Constantin Brâncuși e o ideal feminino

 

“Princess X”, here posted is said to be a sculptured rendering of the French princess, Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, by the artist Constantin Brâncuși.  Although Brancusi hardly courted controversy, he was at the centre of two of modern art’s most notorious scandals: the U.S. Customs office’s refusal in 1926 to classify Bird in Space as a work of art, and the removal of Princess X from the Salon des Indépendants in 1920 on grounds of obscenity.  Although Brancusi’s friends and colleagues signed a manifesto, published in Le Journal du Peuple (February 25, 1920) to protest the authorities’ decision; Picasso (although some accounts cite Matisse) was one to have declared the work a phallus.  Even if Brancusi was infuriated by the comparison, insisting that the sculpture was a portrayal of a feminine ideal and denied alternate readings that characterized it as a sign of his desire for its model or a formulation of sexual duality, today’s suggestion that this portrait of Marie Bonaparte is that of her difficulty in achieving sexual fulfilment, makes Brâncuși’s statement almost irrefutable, in a sense.  A portrayal of a feminine ideal could include that of sexual fulfilment.  That said, the fact that Marie is said to have engaged in research, whose results, published in 1924, in the medical journal Bruxelles-Médical on the basis of studying her frigidity on the grounds of measured distances between the clitoris and the vagina in 243 women, does not preclude Picasso was right in his own affirmations… Is there not enough documentation stating that a clitoris is nothing else but an internal penis; a micro-phallus if you wish?  Marie Bonaparte modelled for the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi.  His sculpture of her, “Princess X,” created a scandal because of what an apparent majority came to justify it to be removed from the 1919-1920 Salon; it appearance to be nothing else but a large gleaming bronze phallus. This phallus to symbolize the model’s obsession with the penis and her lifelong quest to achieve vaginal orgasm by reaching hers: the clitoris.

 

 

*Este post, um rascunho de 2015, pode agora ser melhor entendido, na insustentada e aparente dualidade orgásmica, por quem segue Masters of Sex, agora em exibição na Netflix.