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Reality lies in the essence of things, and not their external forms. "
- Brancusi

Noguchi later wrote that Brancusi's exhibition made him feel "that everything I had done in my work was false. It filled me with longing to seek after my own true identity."
-Isamu Noguchi

Constantin Brâncuşi
February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957

"For Brancusi authentic abstraction was a language to express objective
metaphysical fact. Originality consisted in going to the origins, to the mysterious heart
of things. And so he did not see artistic variation as an aim in itself, but, at its most
profound, the natural result of limited beings encountering and expressing expansive
mysteries. “Reality lies in the essence of things, “ he said, “and not their external
forms. Hence, it is impossible for anyone to produce anything real by merely imitating
the external form of an object.” His sculptures were simply an attempt to crystallise
these essences: “The artist should know how to dig out the being that is within
matter,” he affirmed, “and be the tool that brings out its cosmic essence into an actual
visible essence.”

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"Brancusi might have been mistaken for an unsubtle, instinctive, country-bumpkinish artist. But his work, which was at once fastidious and of a complete simplicity, was the expression of thought-structures, where art and philosophy were concerned, which were in the highest degree lucid, elaborated and profound. The creative vision which underlies his art was highly intellectualized. And yet it was creative, above all things. Brancusi had nothing of what is called ‘culture’ and stood well clear of that soi-disant ‘intellectual life of the day’, which is no more than journalism (or journalism between hard covers). But in other ways he was infinitely more cultivated than the men of letters, the ‘thinkers’, the nonentities who claim for themselves the title of ‘intellectual’ and yet understand nothing, so bemused are they by the slogans, simple or complicated, that they take for the truth, or the production of their own unaided minds. Brancusi could out-master any Master of Arts. He knew all that there was to know about art and its problems. He had assimilated the entire history of sculpture, mastered it, gone beyond it, rejected it, come back to it, purified it, reinvented it. He had got down to its essence."

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Brancusi in his studio...

(Isama Noguchi)
Globular, 1928, polished brass.

"Discontent with academic sculpture, Isamu Noguchi frequented New York's more progressive galleries, and in December 1926 his ambitions were transformed by the exhibition of abstract sculpture by Constantin Brancusi at the Brummer Gallery. Noguchi applied for and was awarded a three-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study modern sculpture in Paris, to be followed by work in India, China and Japan. Soon after arriving in Paris in March 1927 he became an assistant to Brancusi, who taught Noguchi to carve wood and stone. He also drew from the model in the academies, and after leaving Brancusi in late 1927 he established his own studio and created a significant body of abstract drawings and sculpture. Using both geometric and organic imagery, Noguchi made works of bent metal, wood and stone, and experimented with kinetic and neon sculpture. After two years in Paris his fellowship was not renewed, and he returned to New York in early 1929."



read more here about Noguchi and Brancusi...
via Noguchi Museum...

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