Brancusi, Constantin

born Feb. 21, 1876, Hobiţa, Rom.

died March 16, 1957, Paris, Fr.

Romanian-born French sculptor.

He became adept at carving wooden farm implements as a child and later studied in Bucharest and Munich and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, having walked most of the way from Munich. He first exhibited in Paris in 1906. In 1908 he executed Sleeping Muse, influenced by Auguste Rodin, and The Kiss, his first truly original work. He developed a geometric style that became his hallmark, reducing natural forms to an abstract simplicity. He exhibited five works, including Mademoiselle Pogany, in the 1913 Armory Show. One of his favourite themes was a bird in flight; his most famous treatment was the celebrated polished-bronze Bird in Space (1919). Through numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, he achieved great fame and success, and he is regarded as a pioneer of modern abstract sculpture.

* * *

▪ Romanian-French sculptor

Introduction

original name Romanian  Constantin Brîncuși 

born February 21, 1876, Hobiţa, Romania

died March 16, 1957, Paris, France

      pioneer of modern abstract sculpture whose works in bronze and marble are characterized by a restrained, elegant use of pure form and exquisite finishing. A passionate wood-carver, he produced numerous wood sculptures, often with a folk flavour, and he frequently carved prototypes for works later executed in other materials. He is best known for his abstract sculptures of ovoid heads and birds in flight.

Early life and works

      Brancusi's parents, Nicolas and Maria Brancusi, were peasants who lived in the Romanian countryside; like other village children of that time, Constantin did not go to school. From the age of seven he worked as a herdsman, first watching the family flock, then working for other people in the Carpathian Mountains. It was then that the young shepherd learned to carve wood, a popular art in rural Romania for making spoons, bedposts, cheese presses, and facades of homes, all of which were ornamented with carvings. The style of these ornaments would influence several of Brancusi's works. In his tastes, his bearing, and his way of life he would forever maintain the uncomplicated tastes of his origins.

      When he was nine years old Brancusi went to Tîrgu Jiu, a town near Pestisani, in the Oltenia region of Romania, to look for work. First he worked for a dyer; two years later he went into the service of a grocer in Slatina; and then he became a domestic in a public house in Craiova, Oltenia's chief town, where he remained for several years. He retained his taste for working in wood and undertook elaborate carving projects, such as the construction of a violin from an orange crate. Such feats attracted the attention of an industrialist, who in 1894 entered him in the Craiova School of Arts and Crafts. In order to attend the school, Brancusi had to learn how to read and write on his own.

      In 1896, at age 20, Brancusi began to travel for the first time: he went to Vienna on the Danube and hired himself out as a woodworker to earn money for his stay. Since his ambition was to be a sculptor, in 1898 he entered the contest for admission to the Bucharest School of Fine Arts and was admitted. Although he was far more attracted to the work of the “independents” than to that of the academicians at his school, he nevertheless studied modeling and anatomy seriously.

      In 1903, on his return from military service, Brancusi's interest was aroused by the fame of Auguste Rodin (Rodin, Auguste), which had spread from Paris to Bucharest. Rodin's audacious conceptions inspired the enthusiasm of the avant-garde and the indignation of the academicians. The example of Rodin inspired Brancusi to become curious about what was going on in the art world beyond the boundaries of his country, and so he went to Munich, Germany, where he stayed until the spring of 1904. He then decided to go to Paris, a costly trip for a man of modest means. He made the greater part of the trip on foot, with his pack on his back, and had to sell his watch to pay for a boat crossing on Lake Constance. He arrived in Paris in July.

      Brancusi entered the École des Beaux-Arts, where he again entered an academician's workshop, that of Antonin Mercié, who derived his work from Florentine Renaissance statuary. Brancusi worked with him for two years, but in order to earn a living he worked odd jobs. Orders for portraits from a few compatriots also helped him through difficult times. In 1906 he exhibited for the first time in Paris, in the state-sponsored Salon and then at the Salon d'Automne. With a spirit that was still quite Classical but showing great energy, his first works were influenced by the sinewy work of Rodin. In order to get away from that influence, Brancusi refused to enter Rodin's workshop, for, he said, “one can do nothing beneath great trees.”

      In 1907, commissioned to execute a rich landowner's funeral monument in the Buzau Cemetery in Romania, Brancusi sculpted a statue of a young girl kneeling, entitled The Prayer, which represented the first stage of his evolution toward simplified forms. He participated for the first time in the Tinerimea Artistica exposition, an annual exhibition of new talent, in Bucharest, and rented a workshop in the Montparnasse area of Paris. Rodin's influence appeared in Brancusi's work for one last time in 1908 in the first version of the Sleeping Muse, a sculpture of a woman's face in which the features suggest an unformed block of marble. Also in 1908 Brancusi executed his first truly original work, The Kiss, in which the vertical figures of two entwined adolescents form a closed volume with symmetrical lines. In one of his first experiments with direct carving, he affirmed the pure, organic use of form that was to become his trademark and that would influence the work of numerous artists, most immediately a series of sculptures executed by his friend Amedeo Modigliani (Modigliani, Amedeo) starting in 1910.

Maturity

 In 1910 Brancusi executed a seminal version of the Sleeping Muse. The sculpture is an isolated, ovoid-shaped head executed in bronze, with details of the face drastically reduced so that the work has polished, pristine curves. Brancusi would experiment with this ovoid form frequently over the years in both plaster and bronze. In 1924 he created a pure marble ovoid shape devoid of any detail entitled Beginning of the World; as the title suggests, for Brancusi, this ovoid mass represented the very essence of form, or a sort of primal foundation of form that the artist did not care to alter with traditional sculptural techniques of modeling.

      Brancusi extended his experiments with simplifying forms to his exploration of the bird in 1912 with Maiastra, a sculpture named after a miraculous bird from Romanian popular legends. The first version of the work was made of marble, with the bird, purified in form, represented with its head raised in flight. Brancusi followed this with 28 other versions over the next two decades. After 1919 his birds evolved into a series of polished-bronze sculptures, all entitled Bird in Space. The elliptical, slender lines of these figures put the very essence of rapid flight into concrete form.

      During these years of radical experimentation, Brancusi's work began to have an increasingly large, international audience. In 1913, while continuing to exhibit in the Paris Salon des Indépendants, he participated in the Armory Show in New York, Chicago, and Boston, showing five works including Mademoiselle Pogany, a schematized bust that would have numerous variations. Already known in the United States, Brancusi found faithful collectors there over subsequent decades. Meanwhile, critics around the world attacked the radical nature of his work.

      Above all, Brancusi loved carving itself, which required, he said, “a confrontation without mercy between the artist and his materials.” He often carved in oak or in chestnut objects that he would later treat in bronze or marble. His work reflected the African tradition of direct carving. Indeed, like many avant-garde European artists at the time, Brancusi was interested in the “primitive” qualities of African arts. His first sculpture in wood, The Prodigal Son, in 1914, was very close to abstraction; it is a piece of rudely carved oak with the scarcely perceptible features of a human being. He would follow this path with a whole series of wood sculptures that are among his strangest works. He attached great importance to the wooden base of a sculpture and always constructed it himself, sometimes out of five or six superimposed pieces. (Brancusi even constructed his furniture, most of his utensils, and his pipe with his own hands.) In 1918 he sculpted in wood the first version of the Endless Column. Created through the repetition of superimposed symmetrical elements, this column, inspired by the pillars of Romanian peasant houses, embodied the need for spiritual elevation that Brancusi often expressed in his works.

      Brancusi's contribution to the Salon of 1920, Princess X, a portrait of an imaginary person that takes on a curiously phallic form, created a scandal. The police intervened and forced him to remove the work because it led to improper interpretation. In 1922 he sculpted the first versions of The Fish in marble and the Torso of a Young Man in wood. He returned to Romania for the first time in 1924, and in 1926 he visited the United States for an important exhibition of his works at the Brummer Gallery in New York. His shipments from France involved him in a two-year court case with U.S. customs officials because a work in copper, Bird in Space, was so abstract that officials refused to believe it was sculpture: Brancusi was accused of clandestinely introducing an industrial part into the United States. In 1928 he again traveled to the United States, where he had numerous buyers, and won his court case.

Late life and works

      The Maharajah of Indore went to see Brancusi in Paris in 1933 and commissioned him to create a temple that would house his sculptures. Brancusi worked several years to create this temple, and in 1937 he went to India on the maharajah's invitation. The latter's death, however, prevented Brancusi from realizing the project. In the meantime Brancusi had returned to New York for a new exhibit at the Brummer Gallery in 1933, and in 1934 he participated in the exhibition “20th Century Painting and Sculpture” at the Chicago Renaissance Society. He returned to Romania again in 1937 and in 1938 for the inauguration of three monumental works in a public garden in Tîrgu Jiu: new enormous steel versions of the Endless Column, Gate of the Kiss, and Table of Silence.

      In 1939 Brancusi made his last trip to the United States to participate in the “Art in Our Time” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He continued to explore his favourite themes in his late years, including the bird. His last important work was the Flying Turtle in 1943. Henceforth, numerous exhibitions in the United States and in Europe would secure his fame. The largest was an exhibit at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1955. By a naturalization decree dated June 13, 1952, he acquired French citizenship.

      Brancusi willed to the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris everything his workshop contained (more than 80 sculptures) on the condition that the workshop itself be moved to the museum and restored to its original condition. Part of this gift included hundreds of photographic prints he took, beginning in the 1920s, of his work and studio.

Jean Selz Ed.

Additional Reading

The artist's life and work are examined in Carola Giedion-Welcker (ed.), Constantin Brancusi (1959; originally published in German, 1958), which constitutes a serious analysis of his work, with numerous photographs; Sidney Geist, Brancusi: The Sculpture and Drawings (1975), and Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture, newly rev. and augmented ed. (1983); Radu Varia, Brancusi, trans. from French (1986); Eric Shanes, Constantin Brancusi (1989); and Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, and Ann Temkin, Constantin Brancusi, 1876–1957 (1995). Specific aspects of the artist's output are examined in Athena T. Spear (Athena Tacha), Brancusi's Birds (1969); Barbu Brezianu, Brancuşi in Romania (1976, reissued 1999; originally published in Romanian, 1976); Marielle Tabart and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Brancusi: Photographer (1979; originally published in French, 1977); and Margit Rowell and André Paleologue, Brancusi vs. the United States: The Historic Trial, 1928 (1999).

* * *