Art - Richard Cork marvels at the great simplifier of 20th-century sculpture
Hewn or cast with magisterial finality, the work of Constantin Brancusi is a cornerstone of modern sculpture. Leave him out and our understanding of the restless revolution perpetrated by other 20th-century sculptors quickly collapses. But place him where he belongs, with a selection of carvings and bronzes as judicious as Tate Modern's limpid survey, and the importance of his achievement becomes clear at once.
Often regarded as the great simplifier, Brancusi certainly seems to have performed a purgative role in the first room of this show. In 1907-08, he invaded Auguste Rodin's territory and offered a startlingly austere vision of a kiss. We are very aware of the block's stubborn integrity, because the two hugging figures have been reduced to a sequence of minimal slices. If we didn't know the carving was called The Kiss, the meaning of their embrace might appear open to question. Both figures can be seen as male and, placed eyeball to eyeball, they are locked together so rigidly that their bodies could be embroiled in a wrestling match.
Did Brancusi intend them to seem so ambiguous? We do not know, but his surviving statements rejoice in contradictions. "Simplicity," he once insisted, "is complexity itself" - and the Tate show abounds in work that bears out his statement. Eight years after the 1908 Kiss, he carved another version: taller, paler and smoother, with the woman's hair lyrically defined as it undulates all the way down one end of the limestone block. Her breast is evident, too, pushing against the man's chest. Even in this piece, though, the meaning is open-ended. Their embrace seems claustrophobic, and their stretched arms - especially in comparison with Rodin's amorous couple - appear clamped in horizontal bars on their trapped bodies.
Perhaps Brancusi, who made his reputation with a far larger carving of The Kiss in Montparnasse Cemetery, could not prevent himself from reflecting the tensions in his own experience of relationships. He had been unhappy enough, as a boy of ten, to run away from his home in the Romanian village of Hobitza and settle in Tirgu Jiu, where he would later install his sublime tripartite war memorial. Brancusi was always resolutely independent and claimed that he made his decisive, epic journey from Romania to Paris on foot. The same spirit of lonely defiance surely lay behind his decision never to marry. He was, however, far from celibate. Even at his most spare, Brancusi never lost his highly sensual response to the body.
One of the rooms in the Tate show is devoted to carvings of torsos. They begin with a fragment in white marble, its broken state suggesting an act of homage to classical sculpture. They culminate in a confrontation, at opposite ends of the room, between the torsos of a young girl and an equally young man. She swells like a ripe gourd in pale onyx, whereas his dark walnut trunk juts up from parted thighs with an unmistakably phallic thrust.
Brancusi once claimed that "male nudes in sculpture are not even as beautiful as toads". He scorned the prominent mus-culature in Michelangelo and Rodin, dismissing it as mere "beefsteak". All the same, he took an impish delight in producing the outrageous Princess X in 1915. Carved in white marble and perched on a Caen limestone base, the sculpture initially resembles a graceful muse whose elongated neck, culminating in an egg-like head, rises from ample breasts. But then we realise the entire work could be seen as the male genitals in a state of arousal.
The humour in Princess X helps to explain Brancusi's lifelong friendship with Marcel Duchamp. Unlike the arch-renegade Duchamp, however, Brancusi never lost his loyalty to the notion of an invented, carefully crafted object. Nor did he stray far from observed reality. Even his most abstract work, The Beginning of the World, derives from his obsession with isolated heads. The Tate may have chosen to display The Beginning of the World in a room on its own, so that the purity of its marble oval appears absolute on a reflective base of polished steel, but the sculpture originates in a 1908 carving called Head of a Sleeping Child. We can see how Brancusi gradually shed the blurred naturalism of its delicate, tender features. By 1909-10, the child was transformed into Sleeping Muse, with a far more attenuated and elegant face. The following year, it became Prometheus, robbed of eyes and bearing only the vestiges of a nose, mouth and ear.
The more we explore this excellent show, the greater Brancusi's emotional range becomes. Aggression has hardly ever been associated with his work, but the walnut Sorceress (1916-24) shoots out in fierce diagonals matching the drama of the natural cracks zigzagging through the wood. Moreover, Sorceress has been mounted on the squat, boorish Guard Dog, hewn, very roughly, from a thick lump of oak. This is Brancusi at his most sullen, and the jagged edges bristling from the centre of his enormous King of Kings convey a still harsher menace. It is surely no accident that he carved this totem-like embodiment of proud virility around 1938, when the Spanish civil war was alarming everyone with a prophecy of the greater conflict to come.
On the whole, though, Brancusi preferred responding to violence and death with images of redemption. Hence his sustained involvement with the Maiastra, a bird of salvation traditionally installed on Romanian tombs. The bronze version of around 1912 is plump and golden. Above its swollen, gleaming chest, the bird's mouth opens in a cry. Is it greeting the dawn in ecstasy or issuing a dour warning? Similar questions crowd around the later, slimmer, marble birds, one mottled yellow and the other blue-grey. Their mouths gape in a more urgent manner, as if reaching out for food. But Brancusi intended these carvings to inhabit his projected Temple of Meditation, designed for an Indian maharaja, so he must have conceived them in an aspirational spirit.
The climax of the group is undoubtedly Bird in Space, a sleek and glinting form in polished brass. By now the motif of the open mouth has vanished, and the bird surges upwards like a soul released from all mortal constraints. Supremely poised, yet alive with tense expectancy, this burnished creature appears to be charged with soaring energy. Its allure is undimmed today, and sums up the vibrancy of Brancusi's role in the sculptural rebellion he did so much to ignite.
"Constantin Brancusi: the essence of things" is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8000) until 23 May. Richard Cork is giving a free London Institute lecture on modern British sculpture on 11 February at the Cochrane Theatre, London WC1 (020 7269 1606)
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