For an old Brancusi hand like me, the dust jacket of Anna Chave’s recent book on the sculptor could only be a bad omen.¹ It shows a long, slender, black marble Bird in Space mounted on a tall base, the whole so slanted as to appear in danger of falling off the book. The typography, too, is slanted every which way off the horizontal; the author’s name is angled down at the title, Constantin Brancusi, with a strong hint of confrontation, even conflict. There follows the book’s subtitle, “Shifting the Bases of Art,” an unsettling formula, because if the jacket layout says anything, it is not “shifting,” but “tipping” or “toppling”—which is another matter. Add to this a doubt about who is doing the “shifting.” Type-size indicates Chave; proximity to the name above, Brancusi. Add also the double sense of “bases,” as the plural of both “base” and “basis.”

The jacket, then, projects an ambiguous message, a disturbing “polyvalency” of the kind that Anna Chave, an associate professor at Queens College, so often finds in her subject. Book-design gamesmanship continues by other means. The white of the jacket darkens to the gray of the binding and again to the black of the endpapers. For an observer like me, who thinks of Brancusi’s sculpture as a white art, calling for and giving off light, this black is doubly dire in view of his habitual white working clothes and the white-walled studio that always impressed his visitors. This