Constantin Brâncuși

Romanian and French, born Romania. 1876–1957

“Each material has its own life, and one cannot without punishment destroy a living material to make a dumb senseless thing.” — Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși sought to expand the bounds of sculptural language. At the core of this pursuit was an abiding interest in materiality, which he probed tirelessly across wood, bronze, and stone. “Each material has its own life, and one cannot without punishment destroy a living material to make a dumb senseless thing,” Brâncuși said.

Born in 1876 in Hobița, Romania, Brâncuși came of age immersed in traditional woodcarving and crafts. After studying sculpture at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts, he moved to Paris in 1904 and attended the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. In 1907 he began working in the studio of Auguste Rodin, only to leave after a month. Reflecting on this time later, Brancusi said, “These were the hardest years of all, the years of research when I had to find my own path; I left Rodin; I must’ve angered him but I had to discover my own way.”

Shortly after, Brâncuși embraced direct carving, embarking on what he called “the true road to sculpture.” His forms—smooth, geometric, and evocative rather than descriptive—paralleled the broader emergence of abstraction in the early 20th century. Among his earliest works with this technique, The Kiss (1907–08), reveals two lovers embracing. Minimally demarcated, the figures seem to fuse within the block of plaster. In his cast sculptures the material similarly suggests the form. Mlle Pogany (1913), in bronze, was meticulously polished except for the head; over time, its patina came to resemble the sitter’s dark hair.

Yet for Brâncuși a sculpture did not end with its form, but extended into the space around it. In a prelude to assemblage, he refused to see the base as a neutral support, treating it instead as an integral component of the work. In Maiastra (1910–12), a towering sculpture over seven feet tall, a mythical bird from Romanian folklore sits on top of a tripartite limestone base. The base was initially conceived as an independent sculpture in its own right, Double Caryatid. This interest in how a sculpture interacted with space carried over into his photographic practice. He took pictures of his sculptures under various light conditions, capturing the play of shadow and reflection that recast their contours, as in Untitled (Golden Bird) (1919).

Though never formally aligned with movements such as Cubism or Surrealism, Brâncuși was immersed in avant-garde circles, forging connections with artists and poets like Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Like the work of these peers, Brâncuși’s art engendered controversy. His now-iconic Bird in Space, which distills the motion of a bird in flight into a luminous and elongated arc, became the subject of a landmark legal battle. In October 1926, when a newly purchased version of the work was escorted to the United States by its owner Edward Steichen for an exhibition at the Brummer Gallery in New York and the Arts Club in Chicago, customs officials refused to classify it as art, declaring it “an object of manufacture.” They imposed on it the tariff for manufactured metal objects, or about 40% of the sale price. With the help of Duchamp and Steichen, Brâncuși sued the US government and ultimately prevailed.

Brâncuși’s radical interventions into form, space, and material became a touchstone for generations of artists. Observing that Brâncuși had made sculpture “once more shape-conscious,” Henry Moore proclaimed, “Brâncuși’s work, apart from its individual value, has been of great historical importance in the development of contemporary sculpture.” By the time he died in 1957, Brâncuși had fundamentally altered the language of sculpture.

Adela Kim, 2024–25 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2025