Narrator 1: Following a visit to the Impasse Ronsin in August 1923, the British writer Angus Wilson published an article titled: “A Visit to Brancusi’s.” Here is an excerpt from Wilson’s essay:
Narrator 2: A brisk, gritty shuffle on a marble-dusted floor, followed by an agitated “Entrez!” answers your knock on the great swing doors, and unceremoniously, but with the rarest courtesy, the Master himself shows you in.
Brancusi’s studio is rather like stepping suddenly out of the vortex of Paris into the middle of a still, white forest. Marbles and stands are strewn in disorder everywhere, yet despite this disorder the air hangs calm as if under Summer-morning chestnut trees; and into this living stillness sunrays slide from the high square windows, striking the finished pieces and revealing the loveliness of their form.
When you have seen everything, Brancusi takes you to a rough divan and shows you some of his own photographic reproductions, and makes the Turkish coffee, grinding it himself. There is an eloquence in the caress of his short, worn hands and in the critical swallow-glances of his deep-set eyes.
While he is heating the water, he tells you of his early life, of his years at the academies and how the study there cramped his work. And he says: ‘Look at the body of a man or of a woman. Isn't it a lovely thing? But how foolish to try to copy it! Is it not better for the artist to try to create something beautiful of his own?’
Narrator 1: This audio was generated with automated voices.
Excerpted from: Angus Wilson, “A Visit to Brancusi’s,” The New York Times (New York, NY), August 19, 1923.