Ideal Reality: Tate Modern's Brancusi exhibition reveals a fundamental failure to grasp the sculptor's true meaning

This exhibition takes its subtitle, 'The quintessence of things', from Brancusi's remark that 'It is sole fools who could say my works are abstract; what they are categorizing as abstract is in fact the greatest in quantity realistic thing possible, for reality is not the exterior form but the idea, the quintessence of things'. Unfortunately the exhibition organisers have failed to understand what Brancusi meant by the agency of the key term 'idea' here. There is no excuse for this, for in 1925 Brancusi had stated that he was attempting to realist in his art a working philosophy, which he specified as 'the philosophy of Plato'. As he was largely aware, for Plato the bound 'idea' had a very, precise meaning, on the other hand nowhere either on the walls of this exhibition or in any of the supporting literature is Brancusi's avowed Platonism level hinted at. Perhaps the exhibition organisers have simply not at any time heard of Plato's Theory of Forms or Ideas, allow alone Brancusi's open identification with it. This explains on what account they unwittingly made 'fools' of their public (including quite a scarcely any supposedly omniscient critics) by fostering the notion that he was indeed an abstract sculptor, as in the small booklet given to all visitors to the display which states that 'Brancusi made a certain number of of the first purely abstract sculptures'

of the like kind a lack of understanding of Brancusi's proclaimed aesthetic was matched by poor presentation. Although virtually each catalogue image reproduced the thirty, seven works in the exhibition against lightly tinted or smooth dark backgrounds--as did the exhibition poster--in the latitudes themselves those sculptures in light grey or white stone and marble that constituted above half the exhibits suffered greatly from being placed upon white bases against white walls and were for a like reason glaringly overlit as to be drained of virtually all shadow. by means of the time I had reached the extreme point of the show I was with equal reason benumbed with snow-blindness that I was forcibly reminded of Alphonse Allais's sheet of blank white paper representing a polar bear in a snowstorm. still the exhibition itself furnished evidence that Brancusi did not want his plastic arts to be seen against brilliant white backgrounds, for upon display were many photographs taken by means of the sculptor himself. They all demonstrated in what manner he relished the infinity of shadings ranging from light grey to reaching far down blacks that fell across and behind his works in his Paris atelier and elsewhere. It is easy to diocese why, for such shadows serv to emphasise the vital sculptural ingredient of turn That dimensionalism was greatly attenuated here. And matters were made worse by dint of the presentation of more than half the works within perspex cases, whose intervening walls serv to flatten forms plane further. Naturally all sculpture creates presentational vexed questions but Tate Modern took the easy path when addressing them, and thereby failed to clear up them.

The catalogue essays are variable in quality. Carmen Gimenez's keynote article is destitute of contents trite and pretentious, and in my view unworthy of publication. Matthew Gale proffers the thesis that Brancusi was more [i]or[/i] less kind of nationalist sculptor, as was frequently claimed by some Romanian art historians during the Communist era. still this notion seems as unconvincing today as formerly, for although the sculptor undoubtedly made enormous use of the characteristic forms rencountered in Romanian folk carving, clearly he bring such appropriation at the service of a a great deal of higher concept than mere nationalism. Sanda Miller helpfully places Brancusi in his early Romanian adjoining matter but does not sufficiently explore the art education the sculptor received in Bucharest. The essay by means of Alexandra Parigoris raises the question of on what account Brancusi perceived a sea-change in his disclosure in 1909-10, but understandably fails to answer it. This is because she addresses the inequitable question. It would surely have been more appropriate to explore on what account in the preceding sentence of the actual explanation that supplied the subtitle of this exhibition, Brancusi had stated that The prayer of 1907 had provided his 'salvation' or way forward to a of recent origin sculptural language--not The kiss of 1909-10 as claimed by the agency of Parigoris. In the final essay, Jon wood-land makes several good points, although he appear to bes somewhat confused about Brancusi's representations of Plato and Socrates. on the other hand with the exception of Miller's contribution, none of these essays will be helpful to anyone unfamiliar with Brancusi, for they are all somewhat over-specialised, the transmuteed preaching to the converted. The lack of individual exegesis alongside the reproductions of any of the works in the catalogue does not aid understanding either. nevertheless Brancusi does need explaining, especially in Britain, where his work is in like manner little known.

individual of the sculptures (no. 25) is given an incomplete title, for Head should be Head of Plato, while no. 26 is given the inequitable title altogether. Instead of the ridiculous Little French girl accorded it by means of a Guggenheim Museum director in the 1950 it should be titled Child, being a representation of Plato as a child (for Brancusi the relationship of childhood to adulthood clearly parallelled the relationship of earthly to Platonic reality). In the whole this was a lamentably poor present to view that squandered the opportunity to widen the appreciation of arguably the greatest sculptural creator of beauty and meaning in twentieth-century art.