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Brancusi's Torsos: Pure Platonic Forms?

Brancusi agreed with his older contemporary Rodin that the sculptor should ask himself, "What can sculpture do without?" Or, as the architect Mies van der Rohe later put it: "Less is more."

But in striving to return to the classical spirit of the Greeks, Brancusi simply bypassed Rodin's Michelangelesque studies in the archaized "expressive" torso and went straight for the pure Platonic "essence," the purest geometrical form expressive of his "hard" materials: wood, stone, bronze or brass. Clay did not enter the picture at all. This was totally unlike Rodin, who, like other sculptors of the time, rarely if ever carved in stone, leaving that to his assistants, as well as the casting and finishing of his bronzes, and focused instead on modeling his clay, and leaving to later, or to others, how bronze or stone might best express what he'd already said in clay. Brancusi did not mess with clay, not even for his bronzes, and amazed visitors to his Paris studio by how he worked directly on hard and rigid materials, cutting, shaping and polishing his wood, stone, and bronze.

Between 1909 and the 1920's Brancusi created a series of male torsos, starting with one he supposedly found in the crotch of a tree. I don't know if that one still exists. This one, from 1917, may also have had its pure Platonic form or male essence abstracted or "freed" from a tree crotch. However, I suspect Brancusi, who was trained in his native Romania as a woodworker and cabinet-maker, may have carved its legs or "limbs" as separate pieces and only later joined them together.

If, in your mind's eye, you turn this torso upside down, you will see a form somewhat resembling the crotch of a tree trunk or branch, yet a form so perfectly symmetrical and simplified, it rarely if ever is found in nature, whether in a tree or in the trunk or torso of a human body: three intersecting cylinders.

The otherwise starkly simple cylinder of the "trunk" is "truncated" - partly for variety but also so we can see the top, the tree's core and concentric rings. That form is an ellipse. But what we see it as, even when looking at it straight on, or even from below, is something seldom or never found in nature: a perfect circle. Not even a perfect ellipse.

But how pure is this form of three intersecting cylinders, or our perception of it? Do we also recognize it as a male torso just by looking at it? Or do we need the title too?

SIMPLICITY AND IMPENETRABILITY

Before looking at other versions of this male torso in bronze or brass, notice how Brancusi refines, simplifies and abstracts the basic form for his Torso of a Girl.

Here, instead of reducing a torso's several parts to a single geometric form x 3, Brancusi carved his marble down, not to a sphere, a perfectly round marble, but into an ellipse or oval, an ovoid like an egg. Like a stone or pebble from an ocean beach or mountain stream, it has a highly polished but subtly modulated surface where soft hills and hollows gently, almost imperceptibly, flow together, Behind, the buttocks are more prominent, But from the front, absent a chest and breasts, it's more a pelvis than a torso.

The Hirshhorn Museum, which may own it and calls it "Torso of a Young Girl," dscribes it as a "droplet-like form, which may be seen as an interpretation of the body as vessel." A vase or vessel it may be, but a vessel hermetically sealed and impenetrable and thus, paradoxically, both empty and full. A slight incision, barely hinting at the missing pubis and vulva, indicates the upper thighs but also shows them tightly closed. A state of Artemisian purity, the eternal virginity of a "virgo intacto"?

A similar technique of "respecting" the mystery and integrity of the stone's "interior" was used in the famous "Kiss," where the figures of two lovers tightly embraced and kissing are simply outlined on the surface of the block.

The British sculptor Henry Moore much admired Brancusi's hands-on feeling for natural forms and materials; yet Moore himself went in the opposite direction, opening large holes and tunnels to let in light and air, and re-incorporating within the body, inside the torso, so to speak, polymorphous heads, arms and legs, thereby preserving Brancusi's smooth, unbroken surfaces and fluid continuity of form.

THE PEDESTAL PROBLEM. AND A CASE OF PEDESTAL ENVY?

Unlike antique torsos, which are fragments of broken figures, there is little or no sense in Brancusi's torsos of anything missing, lost, torn off, broken, fractured or destroyed, not from a tree, nor from a body. Not a whiff of death and decay. Even in their simplicity, their abstraction, they are complete.

Yet Brancusi often felt impelled to introduce more variety into our experience of them by creating for them bases or pedestals in contrasting shapes and materials. Here, for example, is how Male Torso appears in the Hirshhorn Museum's 1924 bronze version.

The Hirshhorn proudly calls this big and complex pedestal an "integral component of the composition." But is it? Is it instead a needless distraction?

In 1985, no doubt with an eye to rivalling the Hirshhorn's 1924 bronze version on Brancusi's own peculiar wooden pedestal, the Cleveland Museum decided to "respect the artist's intention" and create for its 1917 brass version (acquired in 1937) a similar pedestal, though in a darker oak, and with its massive square front somewhat muted by a routed string course.

Brancusi died in 1957, so we have no way of knowing whether in 1917 he already intended to create such complex pedestals to heighten our awareness of a sculpture's form, texture and material. But suppose he did. Can't one still ask whether these towering high-rise pedestals, these Pythagorean totem-poles with all their contrasting shapes, colors and materials, don't overwhelm and thus actually detract from the simplicity and power of the piece itself? Especially from this torso. Time to revisit the New Criticism's old attack on the "intentional fallacy"? And time to ask again, "What can sculpture do without?"

JUST HOW "PURE" OR "PLATONIC" IS BRANCUSI'S TORSO?

The Hirshhorn's version of Male Torso is dated a decade later than Cleveland's (1927 instead of 1917), and they describe it as made of "bronze" rather than brass. So, pedestals aside, even the two sculptures by themselves may not be identical. But there is one thing the Hirshhorn says about their torso that really astonished me:

"The truncated form of "Torso of a Young Man" - the first version of which he carved from a tree branch - suggests both a partial figure and male genitalia."

I confess I did not understand this at first. Looking at the Cleveland's photo of their Torso, I wondered if the orange glow and reflection in the "crotch" area wasn't being mistaken as testicles. But then it struck me that it was the entire sculpture, the torso in toto, that was being referred to. It was as if a veil suddenly dropped from my eyes, and for the first time I saw it, not just as a "torso," but as an erect phallus and testicles - saw it as what scholars of Greek vases, when finding satyrs in states of perpetual excitement, describe as "ithyphallic."

Mind you, it is not as if these forms that for so many years I saw in museums as both Platonic and "platonic," and far removed from the art that Plato condemned as "feeding and watering the passions," had suddenly become erotic, let alone pornographic. They are too abstract for that. Nor will I wonder too much whether Brancusi himself "intended," even "unconsciously," such a meaning. But I do expect I will continue to "feel" this erotic ambiguity about Brancusi's torsos in future. Nor will it be a false perception or feeling, a "fallacy" - not even a "pathetic" one.

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