The Dedication from Constantin Brancusi

In September 1926, Constantin Brancusi arrived in New York to accompany the installation of his second exhibition in the United States together with Marcel Duchamp, the exhibition curator. The arrival of the two, and above all of Brancusi’s works, has mythical contours, and goes beyond the scope of art history. The us customs officials, who refused to catalog Brancusi’s sculptures as works of art – especially one of his iconic Bird in Space – and classified them under the “Kitchenware and Hospital Instruments” category, seized his work. The episode started a famous legal process, which would last for the next two years and have testimonies from various abstract art critics and defenders. In the end, Judge J. Waite declared that “whether or not we are in sympathy with these newer ideas and the schools which represent them, we think the fact of their existence and their influence upon the art worlds, as recognized by the courts, must be considered,” confirming that the conception of art that had been in place for centuries had been replaced.

A few days after Brancusi’s arrival in New York, Tarsila do Amaral and Oswald de Andrade, whom the sculptor befriended in Paris, married in São Paulo. It is worth imagining the scene: sitting in one of the wooden boxes where the sculptures traveled, Brancusi receives the news and, pausing the exhibition installation, dedicates a catalog that had just come off the press to the newlyweds, whom, however, he jokingly scolds for the rude way they left Paris without saying goodbye. The catalog’s yellowed page, with its unpretentious and affectionate dedication, condenses countless correspondences, relationships, exchanges, and comings and goings, such as the attraction Paris exerted on artists from all over the world in the 1920s; the penetration of modern art in the United States, which would culminate in the shift from Parisian centrality to New York from the 1940s onwards; the increasingly massive circulation of artworks through their reproduction; and the alliances and networks that Brazilian artists established with other professionals from an avant-garde environment that had become global.

Within the scope of an exhibition built from countless dialogues, exchanges, and discussions in and from various places over the world, it is essential to emphasize how art can bridge the gaps between different contexts, moments, and cosmovision and is always open to being re-signified by the changes that time and history impose. In this regard, both this statement and the works surrounding it point to possible encounters and frictions between works from very distinct contexts and periods and serve as a metonymy of the 34th Bienal, of its desire to establish unsuspected and illuminating relationships without giving up preserving the opacity of each of the works.