{"id":2097244,"date":"2026-08-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2097244"},"modified":"2026-08-16T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T06:00:00","slug":"why-brancusis-sleek-streamlined-sculptures-still-seduce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2097244","title":{"rendered":"Why Brancusi\u2019s Sleek, Streamlined Sculptures Still Seduce"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-14-at-11.08.26-AM.png?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cThe legendary actress visits Christie\u2019s galleries at Rockefeller Center and finds herself captivated by the gilded sculpture.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThus trumpets the tagline for Nicole Kidman\u2019s assignation with Constantin Brancusi\u2019s bronze and gold leaf Dana\u00efde<\/em> (1913), circulated online this past spring in advance of the work\u2019s auction. \u00a0The \u201ccinematic short film\u201d produced by Christie\u2019s indeed reveals the Hollywood star finding herself\u2026 duly captivated.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe rushes an unnamed caller off the phone to stalk the sculpture in her stilettos from behind a circular curtain. To the tune of David Bowie\u2019s \u201cGolden Years,\u201d Kidman gazes fixedly into Dana\u00efde<\/em>\u2019s burnished, nearly vacant visage. The camera cuts intermittently to a speculative montage of her inner experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLike some ancient oracle, the sculpture\u2019s mere presence unleashes a series of visionary insights into its presumed (read: decidedly fantastical) origins: from all manner of Greek statuary to eastern Buddhas, from the latter-day pre-Raphaelite painting The Dana\u00efdes<\/em> (1904) by John William Waterhouse to (utterly anachronistically) Alberto Giacometti\u2019s 1951 sculpture The Chariot <\/em>(Does Christie\u2019s not employ a single art historian among its marketing ranks?).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tStare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. Or so Kidman\u2019s filmed epiphany would suggest. She ends up dancing around the sculpture with tousled hair like some latter-day, midtown Maenad, her face\u2014and ostensibly her soul\u2014convulsed by the sculpture\u2019s extrasensory revelations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dana\u00efde<\/em> left the block for a record $107.6 million, breaking the record for the auctioned sale of a sculpture. Whether Kidman\u2019s performance inched the price upward remains unclear. It nevertheless undeniably played into a moment of renewed attention to the artist.<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cBrancusi\u201d at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. <\/span>Photo David von Becker. \u00a9Succession Brancusi\/VG Bild-Kunst<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

BEFORE HIS DEATH<\/strong> in Paris at the age of 81, the Romanian-born Brancusi (1876\u20131957) bequeathed his estate to the French government on one condition: that his 15th arrondissement studio be reconstructed and preserved in perpetuity. Ongoing renovations of the Centre Pompidou, which has long since hosted the \u201cAtelier Brancusi\u201d in its abutting plaza, have set the workspace and its wide-ranging contents on the road.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThey landed this summer at Berlin\u2019s Neue Nationalgalerie, the first major exhibition of Brancusi\u2019s work in Germany for a half century. MoMA will mount its own version of the show in October. More than 150 sculptures\u2014along with works on paper, photographs, and extensive archival material\u2014provide the occasion for an expansive survey of one of the twentieth century\u2019s most influential artists. The host institutions have been given free curatorial rein.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cBrancusi\u201d at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.<\/span>Photo David von Becker. \u00a9Succession Brancusi\/VG Bild-Kunst<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDesigned by Mies van der Rohe, Berlin\u2019s Neue Nationalgalerie offers up the ideal venue for Brancusi\u2019s crisp distillations of form, at least in theory. Interrupted by just four load-bearing columns in its main gallery space, the open plan practically begs for vertical interventions by Brancusi\u2014one of the twentieth-century artists most in tune with van der Rohe\u2019s consummately modernist, \u201cLess is More\u201d sobriety.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn practice, puzzling choices by curators Klaus Biesenbach and Maike Steinkamp rendered the experiment fraught in places. Conservation questions surely informed certain placements (glass vitrines, elevated platforms). Yet the setting of so many of the sculptures against the wall impeded the kind of looking the works demand. Bird in Space <\/em>(1923) was made to look decidedly agoraphobic. One had to crane one\u2019s neck (almost impossibly) to get a glimpse of the maquette which Brancusi made for the lintel of the Kiss <\/em>gate (1935\u201337)\u2014part of his war memorial in T\u00e2rgu Jiu, Romania.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cBrancusi\u201d at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.<\/span>Photo David von Becker. \u00a9Succession Brancusi\/VG Bild-Kunst<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe exhibition did lend welcome attention to the full gamut of Brancusi\u2019s media and formats.\u00a0 Present in photographic form, his 1918 Endless Column<\/em> (part of the same T\u00e2rgu Jiu complex) forms just one of several arresting architectural designs. These also offer oblique insight into the relation of his sculptures to their carved bases, miniature structures in their own right, after all, which often rival their objects for attention.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tYet some of the show\u2019s rather obtuse groupings (\u201cPortraits,\u201d \u201cAnimals,\u201d \u201cBird in Space\u201d) precluded more nuanced considerations, which might have included materials, questions of primitivism, gender, folk culture vs. high modernism, or any number of less literal taxonomies. One section bore the title \u201cThe Ambiguity of Form.\u201d Perhaps no modernist artist proved less<\/em> equivocal regarding form than Brancusi (save perhaps Mondrian). His sculptures evince a lapidary certainty even in their weird, seductive lyricisms.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe elemental spareness of eggs and bones forms the metaphorical (and literal) touchstones of Brancusi\u2019s series of resting heads (Sleep<\/em>, Head of a Sleeping Child, The Newborn<\/em>, etc.) and stylized \u201cportraits\u201d (Nancy Cunard<\/em>, Eileen Lane, Princess X<\/em>). The phallic arc of the latter sculpture\u2014which caused a rumpus upon its debut at the 1920 Salon des Ind\u00e9pendants\u2014exemplifies Brancusi\u2019s conciliation of incongruous elements: lithe female corporeality and swollen male member; the mythical Leda and the Zeus-cum-swan who ravishes her; a young bird and the egg which birthed it.<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cBrancusi\u201d at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. <\/span>Photo David von Becker. \u00a9Succession Brancusi\/VG Bild-Kunst<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

CHRISTIE\u2019S PR VIGNETTE<\/strong> is not the first rendezvous between Brancusi\u2019s legacy and something of the beau monde<\/em>, as it were. A short film shot by Man Ray around 1930 on view herereveals Lee Miller running her hand over the smooth neck of Princess X<\/em>. Rather than Miller\u2019s budding career as a photographer, it is her fame as a model which seems the point here. The rhyme between her graceful form and the sculpture\u2019s anatomy underscores the clip\u2019s unmistakably erotic frisson. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBrancusi\u2019s body of work has likewise informed the design of Balenciaga dresses, Rick Owens boots, and jewelry by the Tokyo-based Ambush firm\u2014or, at least, it has informed their respective publicity campaigns. Among the objects that the Bulgari designer Mary Katrantzou\u00a0wishes she had made, the T Magazine<\/em> reported recently, figures Brancusi\u2019s Sleeping Muse<\/em> (1910) for its managing to be \u201cdevoid of any intricacy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIntricacy need not present itself as such, of course. In that paradox lies the beguiling complexity of Brancusi\u2019s work, which he often carved frommarble, wood, or limestone without recourse to the molding process (what sculptors call taille directe<\/em>). Even his cast bronze sculptures quite literally reflect the obsessive acts of polishing or the application of patina to which he submitted them. The modest volumes of Sleeping Muse<\/em>, or Dana\u00efde<\/em>, or Bird in Space <\/em>belie an intricate and iterative labor, which in turn erased its own traces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAttesting to his labor is an ovoid pavilion at the exhibition\u2019s center recreating Brancusi\u2019s studio, chock-a-block with his myriad tools and flanked by walls on both sides bearing letters, photographs, and archival items. From postcard exchanges with Fernand L\u00e9ger and Blaise Cendrars to documents of his artistic formation in Romania, the material puts intellectual, professional, and personal flesh back on the bareboned laconicism of his sculptures.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe fundamentally subtractive ethos of Brancusi\u2019s vision gave rise to a phenomenon that one journalist deemed\u2014with a seemingly unironic oxymoron\u2014a \u201cminimalism glut\u201d taking over contemporary American culture. Detailed by Kyle Chayka in his book The Longing for Less <\/em>(2020), that sensibility informs everything from the penchant for sleek, streamlined appliances to \u201cdecluttered\u201d lifestyle practices (at least, it must be said, among those with the means to dispense with luxury trappings or material excess to begin with). \u00a0<\/p>\n

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View of the 2026 exhibition \u201cBrancusi\u201d at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. <\/span>Photo David von Becker. \u00a9Succession Brancusi\/VG Bild-Kunst<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBrancusi\u2019s sensibility echoes elsewhere than high-end design or social trends, to be sure. The German curator Nicolaus Schafhausen explored the \u201cThe Brancusi Effect\u201d on the work of several artists and architects in 2014. His exhibition and book notably featured the German architect J\u00fcrgen Mayer H. and industrial designer Konstantin Grcic; the sculptor and video artist Shahrayr Nashat; and a global group of conceptual artists including Sofia Hult\u00e9n, Andr\u00e9 Cadere, and Sa\u00e2dane Afif. The range in itself attests to the varied ramifications of Brancusi\u2019s corpus.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThough it now sits behind glass at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it was Brancusi\u2019s marble Sculpture for the Blind (c. 1920) that shifted sculpture\u2019s invitation to the viewer from the rational, metaphysical plane of sight to the embodied experience of touch. While not as frenziedly as Naum Gabo\u2019s Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1919\u201320), the buffed Leda (1926) was once mounted atop a spinning metal disc\u2014footage of which appears in Berlin, along with a new rotating display.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne wall text claims that Brancusi aimed to depict his animals in motion. Yet while Leda\u2019s table may spin, her form remains singularly still. Seal <\/em>reveals only the slightest of obliques, while the wooden Turtle <\/em>(1940)\u2014like The Cock <\/em>(1924), Maiastra <\/em>(1910), and other creatures\u2014retain a hieraticism just shy of symmetry. The stateliness of Brancusi\u2019s sculptures is never reducible to some platonic idea of nature, however. Even in the fixedness of their forms\u2014their sententious certitude\u2014a single work may conflate the erotic and the machinic, the vernacular and the archetypal, the abstract and the practical.<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst shipped stateside in 1926 for a retrospective organized by the photographer Edward Steichen, Bird in Space<\/em> was initially charged with an import tax upon \u201cmanufactured metal objects.\u201d Only a subsequent court case and deposition by the artist famously restored the work\u2019s aesthetic pedigree on US soil, undoing its putative tax status as a \u201ctool.\u201d From Steichen (a keen photographer of the sculptor\u2019s work) to Duchamp (a close confidant) to the collector John Quinn, Brancusi\u2019s American reception inflects his oeuvre with a particular set of cultural, professional, and interpretive contingencies. What MoMA will make of these a hundred years later remains to be seen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Screenshot-2026-05-14-at-11.08.26-AM.png?w=1024″] \u201cThe legendary actress visits Christie\u2019s galleries at Rockefeller Center and finds herself captivated by the gilded sculpture.\u201d\u00a0 Thus trumpets the tagline for Nicole Kidman\u2019s assignation with Constantin Brancusi\u2019s bronze and gold leaf Dana\u00efde (1913), circulated online this past spring in advance of the work\u2019s auction. \u00a0The \u201ccinematic short film\u201d produced by Christie\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2097244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2097244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2097244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2097244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2097244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2097244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2097244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}