.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
“I offer you pure joy,” Constantin Brancusi once stated. “Look at my sculptures until you manage to see them” (quoted in I. Jianou, Brancusi, Paris, 1963, p. 12). Dispensing with detail to instead embrace universal forms that resonate with a unique and timeless sense of purity, Brancusi conceived an entirely new mode of sculpture. Danaïde, with its radical formal simplicity, graceful refinement, and compelling presence, is one of the finest of the artist’s groundbreaking works, pieces which remain as entrancing and transportive today as when they were made over a century ago.
Executed circa 1913, Danaïde was inspired by a young Hungarian artist, Margit Pogany, whom Brancusi had met in Paris in 1910. The artist was deeply taken by her, absorbing her small face, wide almond-shaped eyes, and dark hair, which she wore in the same neat chignon as can be seen in the present work, before distilling her features into his own distinct sculptural idiom in both Danaïde, as well as the Mademoiselle Pogany series.
Portraiture was one of the most important themes of Brancusi’s revolutionary form of sculpture. Yet, his approach to this purportedly mimetic genre entirely broke with the past. He interpreted his muses’ salient features without recourse to traditional figurative language. Instead, he conveyed these figures through his own powerful purity of vision, transforming the female face into an abstracted assortment of harmonious forms. As a result, the head of Pogany appears here as a confluence of unending curves, all of which echo continuously around the sculpture, the gilded surface conjuring myriad reflections of light that heighten this graceful sense of movement. Using one of his most favored forms of this period, the ovoid, Brancusi pictured Pogany with an ever-so-slight downward look. Sweeping planar arcs denote her gaze and large eyes, while from behind, her neat bun forms a spiral, a serpentine lock of hair tucked just behind her ear. In this way, Brancusi has taken the nuanced physiognomic detail of Pogany and reduced it to its most elemental parts. “It is not the outward form which is real, it is the essence of things,” Brancusi once stated. “On this basis, it is impossible for anyone to express anything real by imitating surface appearances” (ibid., p. 35).
Not only does Danaïde occupy a central place within the development of Brancusi’s work, and modern sculpture as a whole, but its provenance tells the story of the artist’s critical reception in the early twentieth century. Brancusi chose the present work to be included in his first one-man show, held in New York in 1914 at Alfred Stieglitz’s The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (291). There, Danaïde was acquired by Eugene and Agnes Meyer, who would become some of the artist’s most important patrons, as well as lifelong friends. It remained in their collection, together with a number of other works by Brancusi, passing by descent through their family until 2002, when it was acquired by the late owner.
This compelling and rare masterwork is one of six iterations of this subject, and is the only gilded example left in private hands. Today, four of the other casts, each highly individualized in terms of surface effects, are housed in museums across the world, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, London; and Kunst Museum, Winterthur.
Brancusi had arrived in Paris from his native Romania in 1904 at the age of twenty-eight, according to legend, having walked almost the entire way. He quickly obtained entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His early work from Paris was heavily influenced by the already-legendary Auguste Rodin, and in March 1907 he secured a position as a pointing technician in his studio, transferring the master’s compositions from clay into marble. He left, however, after only a month, famously proclaiming, “Nothing grows under big trees” (quoted in Brancusi, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995, p. 39).
By that time, Brancusi had already begun to search for an alternative to Rodin’s well-trodden path. He prowled the halls of the Louvre, the Trocadéro, and the Musée Guimet, immersing himself in the archaic art of Africa, Egypt, Assyria, Iberia, and East Asia. In the autumn of 1906, he visited the retrospective of Paul Gauguin at the Salon d’Automne, where the hieratic, anti-classical figures that the artist had carved in Polynesia struck him with the force of a revelation. By the end of the following year, Brancusi too had cast aside the lessons of his academic training. Forsaking the refined, typically Western tradition of modeling and casting, he began to carve directly in wood and stone. “What is the point of carving out mountains to make corpses of stones?” he asked (quoted in op. cit., 1963, p. 12). Abandoning figurative representation as well as the theatricality and the emotional heft that had defined so much of the sculpture of the past, Brancusi instead sought an art that could transcend the specific to become timeless and universal.
It was at around this time that Brancusi first turned to the mythological figure of the Danaïdes, carving a female head in sandstone between 1907-1909 (Bach, no. 89; Muzeul Național de Artă Contemporană al României, Bucharest). In contrast to the heavier, more monolithic, archaic style of sculpture that he had been creating up until this point, this head, though still predominantly lifelike, presents some of the archetypal features—namely the perfectly oval shaped face with a contemplative downward gaze—that would come to define Brancusi’s later work. Gradually, Brancusi began to refine these elements, creating heads with softer, more graceful contours and highly stylized facial features, so that they appeared increasingly as abstracted visions of femininity. Danaïde, as well as La muse endormie of 1909-1910 (Bach, no. 98), Une Muse of 1912 (Bach, no. 108), and Mademoiselle Pogany, 1912 (Bach, no. 109), demonstrate just how much the form of the female head captivated Brancusi, as well as the diverse aesthetic possibilities it offered him.
In the midst of this artistic development was Margit Pogany, “the fairy godmother of abstract art,” as Jean Arp described her (quoted in A.C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art, New Haven, 1993, p. 32). Brancusi had first glimpsed the young, dark-haired art student in a pension in Paris in 1910. Immediately inspired by her, he carved a portrait in marble from memory, Danaïde (Bach, no. 100; Private collection). This marble was reworked by the artist in the mid-1920s, with all traces of the facial features removed. Pogany later described their meeting and subsequent friendship in a letter of 1952, “In 1910 I was living in a boarding house and [Brancusi] used to come there for his meals as he was living nearby. I cannot remember how often we had met when one day he asked me to come to his studio and see some work he had just finished. He seemed very eager to show it... I went with a friend of mine and he showed us his sculptures. Among them was a head of white marble [Danaïde] which attracted me strongly. I felt it was me, although it had none of my features. It was all eyes. I looked at Brancusi and noticed that while he was speaking to my friend, all the time he was slyly observing me. He was awfully pleased that I had recognized myself. After the first visit I used to see quite a lot of Brancusi… I also saw some more of his work and realized he was a real artist, striving hard to find his own self, striving to find the expression for his own conception of art which differed greatly from that of others. He also made me understand that art was not copying nature, as so many artists thought” (quoted in S. Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture, New York, 1968, pp. 190-191).
Not long after, Pogany asked if she could sit for Brancusi. Throughout the winter of 1910, shortly before she returned to Budapest in January 1911, she returned to his studio several times so that he could work on her portrait. “Each time he began and finished a new bust (in clay). Each of these was a beautiful and a wonderful likeness, and each time I begged him to keep it and use it for the definite bust—but he only laughed and threw it back into the boxful of clay that stood in the corner of the studio” (quoted in ibid., p. 191). These sessions were the starting point for the 1912 marble (Bach, no. 109) and bronze Mademoiselle Pogany of 1913 (Bach, no. 116), and likely inspired Brancusi to return to the form of Danaïde, which he first executed in bronze circa 1913.
It was Brancusi’s quest to attain a novel sense of simplicity and spirituality in his work that led him to the art of the past, particularly in the case of Danaïde, to Eastern art for inspiration. This connection was noted by Henry McBride, a critic who saw Danaïde in Stieglitz’s 1914 exhibition, who described the figure as “a Japanese noblewoman” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1995, p. 124). This “indirect comparison with Japanese art,” as Margit Rowell has written, “does not seem arbitrary” (ibid., p. 124). At this time, Brancusi was a keen visitor of the Musée Guimet, home to Paris’s collections of Asian art. In 1909, the Romanian artist, Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck wrote of her frequent excursions there with Brancusi, where they admired “in addition to the celebrated Japanese prints, the sculptures of the masters of India, Tibet, China, and Turkistan” (quoted in ibid., p. 42). Housed in the museum were a number of ancient statues of the Buddha, the stylistic as well as spiritual qualities of which may have fed into both the conception and execution of Danaïde. In this work, the figure’s visage radiates a calm serenity, as if she is lost in a contemplative world all her own—in many ways a visual echo of the placid, inward looking expression of the Buddha in these ancient works.
The surface of Danaïde also speaks to these ancient examples. Here, Brancusi has used gold leaf, a rarely seen technique in his sculpture that was inspired by Japanese art. Using gold leaf for her face and black patina to convey her hair, Brancusi created a beguiling material contrast which directly recalls these gilded East Asian Buddha figures, some which he could also have seen in contemporary private collections, such as that of Jacques Doucet. As Rowell has written, “The reference to an archaic form of religious art enabled Brancusi to free his work from the stylistic contingencies and constraints—both traditional and modern—of his own period: in short, to liberate it from contemporary aesthetic conventions, in both form and meaning” (ibid., p. 42).
In his assimilation of an individual presence from his own time, with a look to the appearance and meaning of artworks of the past, Brancusi created an entirely unique sculptural language. “Brancusi rationalizes the image the world presents to him,” Sidney Geist has explained. “The process is not merely stylistic in its effects, resulting in smoothing of surfaces, erasure of detail, and simplification of shape; it is, rather, a way of thinking the forms of nature into new structures—sculptural structures, which are at once a version of the external world and the shape of the sculptor’s thought. When we consider the elimination of features which results from the rationalization of form, it is a kind of miracle that an image—and a memorable one—remains. That it does is the sure sign of a vision of the world that looked beyond appearances” (op. cit., 1975, pp. 20 and 23).
In 1914, Brancusi chose both the marble Danaïde and the present bronze to include in what would become one of the most pivotal exhibitions of his career—“An Exhibition of Original Sculpture, in Bronze, Marble, and Wood, by Constantin Brancusi, of Paris,” held at Alfred Stieglitz’s The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later known as 291). The year prior, his work had caused a scandal when it was included in New York’s Armory Show. Together with Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi’s art received the most critical consternation. Back in Paris that same year, Brancusi had three sculptures in the Salon des Indépendants, where they had been admired by Edward Steichen, the American photographer then living in Paris and serving as Stieglitz’s eyes and ears on the ground. It was likely Steichen who suggested an exhibition of Brancusi’s work at 291, and in the spring of the following year, the artist’s first one-man show opened.
The exhibition featured a range of Brancusi’s subjects in a variety of media from the previous three years, including the four types of female figure that had stood at the heart of the artist’s development at this time: Danaïde, Une Muse, Une muse endormie, and Mademoiselle Pogany, which were shown together in the first room.
The show was met predominantly with praise—a far cry from the clamor that his Armory Show participation had created. The art critic Henry McBride wrote, in what would be the start of a lifelong love and defense of the sculptor’s work, “the Brancusi art seems to expand, unfold and to take on a startling lucidity” (quoted in Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2001, p. 161). It was also a financial success: only two works returned to Brancusi unsold, and the show brought the artist’s work to the attention of a new generation of forward-thinking American collectors, including John Quinn, who would become a lifelong patron of the artist. With few in his adopted home of Paris buying his work, this exhibition paved the way for Brancusi’s successful artistic reception in America, placing him at the forefront of avant-garde art on both sides of the Atlantic. As the artist himself proclaimed shortly before his death, “Without the Americans, I would not have been able to produce all this or even to have existed” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1995, p. 68).
Key to enabling Stieglitz to hold the exhibition were two central figures in the art world of this time, Agnes Meyer and her husband, Eugene. Agnes had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she had fallen in love with the city and its art. She recalled, “I also met ultramodern artists of the most profound honesty and simplicity. One of these was Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor who fought his way laboriously from realism to a high concept of abstract form which never lost its earthy roots… His evolution was as natural as the growth of a tree, because it was guided by his thoughtful, imaginative and original nature. My friendship with Brancusi was later shared by my whole family and has lasted to this very day, because we all, including every one of the children, love the man’s quizzical, witty and profoundly honest temperament as well as his art” (Out of these Roots: The Autobiography of an American Woman, 1953, p. 82).
In 1908, she met financier Eugene Meyer in an art gallery, and they were married two years later. In the 1910s, Agnes Meyer was close with Stieglitz and was an important patron of 291. In 1915, she used her journalistic experience—shortly after graduating she had been hired by the New York Sun as a reporter, the first woman to occupy such a role—to found and run the 291 periodical, with Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, and Paul Haviland. “I took a lively part during the first years of marriage in the struggle to interest New Yorkers in modern French art which Alfred Stieglitz was carrying on in his little hole in the wall at 291 Fifth Avenue” (ibid., p. 101). The Meyers paid for the shipping and insurance of the 1914 Brancusi exhibition, and acquired the present Danaïde and Maïastra (Bach, no. 112; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) from the show. In 1929, during one of many dinners that the Meyers shared with Brancusi in his studio, the artist declared, “[I will show you] what a portrait of you is really like!” (ibid., p. 83). The result was the striking, highly abstracted portrait in black marble of Agnes (titled Agnes E. Meyer), which today resides in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Bach, no. 242).
In 1917, the Meyers moved to Washington, D.C., and later acquired The Washington Post in 1933. Over the years that followed, the Meyers contributed to American life in numerous ways, with Agnes in particular playing a critical role in national issues including education and civil rights. Katharine Graham, one of the Meyers’ daughters, who led The Washington Post for over two decades, throughout, most famously, the paper’s coverage of Watergate, recalled Danaïde in her autobiography. Describing her childhood summers in their family home in Mount Kisco, New York, she wrote, “In [Agnes’s] study stood two Brancusis—Danaïde on the mantel… In the library there was the large, white marble L’oiseau dans l'espace, on a wooden base that Brancusi had carved in our garden on his first visit to the United States, when he had stayed with us at Mount Kisco. I remember sitting around watching while Brancusi hacked away and chatted with us simultaneously” (Personal History, London, 1997, p. 36). Danaïde remained in the Meyer family’s collection for just under a century, before it was acquired by Si Newhouse in 2002.
Executed circa 1913, Danaïde was inspired by a young Hungarian artist, Margit Pogany, whom Brancusi had met in Paris in 1910. The artist was deeply taken by her, absorbing her small face, wide almond-shaped eyes, and dark hair, which she wore in the same neat chignon as can be seen in the present work, before distilling her features into his own distinct sculptural idiom in both Danaïde, as well as the Mademoiselle Pogany series.
Portraiture was one of the most important themes of Brancusi’s revolutionary form of sculpture. Yet, his approach to this purportedly mimetic genre entirely broke with the past. He interpreted his muses’ salient features without recourse to traditional figurative language. Instead, he conveyed these figures through his own powerful purity of vision, transforming the female face into an abstracted assortment of harmonious forms. As a result, the head of Pogany appears here as a confluence of unending curves, all of which echo continuously around the sculpture, the gilded surface conjuring myriad reflections of light that heighten this graceful sense of movement. Using one of his most favored forms of this period, the ovoid, Brancusi pictured Pogany with an ever-so-slight downward look. Sweeping planar arcs denote her gaze and large eyes, while from behind, her neat bun forms a spiral, a serpentine lock of hair tucked just behind her ear. In this way, Brancusi has taken the nuanced physiognomic detail of Pogany and reduced it to its most elemental parts. “It is not the outward form which is real, it is the essence of things,” Brancusi once stated. “On this basis, it is impossible for anyone to express anything real by imitating surface appearances” (ibid., p. 35).
Not only does Danaïde occupy a central place within the development of Brancusi’s work, and modern sculpture as a whole, but its provenance tells the story of the artist’s critical reception in the early twentieth century. Brancusi chose the present work to be included in his first one-man show, held in New York in 1914 at Alfred Stieglitz’s The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (291). There, Danaïde was acquired by Eugene and Agnes Meyer, who would become some of the artist’s most important patrons, as well as lifelong friends. It remained in their collection, together with a number of other works by Brancusi, passing by descent through their family until 2002, when it was acquired by the late owner.
This compelling and rare masterwork is one of six iterations of this subject, and is the only gilded example left in private hands. Today, four of the other casts, each highly individualized in terms of surface effects, are housed in museums across the world, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate, London; and Kunst Museum, Winterthur.
Brancusi had arrived in Paris from his native Romania in 1904 at the age of twenty-eight, according to legend, having walked almost the entire way. He quickly obtained entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His early work from Paris was heavily influenced by the already-legendary Auguste Rodin, and in March 1907 he secured a position as a pointing technician in his studio, transferring the master’s compositions from clay into marble. He left, however, after only a month, famously proclaiming, “Nothing grows under big trees” (quoted in Brancusi, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995, p. 39).
By that time, Brancusi had already begun to search for an alternative to Rodin’s well-trodden path. He prowled the halls of the Louvre, the Trocadéro, and the Musée Guimet, immersing himself in the archaic art of Africa, Egypt, Assyria, Iberia, and East Asia. In the autumn of 1906, he visited the retrospective of Paul Gauguin at the Salon d’Automne, where the hieratic, anti-classical figures that the artist had carved in Polynesia struck him with the force of a revelation. By the end of the following year, Brancusi too had cast aside the lessons of his academic training. Forsaking the refined, typically Western tradition of modeling and casting, he began to carve directly in wood and stone. “What is the point of carving out mountains to make corpses of stones?” he asked (quoted in op. cit., 1963, p. 12). Abandoning figurative representation as well as the theatricality and the emotional heft that had defined so much of the sculpture of the past, Brancusi instead sought an art that could transcend the specific to become timeless and universal.
It was at around this time that Brancusi first turned to the mythological figure of the Danaïdes, carving a female head in sandstone between 1907-1909 (Bach, no. 89; Muzeul Național de Artă Contemporană al României, Bucharest). In contrast to the heavier, more monolithic, archaic style of sculpture that he had been creating up until this point, this head, though still predominantly lifelike, presents some of the archetypal features—namely the perfectly oval shaped face with a contemplative downward gaze—that would come to define Brancusi’s later work. Gradually, Brancusi began to refine these elements, creating heads with softer, more graceful contours and highly stylized facial features, so that they appeared increasingly as abstracted visions of femininity. Danaïde, as well as La muse endormie of 1909-1910 (Bach, no. 98), Une Muse of 1912 (Bach, no. 108), and Mademoiselle Pogany, 1912 (Bach, no. 109), demonstrate just how much the form of the female head captivated Brancusi, as well as the diverse aesthetic possibilities it offered him.
In the midst of this artistic development was Margit Pogany, “the fairy godmother of abstract art,” as Jean Arp described her (quoted in A.C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art, New Haven, 1993, p. 32). Brancusi had first glimpsed the young, dark-haired art student in a pension in Paris in 1910. Immediately inspired by her, he carved a portrait in marble from memory, Danaïde (Bach, no. 100; Private collection). This marble was reworked by the artist in the mid-1920s, with all traces of the facial features removed. Pogany later described their meeting and subsequent friendship in a letter of 1952, “In 1910 I was living in a boarding house and [Brancusi] used to come there for his meals as he was living nearby. I cannot remember how often we had met when one day he asked me to come to his studio and see some work he had just finished. He seemed very eager to show it... I went with a friend of mine and he showed us his sculptures. Among them was a head of white marble [Danaïde] which attracted me strongly. I felt it was me, although it had none of my features. It was all eyes. I looked at Brancusi and noticed that while he was speaking to my friend, all the time he was slyly observing me. He was awfully pleased that I had recognized myself. After the first visit I used to see quite a lot of Brancusi… I also saw some more of his work and realized he was a real artist, striving hard to find his own self, striving to find the expression for his own conception of art which differed greatly from that of others. He also made me understand that art was not copying nature, as so many artists thought” (quoted in S. Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture, New York, 1968, pp. 190-191).
Not long after, Pogany asked if she could sit for Brancusi. Throughout the winter of 1910, shortly before she returned to Budapest in January 1911, she returned to his studio several times so that he could work on her portrait. “Each time he began and finished a new bust (in clay). Each of these was a beautiful and a wonderful likeness, and each time I begged him to keep it and use it for the definite bust—but he only laughed and threw it back into the boxful of clay that stood in the corner of the studio” (quoted in ibid., p. 191). These sessions were the starting point for the 1912 marble (Bach, no. 109) and bronze Mademoiselle Pogany of 1913 (Bach, no. 116), and likely inspired Brancusi to return to the form of Danaïde, which he first executed in bronze circa 1913.
It was Brancusi’s quest to attain a novel sense of simplicity and spirituality in his work that led him to the art of the past, particularly in the case of Danaïde, to Eastern art for inspiration. This connection was noted by Henry McBride, a critic who saw Danaïde in Stieglitz’s 1914 exhibition, who described the figure as “a Japanese noblewoman” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1995, p. 124). This “indirect comparison with Japanese art,” as Margit Rowell has written, “does not seem arbitrary” (ibid., p. 124). At this time, Brancusi was a keen visitor of the Musée Guimet, home to Paris’s collections of Asian art. In 1909, the Romanian artist, Cecilia Cuțescu-Storck wrote of her frequent excursions there with Brancusi, where they admired “in addition to the celebrated Japanese prints, the sculptures of the masters of India, Tibet, China, and Turkistan” (quoted in ibid., p. 42). Housed in the museum were a number of ancient statues of the Buddha, the stylistic as well as spiritual qualities of which may have fed into both the conception and execution of Danaïde. In this work, the figure’s visage radiates a calm serenity, as if she is lost in a contemplative world all her own—in many ways a visual echo of the placid, inward looking expression of the Buddha in these ancient works.
The surface of Danaïde also speaks to these ancient examples. Here, Brancusi has used gold leaf, a rarely seen technique in his sculpture that was inspired by Japanese art. Using gold leaf for her face and black patina to convey her hair, Brancusi created a beguiling material contrast which directly recalls these gilded East Asian Buddha figures, some which he could also have seen in contemporary private collections, such as that of Jacques Doucet. As Rowell has written, “The reference to an archaic form of religious art enabled Brancusi to free his work from the stylistic contingencies and constraints—both traditional and modern—of his own period: in short, to liberate it from contemporary aesthetic conventions, in both form and meaning” (ibid., p. 42).
In his assimilation of an individual presence from his own time, with a look to the appearance and meaning of artworks of the past, Brancusi created an entirely unique sculptural language. “Brancusi rationalizes the image the world presents to him,” Sidney Geist has explained. “The process is not merely stylistic in its effects, resulting in smoothing of surfaces, erasure of detail, and simplification of shape; it is, rather, a way of thinking the forms of nature into new structures—sculptural structures, which are at once a version of the external world and the shape of the sculptor’s thought. When we consider the elimination of features which results from the rationalization of form, it is a kind of miracle that an image—and a memorable one—remains. That it does is the sure sign of a vision of the world that looked beyond appearances” (op. cit., 1975, pp. 20 and 23).
In 1914, Brancusi chose both the marble Danaïde and the present bronze to include in what would become one of the most pivotal exhibitions of his career—“An Exhibition of Original Sculpture, in Bronze, Marble, and Wood, by Constantin Brancusi, of Paris,” held at Alfred Stieglitz’s The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later known as 291). The year prior, his work had caused a scandal when it was included in New York’s Armory Show. Together with Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi’s art received the most critical consternation. Back in Paris that same year, Brancusi had three sculptures in the Salon des Indépendants, where they had been admired by Edward Steichen, the American photographer then living in Paris and serving as Stieglitz’s eyes and ears on the ground. It was likely Steichen who suggested an exhibition of Brancusi’s work at 291, and in the spring of the following year, the artist’s first one-man show opened.
The exhibition featured a range of Brancusi’s subjects in a variety of media from the previous three years, including the four types of female figure that had stood at the heart of the artist’s development at this time: Danaïde, Une Muse, Une muse endormie, and Mademoiselle Pogany, which were shown together in the first room.
The show was met predominantly with praise—a far cry from the clamor that his Armory Show participation had created. The art critic Henry McBride wrote, in what would be the start of a lifelong love and defense of the sculptor’s work, “the Brancusi art seems to expand, unfold and to take on a startling lucidity” (quoted in Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2001, p. 161). It was also a financial success: only two works returned to Brancusi unsold, and the show brought the artist’s work to the attention of a new generation of forward-thinking American collectors, including John Quinn, who would become a lifelong patron of the artist. With few in his adopted home of Paris buying his work, this exhibition paved the way for Brancusi’s successful artistic reception in America, placing him at the forefront of avant-garde art on both sides of the Atlantic. As the artist himself proclaimed shortly before his death, “Without the Americans, I would not have been able to produce all this or even to have existed” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1995, p. 68).
Key to enabling Stieglitz to hold the exhibition were two central figures in the art world of this time, Agnes Meyer and her husband, Eugene. Agnes had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she had fallen in love with the city and its art. She recalled, “I also met ultramodern artists of the most profound honesty and simplicity. One of these was Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor who fought his way laboriously from realism to a high concept of abstract form which never lost its earthy roots… His evolution was as natural as the growth of a tree, because it was guided by his thoughtful, imaginative and original nature. My friendship with Brancusi was later shared by my whole family and has lasted to this very day, because we all, including every one of the children, love the man’s quizzical, witty and profoundly honest temperament as well as his art” (Out of these Roots: The Autobiography of an American Woman, 1953, p. 82).
In 1908, she met financier Eugene Meyer in an art gallery, and they were married two years later. In the 1910s, Agnes Meyer was close with Stieglitz and was an important patron of 291. In 1915, she used her journalistic experience—shortly after graduating she had been hired by the New York Sun as a reporter, the first woman to occupy such a role—to found and run the 291 periodical, with Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, and Paul Haviland. “I took a lively part during the first years of marriage in the struggle to interest New Yorkers in modern French art which Alfred Stieglitz was carrying on in his little hole in the wall at 291 Fifth Avenue” (ibid., p. 101). The Meyers paid for the shipping and insurance of the 1914 Brancusi exhibition, and acquired the present Danaïde and Maïastra (Bach, no. 112; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) from the show. In 1929, during one of many dinners that the Meyers shared with Brancusi in his studio, the artist declared, “[I will show you] what a portrait of you is really like!” (ibid., p. 83). The result was the striking, highly abstracted portrait in black marble of Agnes (titled Agnes E. Meyer), which today resides in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Bach, no. 242).
In 1917, the Meyers moved to Washington, D.C., and later acquired The Washington Post in 1933. Over the years that followed, the Meyers contributed to American life in numerous ways, with Agnes in particular playing a critical role in national issues including education and civil rights. Katharine Graham, one of the Meyers’ daughters, who led The Washington Post for over two decades, throughout, most famously, the paper’s coverage of Watergate, recalled Danaïde in her autobiography. Describing her childhood summers in their family home in Mount Kisco, New York, she wrote, “In [Agnes’s] study stood two Brancusis—Danaïde on the mantel… In the library there was the large, white marble L’oiseau dans l'espace, on a wooden base that Brancusi had carved in our garden on his first visit to the United States, when he had stayed with us at Mount Kisco. I remember sitting around watching while Brancusi hacked away and chatted with us simultaneously” (Personal History, London, 1997, p. 36). Danaïde remained in the Meyer family’s collection for just under a century, before it was acquired by Si Newhouse in 2002.
