Artworks

This sculpture is the portrait of Princess Marie Bonaparte. The Great-grand-niece of Napoleon, she was married with royal title Princess George of Greece and Denmark. She was an infamous French author and psychoanalyst and had visited Brancusi and requested he do a portrait of her.
Brancusi remembered “She had a beautiful bust, but ugly legs and was terribly vain, she was looking in a mirror all the time, even during lunch…discreetly placing the mirror on the table, looking furtive. She was vain and sensual.” This perfectly describes the sculpture he subsequently carved in stone Woman Looking in a Mirror in 1909.
But Brancusi refused to part with the sculpture and instead Princess Maria received a gouache painting.
During 1909 there is a shift in Brancusi’s perspective away from a figurative outlook, towards purity and simplification. The Woman Looking in a Mirror, is the pivotal catalyst for this launch in Brancusi’s sculptural career. Which puts him in the highest regard as the most important sculptor in the history of Modern Art.
In 1912, just 3 years after carving Woman Looking in a Mirror of the Princess, the artist photographed, drew, and painted the sculpted piece. Before re-carving it into the work we know as Princess X.
This extraordinary progression adds priceless value to the remaining 5 gouache and 3 drawings and the photograph of Woman Looking in a Mirror. These provide significant clues into our understanding of the artist’s vision and priorities and his desire to further art history. It is a real movement. And the sculpture, which no longer exists, Brancusi made sure to record and illustrate in articles and exhibitions on his work during his lifetime. That he chose to continue with this sculpture rather than begin a new piece is significant. It demonstrates his intention to simplify, as well as conceptualize his feelings toward his subject, The Princess. His personal understanding of her, in time, laid bare by her public notoriety as the lover of the French President, Muse to Freud and author of studies into female sexuality.
Princess X was one of Brancusi’s most controversial works, the bronze version was temporarily banned at the 1920 Salon des Independents in Paris on the grounds of obscenity.
“C’est la femme!” It is woman! Was Brancusi’s response to the slight. “It is the very synthesis of Woman; it is the eternal female of Goethe, reduced to her essence”.
The re-carving of Woman Looking in a Mirror, into Princess X is not only a work of simplification but marks a movement into Abstraction and also a bold inaugural statement into conceptualism. I cannot draw parallel to a more insightful and ironic depiction and progression of a subject.