Modernite et intemporalite chez Brâncuşi. La sagesse de la terre. Le baiser
Modernity and Atemporality at Brâncuși. La sagesse de la terre. Le baiser

Summary/Abstract: Constantin Brancusi remains an enigmatic personality of his time. If the image of the man, the one that reached us, is ambivalent, the work is just as important, as it defies analysis. Difficult to place on its sources, without any direct lineage, Brancusi's work occupies a special place in the history of modern sculpture of the twentieth century. However, exegeses and interpretations abound. For some critics, the sculptor is largely indebted to his Romanian origins, an heir of the ancient tradition of the direct carving of wood and stone and marked by a certain tendency to mysticism. For others, his settling in Paris is essential, due to the influences he might have undergone - those of Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, the styles of his time or the African figurines and the Egyptian art. But if none of these assumptions is negligible, each of them offers only a partial perspective on his secret personality. The constancy of his objectives and the exceptional formal unity of his sculpture make his work even more refractory to analysis. Because it is the work of a lifetime, which, at first glance, seems to show no change, no sequence styles or themes that may help understand maturation in its concepts or forms. The aim of this paper is to analyse La Sagesse de la Terre and Le Baiser, two sculptures that represent a radical swerve from Brancusi’s previous attempts, as well as the sculpture of his time, a visible break in the stylized simplification, the frontal and the relative symmetry that characterize them.

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