Today in the NYR Online, Robert Chandler writes about Constantin Brâncuși, recently the subject of a lavish show at the Centre Pompidou—in Chandler’s words, one of the “three memorable exhibitions of sculpture in my lifetime.” Or, as Man Ray once described a visit to Brâncuși’s studio, “like entering another world.”
Below, alongside Chandler’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about the weight of sculpture.
Robert Chandler
The Sculptor of Flight
Constantin Brâncuși respected his subjects—from birds to borders—and got to the essence of their movement.
Walker Mimms
Curbstones on the Road to Modernism
Labeled “naïve” for his quickly-hewn limestone sculptures, the Nashville stonemason William Edmondson was anything but.
—April 12, 2023
Ingrid D. Rowland
He Made Stone Speak
“Because all creative people start out as young people, we have a tendency to ascribe creativity to youth itself, but mature masters like Michelangelo remind us that the urge to create has nothing to do with age or the lack of it, but rather with that inventive spirit both he and Vasari called ingegno—inborn wit, cleverness, genius. The spirit often manifests young, but like wine and wood, it depends on age to reveal its full complexity.”
—July 2, 2020
Jed Perl
In the Sculptor’s Studio
“Rodin, with his zigzagging enthusiasms, may have been the first sculptor to conceive of the monument in ways that unmade the monument. He set the stage for the twentieth-century sculptor’s conflicted allegiances to grandiosity and intimacy, as well as what many have come to see as modernism’s embrace of ambiguity.”
—January 14, 2016
John Golding
White Magic
“The totality of Brâncuși’s mature achievement seems marvelously self-contained, as does each individual work. The sculptures give themselves to us easily, seem on the surface of things to pose no problems, and make few demands. Almost more than any other works of art they appear to be simply and splendidly themselves.”
—February 4, 1988
Hilton Kramer
A Scribble in the Air
“The sculpture of this century boasts an amazingly wide repertory of forms and styles—wider, perhaps, than that of any other period in the history of art. Behind much of this profusion, which to the untutored eye looks so arbitrary and bewildering, stands the revolutionary change in sculptural syntax effected by the aesthetics of Cubism.”
—December 3, 1964
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