l'atelier Brancusi
Saint's home where Pound visited
Ezra Pound
lived in Paris from December 1920 to October 1924. During that time, he
visited the studio of Brancusi more than once. The studio was located at
8 impasse Ronsin then.
The poet in his mid-thirties visited there and felt a saint in the sculptor
ten years older than he. In the studio "quiet was established",
wrote Pound in Guide to Kulchur. Then he cited a proverb of unknown
source once quoted by Allen Upward, "The quality of the sage is like
water."(1)
In the photographs taken in 1921 and 22 (2), we can see still low Colonnes
sans fin curved of wood, Étude pour L'Oiseau dans l'espace,
Le Coq curved of wood, Colonne du Baiser, Tête ébauche,
and Léda under the high roof of Brancusi's studio.
When Pound visited there, Brancusi welcomed him with his "legendary"
cooking. Robert McAlmon described, in Being Geniuses Together,
how it was when he visited there with Pound.
"The dining table was a huge round slab, and the stove had been made
by Brancusi himself of stones piled one on the other. The meal started
with a kirsh, Rumanian hors d'oeuvres, and the steak or roast chicken,
salad and fruit, and of course, quantities of wine."(3)
In 1922, Pound invited Brancusi to his apartment for dinner.(4)
In his letter to Wyndham Lewis at the end of April 1921, Pound wrote, "
I should take you, Brancusi, Picasso and surprising as it will seem to
you Picabia..." In the same letter, he told Lewis that John Quinn
just bought some Brancusi, and "shown good sense in so doing."(5)
In the summer of that year, John Quinn, who was a collector of modern art
living in New York, visited Paris for the first time to collect art works
there. He might have visited Brancusi's studio that time. When he was in
Paris again in 1923, he visited Brancusi's studio and bought no fewer works
than four.(6)
During these travels, John Quinn met Pound and James Joyce. He was helping
them. When Pound was introduced to him by W. B.Yeats in 1910, Quinn was
collecting manuscripts of William Morris and was helping John B. Yeats,
Williams' father and a painter. After Pound's ardent advise, Quinn began
collecting modern artists' works. Also he helped publication of works by
Pound, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis and collected their manuscripts.
He purchased the manuscript of Ulysses from Joyce and was presented
by Eliot his manuscript of the Waste Land with Pound's inscriptions.
(7)
In 1917, Pound was appointed foreign correspondent of the Little Review,
which started as a Chicago-based literary magazine. The appointment was
realized with Quinn's finacial aid to the magazine. Pound published works
of Lewis and Joyce, as well as his own. But in 1920, the Little Review
was accused of obscenity for the publication of "Nausicaa" episode
of Ulysses.
Since then relationship of Quinn and Pound had cooled. However the Little
Review was going to restart with autumn 1921 issue again supported
by Quinn, and Pound again was going to take the editorship. In the letter
cited above, Pound notified Wyndham Lewis its new editorial policy as,
" a quarterly; each number to have about twenty reprods of ONE artist."(8)
He also told that it would start off with Brancusi's.
In the autumn 1921 issue of the restarted Little Review, Pound discussed
works of Brancusi in his essay, "Brancusi." The essay starts
with a citation from Remy de Gourmont, " I carve a thesis in logic
of the eternal beauty." It is a precious resource for study of Brancusi's
works because the essay is based upon Pound's conversations with Brancusi
himself. It is regarded as the first serious essay on Brancusi.(9)
In this essay, Pound placed as one axis of the discussion thought of a
sculptor, Henri Gaurdier-Brzeska, who was his friend in London. He was
a member of the Vorticist movement started by leadership of Wyndham Lewis
and Pound in 1914. He was killed in action in the Great War.
Gaudier-Brzeska, like Brancusi, at first was influeced by works of Auguste
Rodin. But later on both of them revolted from Rodin tradition. Pound observed
in their works their inclinations to feel beauty of material and purgation
of rhetoric (10).
What Pound might be saying is that to feel beauty of material is to choose
material for its beauty and for its inevitable necessity. If we perceive
sculpture as an objet not as a mere form, material cannot be separated
from form. Marble is chosen because it is marble, not because it is easily
carved. When necessary, sculptor must take up stone not easy to carve.
Brancusi is said to have had an idea that the base is a part of sculpture(11).
In such a notion, the material and form of the base must be chosen to attain
unity or contrast of sculptural work itself and its base. In the combination,
the idea of collage might be reflected. Pound felt in the Aerial
Bird(L'Oiseau dans l'espace) by Brancusi an analogy with jade
and netsuke works for it stands on the diminished base.(12)
As for rhetoric, Pound wrote, "no one who understood Gaudier was fooled
by the cheap Viennese Michaelangelism and rhetoric of Mestrovic."(13)
In the modern age when people are required of complicated and rapid thinking,
cheap rhetoric based upon faithful reproduction and dramatization of object
is grasped at once, and cannot evoke emotion. When new things and forms
were appearing sequentially, forms that caught people's eyes were locomotives
and automobiles, and no longer were sculptural works. When people wanted
to enjoy melodramas, they could go to movie theater. Purgation of rhetoric
might have been to open a new horizon in sculpture in such an age.
After revolted from the Rodin-Maillol mixture, "Gaudier had developed
a sort of form-fugue or form-sonata by a combination of form," and
"Brancusi has set out on the maddeningly more difficult of exploration
toward getting all the form into one form," wrote Pound in the essay.
The process of Brancusi is "as long as any Buddist's contemplation
of the universe or as any medieval saint's contemplation of devine love,
-- as long and even paradoxical as the final remarks in the Divina Commedia,"
wrote Pound. " It is a search easily begun, and wholly unending."
The vestiges are seen in his Bird in which work "there is perhaps
six months' work and twenty years of knowledge between one model of the
erect bird and another, though they appear identical in photography,"
wrote Pound. (14)
According to Pound, the ovoid of Brancusi might be "a master-key to
the world of form." Putting it another way, "every one of the
thousand angles of approach to statue ought to be interesting."(15)
Here Pound might be thinking of a similar approach that can be taken in
poetry. A long poem that ought to be interesting from every one of the
thousand angles. Poem as Sculpture, that might be The Cantos.
As for the ovoid of Brancusi, Pound thought " Brancusi is meditating
upon pure form free from all terrestrial gravitation."(16) And he
wrote, "the measure of his success in this experiment (unfinished
and probably unfinishable) is that from some angles at least the ovoid
does come to life and appear ready to levitate." (17) With the ideal
form in marble, an approach is made "to the infinite by form, by precisely
the highest possible degree of consciousness of formal perfection,"
says Pound.(18)
Pound included Brancusi's words and his "Bird" in The Cantos.(19)
In the list of books possessed by Brancusi and now preserved in l'atelier
Brancusi reconstructed at the Pompidou center in Paris, we can see the
title, Gaudier-Brzeska, a memoir.(20, 21) This might have been presented
by its author, Ezra Pound.
Notes
1) Pound, Ezra : Guide to Kulchur,New Directions,1970.p.84.
2) La collection l'atelier Brancusi, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997.
p.58-9.
3) Wilhelm, J.J.: Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925, The
Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1990. p.274. ( cited from McAlmon, Robert
: Being Geniuses Together 1920-1930, North Point, 1968.)
4) Pound, Ezra: The selected letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915-1924,
ed. by Timothy Materer, Duke Univ. Press, 1991. p.216.
5) Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (ed.
by Timothy Materer), New Directions, 1985, p.127-8.
6) The selected letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, p. 10.
7) ibid., p.1-16.
8) Pound, Ezra : "Brancusi", Ezra Pound and visual arts
(ed. and introduction by Harriet Zinnes), New Directions, 1980. p. 211-214.
(Originally published in The Little Review, VIII, 1, Autumn 1921.
Also reprinted in Pound, Ezra: Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New
Directions,1968. p441)
9) Nakahara, Yusuke: Brancusi, Bijutushuppansha, 1986. p.209.( in
Japanese)
10) Ezra Pound and visual arts , p.212.
11) Nakahara, Yusuke: op. cit., p.236.
12) Ezra Pound and visual arts , p.213.
13) ibid. p.211.
14) ibid. p.212.
15) ibid. p.213.
16) ibid.
17) ibid.
18) ibid. p.213-214.
19) Pound, Ezra : The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New directions, 1995.
p.579, 580, 697, 821.
20) La collection l'atelier Brancusi, p.245.
21). Pound, Ezra : Gaudier-Brzeska, A Memoir, New Directions,1974.
(Photo: cover of La collection l'atelier Brancusi, Centre Georges
Pompidou, 1997.)
Copyright (C)1999 Hideo Nogami
