Constantin Brâncuși

Hobița

Constantin Brâncuși was born on 19 February 1876 at Hobița, a village in the Carpathian foothills of southern Romania, into a family of peasant farmers.[2]

He herded sheep from the age of seven and ran away from home repeatedly. He was skilled with wood from childhood — the region had a strong tradition of carved wooden houses, gates and furniture, and that vocabulary of geometric carving stayed in his work for the rest of his life.[3]

He worked as a dyer's assistant, a shop boy and a barrel-maker. At eighteen he built a violin by hand from an orange crate, which impressed a local industrialist enough to pay for him to enter the craft school at Craiova.

He went on to the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he trained in academic modelling and anatomy, and made a flayed figure so accurate it was used for years in medical teaching.[2]

Walking to Paris

In 1903 Brâncuși set out for Paris. He travelled through Vienna, Munich and Switzerland, much of it on foot, and arrived in July 1904 after more than a year on the road. He was twenty-eight.[2]

He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and worked as a dishwasher to eat. In 1907 Auguste Rodin, then the most famous sculptor alive, took him into his studio as an assistant.[2]

He left after about a month. His reason is the most quoted thing he ever said: that nothing grows in the shade of great trees.[3]

The break

From 1907 Brâncuși stopped modelling in clay to be cast, and started carving directly into stone and wood, which almost nobody was doing.[4]

Direct carving meant the material set the terms. The Kiss, carved in 1907 and 1908, is a single block of stone with two figures barely cut into it, arms wrapped round each other, mouths joined, a single eye shared between two profiles. Rodin's Kiss of twenty years before is two naturalistic nudes. Brâncuși's resembles carved stone figures made long before the modern period.[4]

From there he worked in series, returning to the same few subjects for decades: the ovoid heads of the Sleeping Muse and The Newborn, the spiral of the Mademoiselle Pogany portraits, birds, columns, fish, the Kiss.[5]

Bird in Space

The best-known series is the birds. He made about thirty bird sculptures from 1910 onwards, and the Bird in Space group from 1923, in bronze and marble: a tall, tapering, polished form, wider in the middle, rising to a point, without wings, head or feet.[5]

He said he was not making a bird but the movement of flight. The bronzes are polished to a mirror, so the surface disappears into reflected light.[4]

In 1926 the photographer Edward Steichen shipped one to New York. United States customs refused to admit it duty-free as art, on the grounds that it did not resemble a bird and was therefore a manufactured metal object, taxable at forty per cent. Brâncuși sued. In 1928 the court found in his favour, accepting that a work by a recognised sculptor need not imitate nature to count as art. Brâncuși v. United States is the case usually cited as the moment American law caught up with modern art, and it remains the legal landmark for modern art's status.[5]

Endless Column

In 1937 and 1938 Brâncuși built a monument at Târgu Jiu, in Romania, to the men of the region killed in the First World War.[2]

It is three works set along one axis about a mile long. The Table of Silence is a stone table with twelve stools. The Gate of the Kiss is a stone gateway carved with his paired-eye motif. The Endless Column is a cast-iron stack of identical rhomboid modules nearly thirty metres high.

The column repeats one shape upward until it stops, and the design implies that it could go on. It comes directly from the carved wooden posts of Romanian peasant houses, which is the tradition he grew up in, made at monumental scale.[3]

The studio

Brâncuși lived and worked in the impasse Ronsin in Montparnasse from 1916. He treated the studio as the work: he made his own bases and plinths, photographed everything himself, and rearranged the sculptures constantly so that they formed one composition in white plaster, stone and polished bronze.[6]

When he sold a piece he often carved a plaster replacement so the arrangement was not broken.[6]

He entertained there. Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, Man Ray, Amedeo Modigliani, Ezra Pound and Peggy Guggenheim all came, and he cooked for them on a stone slab. Duchamp was his closest ally, handled his American sales and hung his exhibitions, and Brâncuși taught Modigliani to carve stone. He lived in the same rough conditions for forty years while his work sold for large sums.

Death and the bequest

Brâncuși became a French citizen in 1952. He died in Paris on 16 March 1957, aged eighty-one, and is buried in Montparnasse cemetery.[2]

He left the entire contents of his studio to the French state, on condition that it be reconstructed exactly as he had left it. That reconstruction now stands beside the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It holds more than a hundred sculptures, with their bases, tools and furniture in the positions he chose.[1]

Why Constantin Brâncuși matters

Brâncuși invented the language modern sculpture used for the next fifty years: simplified geometric form, the material left visible and doing the work, the base treated as part of the sculpture, and the polished surface that reflects the room. Almost every sculptor after him worked in the space he opened, from Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth to the minimalists of the 1960s.

Casts and versions are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tate.[5]

The Bird in Space case is his other legacy, and it belongs to everyone who came after. Until 1928, American customs law defined art as imitation of nature. The ruling that a sculpture does not have to look like anything is one of the few places where the argument about modern art was settled in a courtroom.

The studio as one work

Brâncuși was born at Hobița, a village in the Gorj county of southern Romania. In his last years he refused to sell finished pieces, on the grounds that removing one broke the arrangement of the studio, which he had come to treat as a single work. He took French citizenship in 1952 partly so that his bequest of the studio to the French state would be legally valid. The reconstructed Atelier Brâncuși, beside the Centre Pompidou, is free to visit.