29 January - 23 May 2004
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| Brancusi photographs
The totemic wooden works in this room give a sense of how
Brancusi peopled his imaginative world with powerful presences.
He seems to have engaged more energetically and spontaneously
with his wooden pieces than with stone, more readily allowing
them to change in the process of production. This may reflect his
sympathy for the (once) growing and previously functional material;
many of these pieces were carved from reclaimed house-timbers,
a history he made no attempt to disguise. The results are resolutely
vertical, naturally recalling both a tree and a human at once. They
are sometimes, as in Sorceress (1916-24), complex in structure and
difficult to decipher. At other times, especially in King of Kings
(c.1938) and Adam and Eve (1921), the viewer is confronted with a
presence at once benign and mysteriously like a religious idol.
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