Brâncuși, dispensing with detail to instead embrace universal forms that resonate with a unique and timeless sense of purity, conceived an entirely new mode of sculpture.
Danaïde, with its radical formal simplicity, graceful refinement, and compelling presence, is one of the finest of the artist’s groundbreaking works, pieces which remain as entrancing and transportive today as when they were made over a century ago.
Executed circa 1913, Danaïde was inspired by a young Hungarian artist, Margit Pogany, whom Brancusi had met in Paris in 1910. The artist was deeply taken by her, absorbing her small face, wide almond-shaped eyes, and dark hair, which she wore in the same neat chignon as can be seen in the present work, before distilling her features into his own distinct sculptural idiom in both Danaïde, as well as the Mademoiselle Pogany series. Portraiture was one of the most important themes of Brancusi’s revolutionary form of sculpture. Yet, his approach to this purportedly mimetic genre entirely broke with the past. He interpreted his muses’ salient features without recourse to traditional figurative language. Instead, he conveyed these figures through his own powerful purity of vision, transforming the female face into an abstracted assortment of harmonious forms. As a result, the head of Pogany appears here as a confluence of unending curves, all of which echo continuously around the sculpture, the gilded surface conjuring myriad reflections of light that heighten this graceful sense of movement. Using one of his most favoured forms of this period, the ovoid, Brancusi pictured Pogany with an ever-so-slight downward look. Sweeping planar arcs denote her gaze and large eyes, while from behind, her neat bun forms a spiral, a serpentine lock of hair tucked just behind her ear. In this way, Brancusi has taken the nuanced physiognomic detail of Pogany and reduced it to its most elemental parts. “It is not the outward form, which is real, it is the essence of things,” Brancusi once stated. “On this basis, it is impossible for anyone to express anything real by imitating surface appearances”
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