Brancusi, Constantin

Brancusi, Constantin (b Hobitza, 19 Feb. 1876; d Paris, 16 Mar. 1957). Romanian sculptor, active for almost all his career in Paris (he became a French citizen the year before his death), one of the most revered and influential of 20th-century artists. He settled in Paris in 1904 (according to his own romanticized account he had walked from Romania) and spent several years of poverty and hardship there. In 1906 he was introduced to Rodin, whose offer to take him on as assistant Brancusi refused with the famous comment that ‘No other trees can grow in the shadow of an oak.’ His work of this time was in fact influenced by Rodin's surface animation, but from 1907 Brancusi began creating a distinctive style, based on his feeling that ‘what is real is not the external form but the essence of things’. From this time his work (in both stone and bronze) consisted largely of variations on a small number of themes (heads, birds, a couple embracing—The Kiss) in which he simplified shapes and smoothed surfaces into immaculately pure forms that sometimes approach complete abstraction. He was particularly fond of ovoid shapes—their egglike character suggesting generation and birth and symbolizing his own creative gifts. (His woodcarvings, on the other hand, are rougher—closer to the Romanian folk-art tradition and to African sculpture.)

Brancusi's name was established abroad after five of his sculptures were shown at the Armory Show, New York, in 1913, and during the 1920s he became newsworthy when he was involved in two celebrated art scandals. In 1920 his Princess X was removed by police from the Salon des Indépendants because it had been denounced as indecent (there is a clear resemblance to a phallus); and in 1926 he had a dispute with the US Customs authorities. They attempted to tax his Bird in Space (one of his most abstract works) as raw metal, rather than treat it as sculpture, which was duty free. Brancusi was forced to pay up to get the work released for exhibition, but he successfully sued the Customs Office, winning the court decision in 1928. By this time he had a growing international reputation and during the 1930s he travelled widely, notably to India in 1937–8 to discuss designs for a Temple of Meditation (never built) for the Maharaja of Indore. Later in 1938 his largest work was inaugurated—a complex of sculpture (including the enormous Endless Column, nearly 30 m (100 ft) high) for the public park at Tirgu Jiu near his birthplace. By the time of his death he was widely regarded as the greatest sculptor of the 20th century.

Brancusi's originality in reducing natural forms to their ultimate—almost abstract—simplicity had profound effects on the course of 20th-century sculpture. He introduced Modigliani to sculpture, Archipenko and Epstein owed much to him, and Gaudier-Brzeska was his professed admirer. Later, Carl Andre claimed to have been inspired by Endless Column, converting its repeated modules into his horizontal arrangements of identical units. More generally, Henry Moore wrote of Brancusi: ‘Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds—all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this undergrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.’ On his death Brancusi bequeathed to the French government his studio and its contents, which included versions of most of his best works (they often exist in multiple replicas in different materials). The studio has now been reconstructed at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. There is another outstanding Brancusi collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.