Constantin Brancusi
Constantin Brancusi, 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, 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 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
Encyclopædia
Britannica
