Brancusi, Constantin

Brancusi, Constantin (1876–1957). 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 was born in the village of Hobitza into a peasant family and learnt woodcarving whilst working as a shepherd in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1896 he won a scholarship to the Bucharest School of Fine Arts, and in 1903 he moved to Munich, then in 1904 to Paris, where he endured several years of poverty. (According to his own romanticized account, Brancusi made his way to Paris entirely on foot, but this has been doubted.) The first works he exhibited in Paris (at the Salon d'Automne in 1906) were influenced by Rodin, but when Rodin offered to take him on as an assistant, Brancusi refused with the famous comment, ‘No other trees can grow in the shadow of an oak.’ Soon he rejected Rodin's surface animation, and in 1907 he began creating a distinctive style, based on his feeling that ‘what is real is not the external form but the essence of things. Starting from this truth it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.’ 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 egg-like 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.)

In 1913 five of Brancusi's sculptures were shown at the Armory Show in New York. This helped to establish his name ( John Quinn, legal representative of the exhib ition, became an important patron of his work), and the following year Stieglitz gave him a one-man show. During the 1920s he became known to a wider public 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 became involved in 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 at the Brumner Gallery, New York, but he successfully sued the Customs Office, winning the court decision in 1928. By this time he had a growing international reputation and he travelled widely in the 1930s, including making a visit to India from December 1937 to January 1938 to discuss plans for a Temple of Meditation for the Maharajah of Indore. This was never built, but in the same period Brancusi did carry out his largest work, a complex of sculpture for the public park at Tirgu Jiu near his birthplace. The main elements of the scheme (which was inaugurated in October 1938) are the enormous Endless Column (about 30 metres high), which is a funerary monument to soldiers who died in the First World War (he made four other versions of this work), the Table of Silence, and the Gate of the Kiss. By his final years he was widely regarded as the greatest sculptor of the 20th century. He was rather vain and enjoyed the attention his status as a living legend gave him; he even took to talking about himself in the third person. Although he had many friends in the art world ( Marcel Duchamp and the composer Erik Satie were among the closest), he was secretive about his private life, and this increased his legendary aura.

Brancusi's originality in reducing natural forms to their ultimate—almost abstract—simplicity had profound effects on the course of modern sculpture, as did his masterly skill as a stonecarver, which helped to bring about a revival of direct carving. 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.’ However, although his work is so central to the history of modern art, John Golding writes that ‘as an artist he always managed to stand somewhat apart. When he was presented with a chart of “isms” drawn up by Alfred Barr and published in Michel Seuphor's Art abstrait in 1949 and saw that he didn't fit into any of them, he was delighted.’

Brancusi was a perfectionist and became increasingly reluctant to part with his work. He spent a good deal of his time arranging it in his studio and photographing it, sometimes documenting works in progress. His friend Man Ray helped him to improve his camera technique. On his death he bequeathed the studio and its contents to the French Government; it included versions of most of his best works (they often exist in multiple replicas in different materials) and more than a thousand photographs. The studio has now been reconstructed at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. There is another outstanding Brancusi collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.