Constantin Brancusi’s golden Danaïde

The Greek myth of the Danaïdes tells the story of the fifty daughters of King Danaos whom the king’s brother Aegyptos demanded as wives for his sons. By order of the king, the Danaïdes —with the exception of one—kill their husbands on their wedding night. As punishment, they are banished to Hades and condemned to filling jars from which the water quickly leaks out. In the fourth book of Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the Danaïdes among the “shadows of darkness,” and how they “constantly fetch water once again, which they will lose” (IV, 463 Latin).

Around 1900, this theme was taken up several times within the Symbolist movement, for instance in Camille Mauclair’s stories Les Danaïdes (1903). In the visual arts, Auguste Rodin is particularly noteworthy; Constantin Brancusi worked for him briefly in 1907 but left his studio after a few months because — as his legendary comment goes — “nothing grows under big trees” (quoted in Brancusi, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995, p. 39).

Rodin initially executed the theme of the Danaïde as a small bronze figure, presumably with the intention of incorporating it into Les portes d’enfer. However, the figure was not used there; instead, it was realised in marble a few years later (La Danaïde, circa 1889). The rear view shows the figure slumped beside a large jug from which water flows, its stream merging with the waves of her hair. The pedestal is not a neutral form, but an element essential to the figure’s formal design and expressive quality. The sculpture presents a sequence of views that demand an active approach. As one walks around the Danaïde, she seems to want to rise again and again from the mass of the pedestal in the tension of her back, only to sink back into it once more.

The non-finito is a figurative representation of the cyclical nature of the action implied in the narrative. Rodin remains committed to a literary understanding in his conception of the work. On the one hand, he translates the Danaïde’s exhaustion into a motif: the image of a reclining woman with a leaking water jug as an attribute. On the other hand, he transposes this flowing out onto the level of the viewer into a temporal sequence of rising up and sinking back that unfolds around the sculpture. Finally, he translates it to a material level: by representing the figure’s boundedness to the stone not solely in the fluid transition between spilled water and falling hair, but fundamentally through the use of the non-finito.

Brancusi’s early academic works culminated in 1907 with pieces such as Le Supplice and La Prière, in which the artist increasingly reduced the corporeality of the figure and simplified it to its most basic forms. In the same year, Brancusi also began working in stone. Initially still clearly influenced by Rodin’s non-finito and fragmentation, these works reveal an ever-increasing reduction of individual details and a simplification of the formal language. In this search for formal conciseness, the influence of artists such as Medardo Rosso, André Derain, and Elie Nadelman may have played a role, as did the elegance of Art Nouveau, which aimed at “essence.”

Brancusi’s exploration of the Danaïde theme began with the Danaïde (1907–1909) at the Muzeul Național de Artă al României in Bucharest. While deliberate asymmetries and the irregular curve of the forehead emphasize the individuality of this head, its tilt and the eyes without a gaze lend it a contemplative expression. The porous, sedimentary quality of the sandstone contributes significantly to its appeal, in which the memory of the Danaïde element of water takes on a material quality.

In the years that followed, Brancusi continued to explore this theme. A key inspiration was his encounter with the young Hungarian painter Margit Pogany, whom he met in Paris in 1910 and whose appearance—with her large eyes and dark, close-fitting hair gathered in a knot at the back of her head—made a lasting impression on him (Pogany’s recollection in S. Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture, New York, 1968, pp. 190–192). The artistic result of this encounter was the marble bust Mlle. Pogany I (1912–1913) and a marble Danaïde (1913, revised 1922), which essentially represents a version of Mlle. Pogany reduced from shoulder line, arms, and eyes. A plaster cast made from this marble Danaïde served as the starting point for the bronze versions of the sculpture which Brancusi began to create in 1913.

There is some uncertainty regarding the chronological sequence of the gilded and partially patinated versions of the Danaïde, and the version held by the Kunst Museum Winterthur. This latter Danaïde is likely the smallest of the six versions known today. It is the only one with an overall black patina, and it rises from an elaborate base. The base’s curved lines connect top and bottom like spiral ramps, and are accentuated by vertical breaks and positive and negative forms that oscillate between geometric and organic qualities. The interplay between this Danaïde and its base belongs to the very beginning of Brancusi’s interest in the connection between base and sculpture. Due to the difference in their materials and the contrast between light and dark, the head’s form and the base are set in opposition, and yet are finely attuned to each other in their linear curvatures.

This interplay of curves is not confined to a single viewpoint. Rather, Brancusi presents here, for the first time in his oeuvre, a sculpture that can be rotated on its pedestal. The relationship between Danaïde and the pedestal, through the resonance of their distinct yet similar formal language, implies a fundamental capacity for dialogue that can only be fully realised through a virtually unlimited number of rotations. While in the Bucharest version of the theme, realised in stone, the figure’s bondage is expressed through traditional means such as the tilt of the head and eyes without a gaze, in the Winterthur version, Brancusi explores the possibility of extending the cycle of captivity beyond the figure to the relationship between pedestal and sculpture. He translates it into a flowing interplay of lines that secures the unity of the constellation.

Brancusi probably began gilding bronze as early as Prométhée (1911) and originally also gilded the bronzes of Maïastra (1911-1912). He applied gilt to the cast of the Danaïde in the Newhouse Collection, and to the one at the Musée National de l’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The exact chronology of the use of this surface treatment through gilding remains difficult to determine, not least because Brancusi himself likely made subsequent changes, removing the original gilding and replacing it with a high polish.

After she saw a highly polished version, Agnes Meyer, the first owner of Danaïde in the Newhouse Collection, asked Brancusi to change the surface quality of her piece so that it would appear less naturalistic than with a black patina, but fortunately this change did not occur (see P. Hulten, N. Dumitreso, and A. Istrati, Brancusi, Paris 1986, p. 104). Ultimately, in his Danaïdes, Brancusi dispensed with any narrative dimension and achieved through the high-gloss polish of the bronze a degree of abstraction that is due to both its form and the treatment of the material.

Thematically, the Danaïde communicates with other sculptures that Brancusi created at around the same time. It belongs to a group of small-scale works in which the artist, as it were, ventured into new artistic territory under the auspices of Greek mythology, such as with Prométhée, the Naïade (1912), and the figure of Le Narcisse dated 1909-1910. Like Narcissus and Prometheus, the Danaïdes are also “banished to a place” in the mythological narrative.

In a certain sense, for Brancusi, the Danaïde is the sister of Le Narcisse, both in form and in spirit. In fact, this expression of self-reference appears strikingly often in his work—particularly in early works such as Le Repos (1906), Le Sommeil (1908), Tête d’enfant endormi (1908), La muse endormie (1910), or Femme se regardant dans un miroir (circa 1909). There are two perspectives that can help in understanding this group of works. On the one hand, Brancusi’s interest in self-absorption may have been motivated by psychological or biographical factors. On the other hand, he participated in the shift away from the male figure and from a dynamic, active formal language—a move that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in response to the crisis of the male hero—in favor of the calmer, more enclosed forms of the female figure, the animal, the child, and the introverted in general. He explored these themes associated with inaction or with actions that remain self-contained and circular, such as gazing at oneself in the mirror and the endless, fruitless drawing of water.

A work such as the Danaïde, in which the figure’s withdrawal into itself is combined with a distinct geometrization of form, is also an expression of contemporary efforts to reestablish the figurative within the geometric. In addition to Brancusi’s sculptures, such as the Danaïde, Maïastra, Le Baiser (1907-1909), and La Timidité (1917), this can also be observed in works by Derain, Nadelman, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. They demonstrate that during this period, the conviction that art must be grounded in the universal laws of geometry was a widespread credo. “One might say,” wrote Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, “that geometry is to the visual arts what grammar is to writers” (“La Peinture Nouvelle” in Les Soirées de Paris, I, no. 3, Paris, 1912, p. 90).

The orientation of artistic form toward the geometric—toward mathematical figures and structures—seemed to guarantee objectivity and modern classicism, safeguarding the status of art in a time of dramatic historical upheaval. In Brancusi’s work, however, this geometric rigor is balanced by asymmetries, irregularities, and staged tensions. Thus, his Danaïde is individualized by the asymmetrical placement of her ear and curl; the surface of her hair knot is partially left rough, and her frontal view is defined by the counterpoint of her tilted head and the curve of her nose.

In the presentation of the Danaïde, one encounters very different combinations of pedestal and sculpture. The specific kind of consonance between figure and pedestal chosen for the black-patinated Danaïde from Winterthur is not found elsewhere in the artist’s work. Photographs taken by Brancusi from the early 1920s show the work in his studio on a tall pedestal structure that functions as a surrogate for the figure, as the body of the head it supports, while other of his photographs—such as the one reproduced in Ezra Pound’s essay in The Little Review in the fall of 1921—focus entirely on the figure and give the pedestal virtually no say.

PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH TEJA BACH

Friedrich Teja Bach is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Art History, University of Vienna. He is the leading expert on Constantin Brancusi and the author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist, Constantin Brancusi: Metamorphosen Plasticher Form, published in 1987. He has also written widely on twentieth-century painting and sculpture, as well as on Albrecht Dürer and ancient Mediterranean civilizations, including the publications: Struktur und Erscheinung. Untersuchungen zu Dürers graphischer Kunst (1996) and Shaping the Beginning. Modern Artists and the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean (2006).