The ARMORY SHOW, formally International Exhibition Of Modern Art, an exhibition of painting and sculpture held from Feb. 17 to March 15, 1913, at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in New York City. The show, a decisive event in the development of American art, was originally conceived by its organizers, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, as a selection of representational works exclusively by American artists, members both of the National Academy of Design and of the more progressive Ashcan School and The Eight. The election of Arthur B. Davies as president of the association changed this conception. A member of The Eight, Davies produced pleasant, Romantic paintings that enjoyed the respect of almost all of the American art establishment. He was also a man with a broad, highly developed taste, capable of appreciating trends in art far more radical than his own style, and he was aware of developments in Europe. Davies, with the help of Walt Kuhn and Walter Pach, spent a year, much of it in Europe, assembling a collection that was later called a "harbinger of universal anarchy." The exhibition traveled to New York City, Chicago, and Boston and was seen by approximately 300,000 Americans. Of the 1,600 works included in the show, about one-third were European, and attention became focused on them. The selection was almost a history of European Modernism. Beginning with J.-A.-D. Ingres and Eugène Delacroix, the exhibition displayed works by Impressionists, Symbolists, Postimpressionists, Fauves, and Cubists. Although the sculpture section was weak and the Expressionists were poorly represented, the show exposed the American public for the first time to advanced European art. American art suffered by contrast.

Reactions to the show were varied. Marcel Duchamp's Cubist painting "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" was popularly described as "an explosion in a shingle factory"; and Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, and Walter Pach were hanged in effigy by Chicago art students. Yet this show became the basis of many important private American collections.

For American art, the show had results more difficult to gauge. Stuart Davis exemplified one artist's reaction: "The Armory Show was the greatest shock to me--the greatest single influence I have experienced in my work." Similarly, the artists Joseph Stella, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Arthur Dove were encouraged by the Armory Show to continue their avant-garde direction. American painting in general, however, continued to be dominated by the realists--the Ashcan School and its successors, American Scene painting and Social Realism--until some 30 years later. 

"Armory Show."   Britannica 2001 Standard Edition CD-ROM.   Copyright © 1994-2001 Britannica.com Inc.   November 24, 2002. 

THIRTY YEARS BEFORE his death in 1957, there had ceased to be any doubt of Constantin Brancusi's status as a modernist master. He devoted a long life to distilling extremes of formal perfection from a narrow range of motifs. This perfection is never frozen: it always contains some organic character, an affinity to life and therefore to change. "I never seek what to make a pure or abstract form," Brancusi said. "Timelessness,'' "wholeness,'' "essence,'' "aliveness": such words inescapably recur in what has been written about him over the past 70 or 80 years. They are well-worn tokens, rubbed smooth by use, but you can't visit the Brancusi retrospective that is now in its last weeks at the Philadelphia Museum of Art without feeling how his work revives them. 

Brancusi was born in 1876, in a small village in Romania. He completed a long and thorough training in sculpture in Bucharest before reaching Paris, almost penniless, in 1904. He even worked briefly as a studio menial for Auguste Rodin before quitting in the realization that, as he later put it, nothing grows under great trees. Throughout his life, legends stuck to Brancusi like burrs; he was apt to be seen as a peasant sage, a Carpathian exotic (to most Parisians, Romania barely qualified as part of Europe). And he seemed even more of an original to American collectors, who, fervently egged on by Marcel Duchamp, were his chief support. 

But, in fact, he was an artist of immense sophistication, the friend of Duchamp, Erik Satie, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. His work, with its flowing contours and obsessively refined surfaces, was one of the main sources for Art Deco style. Imagine the top of the Chrysler Building carved from oak, and you have something very like his sculptural bases. As Rowell points out in the catalog, guests in his Paris studio would be regaled with homemade sheep's milk cheese and a glass of iced champagne--funk and chic together, essential Brancusi. He loved contrasting the rough with the smooth, the hyper-refined freehand curve with the lump and the block. And when those sleek organic forms, half-volatilized in light, rise up from their wooden pedestals, you think of the resurrection of glorified bodies. 

http://www.europanostra.org/

It was one thing to be a peasant and quite another to draw on sources in folk culture, and Brancusi's "primitive" interests matched those of other Europeans, starting with Gauguin. Brancusi's own Tahiti was his childhood and youth. He remembered peasant Romania very well. Its big-boned craft shapes--lintels, shallow wooden arches, the massive oak screw threads of rustic presses for oil and wine--are preserved in his carvings, where they mingle with disguised quotations from African sculpture. The folk-legend of Maiastra, a miraculous bird with shining golden feathers that guided a prince to his imprisoned lover, helped to inspire his prolific series of bird sculptures. His Endless Columns, those stacks of notched hourglass units that could be piled up to tree-height or to heaven (late in his life, Brancusi had fantasies of building one more than 1,000 ft. high), derived from grave markers in village cemeteries. 

But this folk source doesn't explain Brancusi's spiritual aims in making them: he seems to have thought of the endless column as a link between man and God. Nor does the source account for the columns' strictly modernist power. Brancusi's decision to make a modular sculpture out of identical rhomboids, without a fixed end, opens on a world of sculptural possibility that hadn't existed before and was later to be colonized by American Minimalism. The list of sculptors whose work carries traces of Brancusi's dna is almost as long as those columns: Isamu Noguchi, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, William Tucker, Claes Oldenburg, Christopher Willmarth and so on to Scott Burton, who made sculpture as furniture and thought Brancusi's bases were as self-sufficient as his carvings. It seems strange, though, that Minimalists should have picked up on Brancusi's processes, such as the stacking of units, without paying the least attention to his spiritual ambitions. Whatever else Minimalism was about, it wasn't the aliveness and metamorphic intensity of Brancusi. 
 

Brancusi was after a healing wholeness. He didn't care about "truth to material," but he did strive to make the action of the hand and the movement of thought one. He believed that every aspect of sculpture--whether rough, like his urgently hewn oak and walnut carvings, or exquisitely nuanced, like his marble head or bird forms, polished to the point where light and substantial weight become mysteriously the same--needed to be manual before it could be whole. 

He loathed the fragmentation of Picasso's work and had no taste for the open, pieced-together asymmetry of Constructivism. Form for him is always closed and unitary, though different forms could be added to one another to make a whole, as in the interplay between sculpture and base. And he especially loved form that spoke of life or awareness at their origins: primal, self-enclosed, a marble egg floating in its own space like a cell, an egg like head lying on its side, filled with what the poet Octavio Paz called "the dreams of undreaming stone." 

Excerpted from 
FUNK AND CHIC by Robert Hughes
Time, 12/18/95, Vol. 146 Issue 25, p77, 2p
BRANCUSI, Constantin -- Exhibitions; SCULPTURE

Iconography: "Brancusi’s marble Muse is a subtle monument to the aesthetic act and to the myth that woman is its inspiration. The finely chiseled and smoothly honed head is poised atop a sinuous neck, the curve of which is counterbalanced by a fragmentary arm pressed against the ear. The facial features, although barely articulated, embody the proportions of classical beauty. As in the sculptor’s Mlle Pogany, also of 1912, the subject’s hair is coifed in a bun at the base of the neck. But while Mlle Pogany is the image of a particular woman, The Muse is the embodiment of an ideal." (www.guggenheimcollection.org)
It was the beginning of his signature abstraction of heads down to their basic forms, "Constantin Brancusi revolutionized sculpture when, in the early years of this century, he began to render  the human head in simple abstract forms and smooth continuous surfaces." By his carving he felt that he got closer and more intimate with the material. All his work, both in wood and stone, reflects his love for life, the force and freshness of the images of the world around him. 

Context: Brancusi would make three versions of Mademoiselle Pogany throughout his lifetime. "Madmoiselle Pogany II" is part of his most important sculptural series, a sequence of three portraits of a young Parisian dancer originally produced in 1912, 1919 and 1931."
(www.lasvegassun.com)
"The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi was born of peasant parents in Pestisani, Southern Romania on February 21st, 1876. Constantin Brancusi made the earliest and sharpest break in the modern movement of abstraction. He defined new forms by carving in wood and stone. His simple, exquisite forms reflect attitudes of modern art. Although a pioneer of modern art, Brancusi was the least public and the most withdrawn artist. His working life was spent mostly in solitude in his studio. He allowed nothing to interfere with his work. To the few writers he permitted to see him he would say "Promise not to write about me until I am dead." His life was simply and completely dedicated to his work. His way of work was a concentrated dialogue between himself and his material, which gradually took forms. His passion for a direct and simple contact with life referred to his sculpture and everything he did. By his carving he felt that he got closer and more intimate with the material. All his work, both in wood and stone, reflects his love for life, the force and freshness of the images of the world around him. His work was presented and appreciated at different exhibitions around the world: France (Paris), USA (New York & Chicago), Switzerland (Zurich & Yverdon), India, and certainly Romania. He died in his studio in Paris on March 16th, 1957."
(www.uiuc.edu)

Constantin Brancusi, The Newborn 1915

Iconography: These heads, when viewed together, show eloquently how Brancusi developed. First, as an apprentice to Rodin, and then on to what he wished to do for himself and express to the world.  "When Constantin Brancusi moved to Paris from his native Romania in 1904, he was introduced to Auguste Rodin, the French master sculptor who was then at the height of his career. He invited Brancusi to join his atelier as an apprentice, but the younger artist—with the confidence, stubbornness, and independence of youth—declined, claiming that “nothing grows in the shade of a tall tree.” Brancusi rejected Rodin’s 19th-century emphasis on theatricality and accumulation of detail in favor of radical simplification and abbreviation; he suppressed all decoration and explicit narrative referents in an effort to create pure and resonant forms. His goal was to capture the essence of his subjects—which included birds in flight, fish, penguins, and a kissing couple—and render them visible with minimal formal means. Brancusi often depicted the human head, another favorite subject, as a unitary ovoid shape separate from the body. When placed on its side, it evokes images of repose. Some of Brancusi’s streamlined oval heads, whose forms recall Indian fertility sculptures in their fusion of egg like and phallic shapes, suggest the miracle of creation."
(www.guggenheimcollection.org)
 

Context: It is easy for a viewer who is disinclined towards abstraction or 'modern' art to claim that the artist creates his abstractions in that manner because they simply do not know of any other way. In short, that they are untalented. However, by looking at the earliest works of Brancusi, much like looking at an early Picasso, it becomes clear that the opposite is true. The artist may be too talented, and disillusioned with the ideals that all fine art must inspire awe with its' obvious painstaking creation. Instead, Brancusi chose to simplify, and create a beauty which is no less awe-inspiring than that of The Pieta.

Iconography: Brancusi may have been trying to answer the age old riddle, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Here, we see that he thought it was the egg. And, who knows...maybe he was right. It is also known as 'Sculptur for the Blind'. Not as a joke, but to make people understand that sculpture is a three dimensional, tactile experience. Unlike a painting, which is, essentially, a lie because it is pigment on canvas meant to fool the viewer into believing things that aren't there, a sculpture exists in our reality. We are discouraged from touching a painting, while a sculpture may be felt, sat on, climbed over or caressed. In this sculpture the base is as much a part of the work as the supposed "main focus" sitting on top. 

Context: As one of Brancusi's later works, we can see how far he has taken abstraction and simplification. This may not even be meant to represent an egg, it may be little more than a smoothed out ovoid reminiscent of his 'head' sculptures. It may be 'The Newborn' simplified down as far as it can get.

http://www.dallasmuseumofart.org/edu/teachingpackets/TP/IdeasTakeShape/Artwork/IdeasEgg.htm

Iconography: "The Torso is not anatomy, it recalls none of that glorious straining of muscles and sinews, present in Greek or Renaissance marble sculptures. Nor is it a mere reduction to a metaphor ; it celebrates the beauty of the material itself, but a humanized material." http://www.dntis.ro/romania/mr/romanian_images/sculptors/brancusi/
There may certainly be a bit of double meaning in this piece. In terms of simplification and abstraction of the torso, one thinks of it as being the upper body with or without the head and maybe a bit of the arms. Brancusi has chosen instead to include the hint of leg and the trunk of the body. In terms of simplification, it may be argued that the legs of a young man are rarely equal width of the torso. This is where the double entendre comes into play. It looks like an abstract bronze phallus. The implication that  it is a part of a young man suggests what part a young man may deem most important. Is this true? Maybe not. But throughout art history it must be noted that every artist, without exception, has lust or sex as a muse in at least half of their works. Whether it be a voyeuristic view of a young woman bathing, or greek kraters with older men and their boys depicted, it remains one of the strongest factors of art throughout time.

Context: Note how perfectly polished and symmetrical this bronze piece is, it is meant to invite the viewer to run their hands over it as a tactile experience, much like 'Beginning of the World'.