Narrator 1: Many artists had studios at the Impasse Ronsin, and for eight years, American painter Reginald Pollack lived next door to Brancusi. Here is part of a 1988 essay in which Pollack shares his memories of Brancusi and his studio:
Narrator 2: When I first met Brancusi, I was dazzled by this artist who seemed, in his studio, to be a sorcerer in his temple. But as the years passed, we grew friendlier.
Once he dropped in when my wife was about to cook a tongue, which he examined with distaste, leaving abruptly. Twenty minutes later he returned, just as the tongue was ready to be eaten. Without preamble, he removed it from the table, saying that it was fit only for cats. He set a leg of lamb he’d just roasted in his forge in the center of the table. ‘Ah, you are also a cook?’ my wife said. Brancusi laughed delightedly and declared that he was one of the greatest cooks in the world.
He also used to reminisce with pleasure about the escapades—bacchanales, he called them—he had had with the medical students from Necker Hospital nearby. He’d invite the interns over, roast a gigot on the forge, serve it with asti spumante, and they would all dance around his studio, drunk and naked.
At times, talking to him in his studio, I had the feeling that he wanted me to believe all his work had sprung into existence as the direct consequence of some secret, magical act. He maintained this public image so skillfully that posterity has accepted it at face value, remembering him as a modern-day artistic shaman. The myth captures a part of Brancusi that was larger than life; it also obscures the human side of him I knew.
Narrator 1: This audio was generated with automated voices.
Excerpted from: Reginald Pollack, “Shaman and Showman,” Art & Antiques (May 1968): 94–98, 114–116.