A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across some interesting geometric abstract pieces by Al Held. Knowing nothing about him or the work but understanding the difficulty in comprehending giant paintings when you've only seen reproductions I started reading. The more I read, the more complex he became - although his work seemed simpler and simpler and perhaps less interesting. Anyway, the point is I found a gem of a resource - the Archives for American Art at the Smithsonian have a cache of in depth interviews with artists. In his one, Held describes a trip he took to visit an elderly Brancusi when he was living in Paris.
"There wasn't really too much of a conversation, it was a very primitive conversation. But it was a piece of theatre, it was marvelous theatre. I sort of called him up and said that I was a young artist, a student and I admired his work and that I'd like to have the opportunity to visit his studio if it were possible. All I got back was: Tuesday at three o'clock. Well, I presented myself at his door on Tuesday at three o'clock or whatever. I'm making up Tuesday at three o'clock but it was something like that. I rang the bell. There was a crack in the door. I said, "I have an appointment with Mr. Brancusi."
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| Sculpture for the Blind (Beginning of the World) - Brancusi, 1916 |
"The door swung open; there was no answer but the door swung open. By the time the door had swung open all I saw of him was his back. He was already sort of like he was going into his studio and expected me to follow. Which I did. The studio was like a maze. Remember this was about 1952 or 1953 so he was quite old at the time; and ill. The studio was very much like the facsimile in Paris, there were three ateliers there, three French ateliers. It was so full of stuff it became like a maze. There was no real open space. He took me around this path and without ever turning around he would sort of reach out and take a chamois off and say "Fish" and then he'd sort of shuffle down the row and his other hand would reach out and take another chamois off, say, "Bird", and he would go through this maze. I would be following this shuffling figure, all I saw was his back and kind of white slippers, and this one word thing and... he slowly shuffled around the whole studio and never once turned around. Then he sort of led us to a kind of opening and the opening was something like where we're sitting now -- I don't know exactly -- but I think it was some of his stools, you know, and a kind of carved table, a little sitting area. That's the first time I saw him as he turned around and gestured for me to sit down and he sat down.
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| Man Ray's portrait of Brancusi |
"All I saw was this maze of white: white beard, white smock, white trousers, white shoes, white hat. He had one of these little -- what do they call those? They're not yarmulkes, they're not sitting on the back of the head, they're sort of like modified baker's caps -- well, anyway, that was white; and it was white beard, white hair and only those two black eyes. And that was it. It was a maze of -- the whole thing was white. I'm sure he was totally conscious of the theatricalness of the whole thing."
The interview goes on to detail Brancusi doing what artists do, bitching. In this case it was about how the people who had commissioned a sculpture from him were compromising it too much.
I find it pleasing, from the theatricality (one of the reasons that the most famous artists are famous is because they're great showmen) to the dismissal of his own work with a single word. That dismissal is fascinating - it could be a loss of interest in work as soon as it is finished, it could be a belief the work was so simple it could be summed up with a single word, it could be acknowledgment of the limitations of language and his knowledge of French.
The full interview, both as an audio recording and a transcript, is at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-al-held-12773
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