"Brancusi was a wonderful little man, bearded, with dark and sharp eyes, he was somewhere in the middle between a smart peasant and a real divinity". With such words Peggy Guggenheim describes, in her biography published in Italy by Rizzoli, the Romanian artist, which she met in Paris during the war years and with whom she stroke up a far from disinterested friendship (Peggy hoped to inherit his celebrated atelier). She also hoped to be able to negotiate a convenient price for the purchase of the two works now appearing in her Venetian collection: the “Maiastra”, circa 1912 and “Bird in space”, also in bronze, of 1940. The first was bought for one thousand dollars by Paul Poiret’s sister; the second, after that Brancusi had asked 4.000 dollars, was purchased in dollars in New York, but the artist was paid in francs and so Peggy managed to save 1000 dollars. These two statues are currently exhibited, in an almost sacred environment, inside the exposition “Brancusi. The white work”, open until 22 may at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

White is a dominant colour for Costantin Brancusi (Hobitza, Romania 1876 – Paris 1957): he dressed in white; his famous atelier, now recreated at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, was entirely covered with the white powder of his works, as Peggy reports in her autobiography; and what is more, this colour is extremely appropriate for the abstraction process to which Brancusi submitted the several versions of all his works (his tension towards infiniteness, that is to say his leaning towards divinity, is one of the two aspects stressed by Peggy). Yet in this case the definition “white work” is referred to his activity as a photographer, rigorously in black and white. It is the first time in Italy that an exhibition focusing on this aspect of his activity is organized. Quoting Paola Mola, one of the exhibition’s curators together with Marielle Tabart, which takes care of theAtelier Brancusi at the Centre Georges Pompidou : “in our times driven by lightness, this aspect of Brancusi’s production turns out to be highly modern. It is nonetheless necessary to get rid of a misconception: Brancusi’s photographs go widely beyond their documentary value, since they aspire to be not only an sculptures’interpretation, but to stand as independent works of art.

Through photography Brancusi (as showed in the first of the eight rooms forming the exhibition) intends to settle the original context of the atelier in which his works were hosted using some strict spacial relationships. He also aims to give a reading starting from different perspectives, with alterations on the theme of the same sculpture, as in visible in the work representing a head shot from different perspectives and compared with the plaster originals placed in the second room. As we go on, the discourse is exemplified by continuous little mutations, a process that Brancusi applied also to his sculptures, chasing an otherwise impossible perfection, going on until photographies take on an expressive independence of their own, a well recognizable symbolic value. But if we say that photography is carved light, then the work “The firebird”, a metaphore of the man’s need of elevation, is the one that best represents ignition, also thanks to the bronze surface which has been levigated with an extremely meticolous manual skill, deriving from an age-old artisanal tradition, typical of peasants. In the last two rooms are exposed photographs with independent subjects (flowers, a moving eagle, a self-portrait) and some frames taken from the film “Leda” shooted in 1936, in which is blatant the bond with Man Ray. Brancusi was indeed very open to the innovations grown inside historical avant-gardes, even remaining faithful to his Romanian cultural roots.