Sculpture: Plaster, 47.5 cm (h). Private collection.
Modeled in 1912, Une muse is one of the pivotal compositions of Brancusi’s early maturity. It is the culmination of a sequence of sculptures inspired by the features of Baroness Renée-Irana Frachon, who three years earlier had served as the model for La muse endormie, the first in a long sequence of delicate, ovoid heads – radiant in their formal purity – that would preoccupy Brancusi for well over a decade. With its contemplative pose and sightless, internalized gaze, the present Muse is not only a vision of woman as inspiration, as Brancusi’s title suggests, but an embodiment of the artistic process itself.
The genesis of Une muse may be found in a stylized, mask-like portrait that Brancusi made in 1909 of Baroness Frachon, whom he had met two years earlier. Already clearly evident in La Baronne R.F. are the characteristic anatomical features of the present sculpture: the oval head, textured hair, exaggerated brows, thin nose, and tiny mouth. Later the same year, the baroness posed once again for Brancusi; this time, she later recalled, the sculptor “asked me to sit down and to close my eyes, to keep my face still so that he could capture the expression of serenity one has in sleep”. The result was La muse endormie of 1909-1910, an attenuated female head with pared-down, abstracted features and partially effaced eyes.
The pristine ovoid form of La muse endormie also served as the starting point for the present composition, which Brancusi undertook in 1912. Margit Rowell has written, “The ovoid shape of the head and the delicate facial features indicate that Muse is yet another portrait of Baroness Renée Frachon; the intensified stylization and asymmetrical, attenuated features indeed recall Sleeping Muse. However, in comparison to the simpler, more contained works that preceded it, Muse shows a new sculptural complexity”. The head is now upright rather than recumbent, supported by an elegantly curving neck and fragment of chest. The left cheek rests lightly against the raised left palm, a gesture that Brancusi had tentatively essayed in Femme se regardant dans un miroir of 1909 (subsequently re-carved as the notorious Princesse X) and to which he would return later in 1912 with Mademoiselle Pogany. In Une muse, the gesture lends the figure a meditative and introspective, but undeniably wakeful, quality. No longer a nascent, quiescent being–the metaphorical egg of creation–the ovoid form has now been incorporated into an image of developed humanity, capable of cognition and creativity.