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Romanian Cultural Center

            Along with activities concentrated on books, the two centers began organizing literary evenings, poetry recitals, and roundtables with readers and authors, followed by the authors autographing their books. The two institutions included in their panoply of activities film screenings, conferences, symposia, colloquia, and exhibitions on diverse topics of interest in the United States and Romania. Both centers are the ambassadors of their cultures and serve a variety of patrons.

            In Romania, the audience of the American Cultural Center consists of scholars, researchers, students, and the general public interested in American culture, literature, music, art, science, technology, economy, business, and public affairs. In the United States, the patrons of the Romanian Cultural Center are American historians, linguists, folklorists—Romanianists—interested in researching Romania's past, evolution, and development during the transition period that followed the bloody year 1989, which marked the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The Romanian Cultural Center is visited by economists and business people interested in starting businesses and investing in this part of the world, and it also serves the needs of a large Romanian community living in the New York area.

            The collections of the Romanian Cultural Center in New York consist of approximately twenty thousand books both in Romanian and English, Romanian journals, newspapers, scores, and eight hundred records supplied by the National Library in Bucharest. The materials are shipped to New York already processed. The books have the call number1 already inscribed on the label placed on the lower section of the spine (for easy retrieval for the shelf browser), and on the book plate affixed on the verso of the front cover, in the upper left corner. Both the inscription and the artwork on the book plate are heather gray on a white background, printed offset on coated paper. The book plate is 2.5 by 3.5 inches, while the spine label is 2.5 by 1.25 inches. The inscription on the book plate is in the Romanian language (Bibliotheca Româna-New York), while the spine label bears only the acronym (BR-NY).

            The book plate is a stylized representation of the Gate of the Kiss, a monumental sculpture by Constantin Brâncusi (1876-1957). The Gate of the Kiss has a tooled surface, broken by the pores of the material. While appearing to be made of two columns and a massive lintel, it is actually constructed of a number of blocks and slabs of ocher travertine. The lintel is incised with a schematic rendition of the kiss repeated sixteen times on each wide face and four times on each narrow face. The entire frieze shows forty pairs of lovers. This is Brâncusi's only work whose surfaces are decorated.

            The Gate of the Kiss relates to Romanian much-decorated folk architecture in wood. The short columns, in their in-curving surfaces, invite us to consider their interiority. The circles of the "eye" are a masterstroke in their massive orthogonal setting.           

Placed just below the areas of great pressure on the Gate, their buoyancy mitigates the blunt abutment of column and lintel. If the "eyes" are visible at a distance, giving the Gate a mask-like presence when seen from far off, at a close approach the population of lovers on the lintel rises to legibility, aerating the mass on which it is traced.2 

The eight-fold repetition of the "eyes" and the forty embracing couples are not read as mere redundancy. The number four had a sacred character during antiquity and in folk mythologies. It represented the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire; the four cardinal directions; the four winds; the four seasons; the four faces of certain divinities and demons. Repetition makes the Gate of the Kiss formally intelligible at a glance and in the same moment delivers its message with incantatory insistence. The theme of the Gate of the Kiss is love and community, upheld by sexual energy, love defeating death. The Gate of the Kiss does not remind up of a monument for the dead; it is rather a hymn to life and love.

            Constantin Brâncusi was born in Hobita-Pestisani, a village in southern Romania. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, and he was so eager to launch his career that in 1904 he walked most of the way from Munich to Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, then working for the great master of naturalism, Auguste Rodin, Brâncusi struck out on his own. Looking to the art of ancient and non-Western cultures to find new avenues of expression, he applied motifs from Romanian folk art and African tribal sculpture to direct carving, a departure from the Western tradition of modeling and casting in plaster or bronze.

            Brâncusi worked in marble, plaster, stone, and wood, and spent a lifetime exploring a series or primary themes—women, children, animals, birds, and fish—whose forms became increasingly simplified over time. Although Brâncusi's mature work verged on pure abstraction, it was based on the natural world, often discernible with the aid of descriptive titles (e.g., Bird in Space, Flying Turtle, Sleep, Sleeping Muse, Chimera, Torment, Beginning of the World) recalling his conviction that "a true form should suggest infinity."

            In 1926 Brâncusi visited the United States for an exhibition of his works at the Brummer Gallery in New York. His works shipped from France involved him in a two-year court case with the United States Bureau of Customs, because his Bird in Space was so abstract that customs officials refused to believe it was a sculpture. Brâncusi was accused of clandestinely introducing an industrial part into the United States. Aided by American art critics and dealers, he won his case.

            In 1935 Brâncusi accepted the proposal to design a monument for the town of Târga-Jiu, near his birthplace. He returned to Romania to create a memorial to the soldiers who fought during the First Works War. He eventually created an ensemble of works, a triptych, to be placed along the "Avenue of Heroes" in the central park of the town. From the Table of Silence near the river Jiu, the visitors walk beneath the Gate of the Kiss, then continue past a church to a ninety-six-feet Endless Column reaching skyward. The column's endlessness derived from Brâncusi's need for spiritual elevation and his conviction that its identity depended not only on its height but also on the rhythm and proportion of its units.

            Constantin Brâncusi died in Paris on 16 March 1957 in the studio that he willed with its contents (more than eighty sculptures) to the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris on the condition that the workshop itself be removed to the museum and restored to its original condition.

            Brâncusi's powerful originality, which in its pursuit of simplicity and purity departed radically from nineteenth-century sculpture, distinguished him from all other schools and movements. His creativity was one of the most important influences in abstract sculpture during the first half of the twentieth century. 

Hermina G. B. Anghelscu

University of Texas at Austin

Austin, Texas  

Bookplate courtesy of the Romanian Cultural Center, New York. 

Notes

[Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 33, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 134-138.]