FEATURE-Brancusi masterpieces in Romanian repair limbo
By Dina Kyriakidou
TARGU JIU, Romania, July 14 (Reuters) - In 1904, a young carpenter, stone mason
and flute player set out on foot from rural Romania to reach Paris and become
one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century.
Some 30 years later, Constantin Brancusi returned to the town of Targu Jiu on
the edge of the southwestern Carpathians to create the only monumental
sculptures of his career as a tribute to his homeland's fallen World War One
heroes.
But the works gracing the town's river-front park and hailed as one of the
world's most precious art treasures now lie broken or covered up after
post-communist Romania's unsuccessful attempt to restore them.
For more than a year, the stone pieces have been dismantled and the monumental
Gate of the Kiss has been covered with plastic and scaffolding, as authorities
try to resolve a wrangle with a local company that undertook the restoration but
failed to deliver.
"I hope the restoration is completed soon and the sculptures take their rightful
place in our country," Deputy Culture Minister Ioan Opris told Reuters. "They
are unique. Brancusi did not make any other open-air sculptures."
The Jiu river flows by the leafy park, where a visitor can walk under the five-metre
(16-foot) high Gate of the Kiss, through the Corridor of the Chairs to the Table
of Silence -- an Arthurian-inspired round table surrounded by 12 stools.
None of the hour-glass shaped stone stools are in place -- they were removed in
May 2002 for cleaning, structural improvements and repairs to their surface,
local officials said.
"The restoration was to be completed by August 2002," said Constantin Cretan, a
spokesman for the Targu Jiu town hall. "But there were problems because the
company did not have enough specialists to carry out the project."
"NO TIME TO LOSE"
The firm was dismissed after finishing 30 percent of the work, said ministry
director Paula Olteanu, who heads the project.
"There is no time to lose. We are very aware of the fact the delay works against
the stone," she said.
Partly funded by the World Bank, the project is estimated to cost about
$100,000. It has now been assigned to an Italian firm that was expected to
complete it later this year, Opris said.
Local officials say thousands visit the park every weekend, including many
foreigners, who come to this remote industrial town just for the Brancusi
sculptures.
"Visitors are not happy. They spend money to come here but they don't see the
works as they really are," Cretan said.
For the time being, the only work a visitor can enjoy is the Endless Column.
Hailed by UNESCO as a "masterpiece of modern art," it was taken down, restored
and reassembled in 2000.
About one mile (1.5 km) from the park, the 30 metre (100 feet) high stack of 15
rhomboid polished metal cubes, which Brancusi viewed as a "stairway to heaven,"
appears to almost float in the sky.
Romania's post-war communist rulers branded Brancusi a "representative of
decadent art" and declared him persona non grata. They tried but failed to
demolish the column, which came to symbolise the Romanian people's perseverance
against hardship, in the 1950s.
During decades of communism, the complex was badly neglected. Urban development
raised visual obstacles between the column and the park, intended as a unified
complex, and time eroded the surface of both the stone works and the metal
column.
The World Monuments Fund listed the sculptures among the world's 100 most
endangered sites and the World Bank contributed to the column's $2.6 million
restoration.
BIRDS AND MUSES
Best known for his polished metal or marble blade-like birds or his egg-shaped
sleeping muses, Brancusi also produced rough, almost primitive wood pieces. Some
appear inspired by the carved wooden columns holding up Romanian country
porches.
Born in the nearby village of Hobita in 1876, Romania's most celebrated artist
spent his early youth as a shepherd, an apprentice to a carpenter and stone
mason before studying at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts.
In 1904 he set out on foot -- through Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Switzerland
-- for Paris. There, he was influenced by Auguste Rodin. Associated with many of
the Dadaists in the 1920s, he resisted joining a movement.
His friends included artists like Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand
Leger and the author James Joyce.
Sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who was Brancusi's apprentice in Paris, wrote of his
mentor: "He wore white, his beard was then already white. He had two white dogs
that he fed with lettuce floating in milk. My memory of Brancusi is always of
whiteness and of his bright and smiling eyes.."
Brancusi donated the Targu Jiu complex to his country in 1937 but died in Paris
20 years later before he could complete his vision of a park filled with
sculptures, banned from Romania by its communist dictators.
