Art has always been a phenomenon that captivated the thoughts of such protagonists of philosophy as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Nietzsche and many others. Yet it is fascinating to turn the light upon Constantin Brâncuși, whose sculptures – vice versa to the philosophy of art – is an example of the art of philosophy.
Romanian-born Brâncuși moved to Paris in his late twenties to immerse himself into the world of art. Paris was an excellent choice in his case as at the time, it was the beehive of new emerging ideas and artists – the land of a promising future and interesting connections. The sculptor’s talent, skillfulness, and youthful exuberance was soon noticed and he was invited to Auguste Rodin’s workshop. However, this liaison did not last for a long time. After a month Brâncuși quit, claiming that “nothing grows in the shade of a tall tree.” These couple of weeks were a prelude to Brâncuși’s following creative period, when he interpreted the luminaries of sculpture’s most celebrated work – The Kiss. Brâncuși was caught by the flux of avant-garde. He was engulfed in the twentieth century’s most influential circle of people (Amedeo Modigliani, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Eric Satie, Ezra Pound, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Rousseau, Fernand Léger, etc.), who brought the Promethean light upon the sight of the existing art canons.
In this post-war time, the practice of art was dominated by ideas which sprang from phenomenology, existentialism, and Freudian theories. Brâncuși particularly was influenced by Plato’s philosophy. His work is a presentation of the idea of “the essence” transferred into a three-dimensional experience (“What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things,” said Constantin Brâncuși). The invention and arrangement of spaces, materials, shapes, colors, and the exclusion of whatever seemed to be inessential (simplification) was a common characteristic of art. However, it was not the aspiration of the artist but as Brâncuși explained: “You reach it against your will, by approaching the real meaning of things, which is not the carcass we see but the very core it hides.” The idea itself became the subject matter of art, or as T. J. Everets accurately remarked, "a work of art has no idea in it which is separable from the form".
All in all, signposted with Celtic, Romanian folk, and African motifs, passed through a sieve of ideas, the complete oeuvre of Brâncuși is a narrative of his life and past influences. Although his chief inspiration came from the medium he worked in, the sculptor's tremendous efforts and intellectual conceptualization ad hoc made it possible to maintain a priori characteristics and telluric energies of the materials - marble, stone, clay, wood, and bronze - that he used.
A person who generates or experiences a sculpture or other kind of artwork, is not a tabula rasa. George Simmel wrote, “the individual is nothing more than a receptacle in which previously existing elements mix in changing proportions.” Regarding the question of art, Marcel Duchamp cut the Gordian Knot with his philosophical statement in which he emphasized dual contribution: the one of the artist, who “beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing” and the other of the spectator who, in an external sense, actually creates the art. Brâncuși became some evidence to Duchamp’s idea; he presented the essence and left it in the hands of spectators: “when we find ourselves in art, we do not need explanations."
Bio: Wikipedia
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