Narrator 1: In a 1949 essay, the British writer Robert Payne describes a journey through Brancusi’s studio. Here are some excerpts from his writing:
Narrator 2: The bell rang outside the great square studio in the Impasse Ronsin. There is a long pause. You hear the bell echoing inside the studio. You know he is old and hard of hearing, and sometimes has no desire to receive visitors. And then at last he comes, and there is on the old red face the smile of a young child.
Immediately, almost before you have entered the great barn-like studio, he motions to you to keep still while, like a conjuror performing with finesse the first of a series of tricks, he switches on the current which makes the turn-table revolve. And on this turn-table, gliding rather than revolving, there moves the polished bronze statue he calls Leda.
A fish, in blue slate-coloured stone, also revolves; and if its shape reminds you of the flint axe-heads of our ancestors. And behind rise the white dove columns of wood moving into endless height. Around the room there are still more birds and fishes, so that you feel you are in a forest where only birds and fishes remain. It is all light and the beating of wings.
We had wandered freely round the studio. Sometimes Brancusi would snatch off a dust-cover, revealing an egg, a portrait, a tortoise made of wood, and almost hidden away there were some sketches. I asked if he had made many drawings. He pulled on his cigarette, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why draw?' he said. 'We have to go back to the simplest things—the shapes of birds, fishes, columns—and it is hard to go back to these beginnings.’
Narrator 2: This audio was generated with automated voices.
Excerpted from: Robert Payne, “A Meeting with Brancusi,” World Review, no. 8 (1949): 61–65.