, Autobiography, vol.I 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey
West, Chicago and London, 1981, p. 68, See also Journal II..., p.219 (entry 1 July), p.286
(entry 18 June) or Journal III, 1970-1978, Chicago, 1989, p.153 (entry 15 May.) In this
context, it is interesting to note that George Tătărescu’s sister, Mrs Maricica
Pociovalișteanu, evoked Annie Besant, whose lectures she had attended in Paris before
the First World War, to justify her beliefs that Brancusi was not a peasant because ‘all his
life, he strived to escape the earth’. Oral communication with the author in 1979.

77
The literature is vast, for a useful overview of how these beliefs came to be dismissed see
Antoine Faivre et Jacob Needleman (eds), Modern Esoteric Spirituality, New York, 1992.
See also Paradis Perdus, L’Europe Symboliste, Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal, 1995;
Adrian Hicken, Apollinaire, Cubism and Orphism, Aldershot, Hants / Burlington, Vt., 2002
and Glyn Thompson’s essays posted on Academia.edu. For a focus on French Avant-garde
practices, see Entrée des mediums Spiritisme et Art de Hugo à Breton, Gérard Audinet (ed.),
Paris, 2012. For the nineteenth century context of photography and the occult,
see The Perfect Medium. Photography and the Occult, Clément Chéroux and Andreas Fischer
(eds.) New Haven and London, 2004.

78
See Mircea Eliade, Journal II…, p. 167.

79
See Mircea Eliade, “Brancusi et les Mythologies”, op. cit. p.13.

80
Roger Vitrac, “Brancusi”, Brummer Gallery, New York, Nov. 1933.

38