When I first saw a photograph of master Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s (1876-1957) ‘La muse endormie’ (The sleeping muse) my first impulse was to paint it. So I did. Two of them. Brancusi had produced six in bronze apart from the first one in marble. This one here is his sixth one.
This bronze work cast in 1913 was sold at Christie’s in May this year for $ 57,367,500.
The face of a sleeping woman has Buddhist serenity about it. That may have something to do with the fact that Brancusi was a modernist sculptor who consciously broke away from the more classical style that dominated before him. I read that he was moved by Paul Gauguin’s very anti-classical Polynesian faces. That might perhaps explain some Buddhist touch. (By Buddhist, I mean the Buddha’s most famous faces and not his philosophy.) Gauguin himself had drawn some Buddhas.
Quite apart from Brancusi’s supreme artistry what I find noteworthy about bronze statues is the way the metal ages without really ageing. I have a couple of bronze pieces—a platter and a bowl—from my grandfather’s time which are more than a century old. The passage of time has made them glistening smooth in a way that a sculptor might not have been able to achieve.
There is absolutely no reason to write about ‘La muse endormie’ but then if art needed a reason, it would not exist.