Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray

Rotterdam

by PATRICK ELLIOTT

The exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray: Framing Sculpture, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (closed 25th May),1 featured three artists who are not the most obvious bedfellows. Brancusi is the modernist sculptor par excellence, all stream­lining and polish; Rosso is essentially a nineteenth-century Impressionist sculptor, all bumps and shadows; and Man Ray is best-known as a photographer and Dadaist. They all lived in Paris, but one was Romanian, one Italian and the third American. Man Ray and Brancusi were good friends, but it is unlikely that either of them ever met Rosso. What the three have in common, as the exhibition’s subtitle implies, is that they sought to exercise control over the presentation of their sculpture, and did this through photography. All three photographed their own work, taking infinite care with lighting, plinths and pre­sentation, and insisting that particular shots were used in publications. More than that, all three wrestled with the inherent contradiction between three-dimensional sculpture and the two-dimensional format through which it is promulgated.

The elephant in the exhibition is of course Rodin. He did not take photographs himself but did employ some of the greatest photo­graphers of his day, notably Steichen, Druet and Bulloz, to do so. He often used photographs as working material, retouching them and exhibiting them. His solo exhibition at the Pont d’Alma in 1900, where he hired an exhibition hall, provided his own plinths, produced a catalogue and gave guided tours, represents a key moment in this business of ‘framing sculpture’. At one point Rodin was destined to be part of the Boijmans exhibition, but he was ultimately dropped in favour of Man Ray. That change of tack had a radical effect on the exhibition: instead of providing a potted, historical narrative on the relationship between sculpture and photography around 1880–1920, it opened up a richer and more imaginative field of inquiry. The relationship between sculpture and photography has become a growth area in academic study in the past couple of decades with books by, among others, Albert Elsen on Rodin, Véronique Gautherin on Bourdelle, Marielle Tabert on Brancusi, and Paolo Molo on Brancusi and Rosso, and exhibitions on the subject held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010) and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (1997). One might think there was little more to say on the matter, but the Rotterdam show proved otherwise.

The exhibition was divided into three generously sized, interconnecting sections, one for each artist. Rosso and Brancusi were each represented by about eighteen sculptures, plus a large number of photographs. Entering the exhibition the visitor was confronted by two bent slivers of material, one black, one white, each standing about a metre tall. The identity of these two objects only became clear as one walked into the room: they were plaster and wax versions of Rosso’s Bust of Henri Rouart (cat. nos.5a and 5b), seen from the side. The daring display immediately hit at the heart of Rosso’s sculpture, which invariably has a definite front and an ideal viewpoint. Look at the sides or backs of his sculptures and you often find an amorphous lump of plaster or a gaping hole. This is precisely the problem that Rosso addressed through photography, in that by photographing his own works, he could choose the best angle, distance and lighting, and thus counter Baudelaire’s claim that sculpture had too many viewpoints. Rosso is the most pictorial of sculptors: he is said to have been delighted when Degas saw a photograph of one of his sculptures and thought it was a painting.

Rosso’s photographs effectively show us how he wanted his sculptures to be seen. Tiny, grainy, tightly cropped and messy, some are so over- or under-exposed that it is hard to tell what they represent. Many are retouched and annotated (Fig.67) and some are photographs of photographs: clearly, he worried away at them endlessly. This all speaks of Rosso’s desire for control, but it is actually his very failure to achieve control that becomes the triumphant subject of the work. He sought to render the instant, Impressionist glimpse, but struggled to resolve the fact that the viewer can still examine the sculptures at length, close up and from all sides. The sculptures are astounding partly because of his failures. Cast by Rosso himself, the bronzes are full of holes, nails, grog, bubbles, casting flashes, exposed seams and bits that seem to be falling off; some look to be the product of a volcanic heat so intense that the blistered, blackened surface rejects the patina. Mess becomes a metaphor for uncertainty (in this sense he has much more in common with Giacometti than with Brancusi), yet the paradox is that Rosso sought photographic realism. Rosso would be a lesser artist if the soft-focused view which he gave us in his photographs were all that one could see.

The section on Rosso segued nicely into Brancusi with two versions of Rosso’s Sick child (nos.7a and 7b) shown next to Brancusi’s Sleeping muse I (no.21a; Fig.66). It was a resonant pairing, but it had the effect of making Rosso look like the precursor and Brancusi the victor on the road to abstraction. The ideal partner here would have been Rosso’s Madame X in the Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, a wax, egg-shaped form which probably predates Brancusi’s Sleeping muse by a good fifteen years. Brancusi, like Rosso and Man Ray, began photographing his own work for practical, economic reasons, but soon decided that nobody else could do the job so well. The catalogue tells us little about the three artists’ technical equipment (i.e. negative format, lenses, lighting and darkroom equipment), but it is clear that Brancusi could achieve beautiful velvety tones and pin-sharp detail in large gelatine silver prints with no retouching. He also courted over-exposure, particularly to express the radiant shine on the polished bronzes. Whereas Rosso focused on individual works, cropping them down to postage-stamp-size and scribbling all over them, the background – the artist’s studio – was central to Brancusi’s vision. It is striking just how different his work looked in the journals and books of the period compared to that of his contemporaries. That look was achieved not just through sculptural means, but through his photographs, which transformed the studio into a giant Gesamtkunstwerk. Unlike Rosso, he photographed the same works from different angles, and in one telling pair of photographs of the studio (nos.34c and 34d) changed the position of a couple of sculptures, as if he were setting up a still-life composition. The self-portrait in a deckchair, ‘sleeping’ and dishevelled but with a shutter-release cable tucked into his hand (no.35c), shows us that he is not the ingénue peasant of legend.

Man Ray is the odd one out in the triumvirate, in that he was not a sculptor in the conventional sense, and he did not photograph his own works in the conventional sense. He often made assemblages of found objects, photographed them and then discarded the original objects. Many of his works are therefore both sculptures of a sort and photographs; and his rayograms (Fig.68), made by placing three-dimensional objects on photographic paper and exposing it to light, occupy a similarly ambiguous status in that they are both sculptural and flat, and were made without a camera. Thus, although we can speak of Rosso and Brancusi as having different approaches to envisioning their sculpture, with Man Ray the process is turned inside-out and back-to-front. If a Venn diagram were made of the three artists and their work, the point of triple overlap would be quite small: it was in fact their different solutions to a shared goal that made the show so compelling.

1    Catalogue: Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray: Framing Sculpture. Essays by Peter van der Coelen, Francesco Stocchi, Nina Schallenberg, Roxanna Marocci and Patty Wageman. 272 pp. incl. 299 ills. (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2014), €34.95. ISBN 978–90–6918–270–4. The English-language version of the catalogue features additional installation photographs which are not published in the Dutch version.