Constantin Brancusi

Romanian-born French sculptor

• Born: February 19, 1876
• Birthplace: Hobitza, Romania
• Died: March 16, 1957
• Place of death: Paris, France

A craftsman and a poet of forms, Brancusi carried abstraction to its utmost limits, often far beyond the material’s own representational element. Renouncing the traditional form, he attempted to extract from the material whether marble, metal, or wood its maximum effect. His major contribution to modern sculpture was his unique capacity to render meaning through sheer form.

Early Life

Constantin Brancusi (kawn-stahn-TEEN brahn-KEW-see) was born in the small Romanian village of Hobitza, hidden in the foothills of the legendary Transylvanian mountains. Both of his parents were of peasant stock. A small parcel of land provided their rather large family Brancusi had three half brothers, besides two brothers and a sister with its daily bread. Young Brancusi idealized the pastoral life in the remote Transylvanian village. From his early years, he felt a strong attachment to his land. The native landscape influenced the youngster and provided him with unusual spiritual intensity that later characterized the artist and his work. Brancusi’s communion with nature kept his sanity intact, while his mother’s love alleviated the burden of poverty and the harshness of everyday life in Hobitza.

In 1887, Brancusi left his family and went to find his fortune in the small provincial town of Târgu-Jiu. There, for five years, he was compelled to earn his own living toiling at painful and hard, if varied, work. At the end of 1892, Brancusi went to Craiova, the capital city of the province of Oltenia. Although he had no previous formal schooling, his voracious intellectual curiosity, as well as an inherent ability to learn quickly, helped him to be accepted into the School of Arts and Crafts in the fall of 1895. Brancusi, being much older than his classmates, became noteworthy for his seriousness and diligence. The high grades he received represented the recognition of his assiduity. He excelled in wood carving and, on the advice of his teachers, specialized in sculpture.

In 1898, at the age of twenty-two, he was graduated with honors from the School of Arts and Crafts. To overcome his youthful appearance, Brancusi, who was short yet strongly built, grew a small beard that he wore with open pride. After graduation, the artist’s peasant character helped him overcome the difficulties of a near-penniless existence. Brancusi supported himself by working on non-art-related jobs that he found tedious and even hateful. During his last year of study at the school in Craiova, with the aid of a small, locally administered grant, he produced one of his first recognized works: the head of the roman emperor Aulus Vitellius. Modeled with an unusual psychological subtlety and constructed with the vigor of an antique sculpture, the bust brought him the recognition of his artistic talent. It also provided him the opportunity to receive additional grants that enabled him to leave for the capital city of Bucharest and become enrolled at the famous School of Fine Arts, an equivalent of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From 1898 to 1902, Brancusi worked relentlessly to refine his talent and to improve his skills.

As during his early years in Craiova, Brancusi’s unusual talent and hard work won for him the recognition of his teachers and the admiration and envy of his classmates. Brancusi won a number of prizes, notably for his Antinous of Belvedere and for a life-size anatomy figure that revealed an unusual knowledge of the human anatomy. During his last schooling year, Brancusi studied human anatomy. He performed numerous dissections under the direct supervision of Dimitrie Gerota, a renowned Romanian professor of anatomy. For his final examination, Brancusi presented a study of the now-famous Écorché a life-size plaster of a nude man. Early in 1903, as a recognition of his talent, Brancusi was commissioned to create a bust of General Doctor Carol Davila, the founder of the modern Romanian School of Medicine. At the end of 1904, after a lengthy trip through Europe and a short stay in Munich, Brancusi arrived in Paris. The French capital became his adoptive city.

Life’s Work

For more than half a century, from 1904 to 1957, Brancusi worked and lived in Paris. Life in the French capital was different from the easygoing lifestyle in Bucharest. After a long journey of more than a year across Europe, most of it made on foot, Brancusi arrived in Paris with very little money. The young Romanian sculptor had to endure a lengthy period of financial difficulties. For almost a year and a half, he was unable to use his artistic skills. During this time, Brancusi earned his living by washing dishes and by working and singing in a Romanian church in Paris. Nevertheless, after a year of hardships and numerous painful adjustments to the fast-paced Parisian life, Brancusi’s determination to succeed finally paid off. With the help of some of his Romanian friends, Brancusi began to receive commissions for a number of busts. Although done from live models, most of the portrayals do not reflect the sculptural flamboyance that characterized Brancusi’s later works. At the end of 1905, Brancusi produced several busts, this time done from photographs. Of special mention are Portrait of a Concierge and Portrait of Dr. Zaharia Samfirescu. Two other works, Portrait of Restaurant Owner and Portrait of Mrs. Victoria Vashide, earned for the sculptor a modest sum that enabled him to meet his daily expenses.

In 1905, Brancusi was enrolled at the famous École des Beaux-Arts, at that time holding its classes in the studio of Antonin Mercié. The school, which had students from all over the world, emphasized the work on sculptural details of old French churches, Gothic cathedrals, and Baroque ornaments rather than on live models. Brancusi, who felt no desire to follow the school’s rigidly imposed curricula, worked assiduously, making new sculptures almost daily but destroying nearly every figure he made.

Brancusi first participated in the famous Salon d’Automne in 1906. At the Salon he exhibited the head of a girl in bronze entitled Pride. The sculpture was made by Brancusi in 1905 while he was still a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. Two other works, Bust of a Boy and Portrait of G. Lupescu, both plaster, were done from photographs. At the exhibit, Brancusi had the chance to meet Auguste Rodin, at whose studio he would soon be working. The beginning of 1907 appears to have been a critical time for Brancusi. At age thirty-one, he had to leave the École des Beaux-Arts because of the school’s rigid age limitations. For two months, in March and April, he worked for Rodin. Soon, however, he left the master’s studio because of their opposite views on art. At this time he made his famous remark: “Nothing can grow in the shadow of the great trees.”

On April 18, 1907, Brancusi received his first big commission. He was to make a funerary monument for the grave of Petre Stanescu, but the monument was to be erected in Buzau, Romania. With only five hundred francs advance money, Brancusi rented his first studio, at 54 rue du Montparnasse. In the summer he journeyed to Romania to begin his work on the monument, which, according to the agreement, was to have a portrait of the deceased and a figure of a kneeling body in prayer. The portrait, done mainly from family photographs, is one of Brancusi’s most eloquent sculptures. The figure represents a nude of a young woman with her arms over her chest in a gesture of crossing herself; its attitude alternates between rest and tension, between restrained dignity and an expression of private yet strong emotion. Brancusi started his work on the Prayer in 1907. When it was finished at the end of 1909, it marked the end of Rodin’s influence on Brancusi. From then on, the Romanian sculptor was his own master. Brancusi’s fame grew steadily. The Romanian press began noticing the impressive artist from Hobitza. The art critics remarked on the sculptor’s ability to render the magic of sheer form without distorting its content.

Most of the earliest works of Brancusi are now lost, and in most cases knowledge of his sculptures is fragmentary. Brancusi’s artistic output is relatively small. In 1913, Brancusi had five works displayed in the Armory Show in New York; at the end of the same year he had only three works exhibited in London. In February, 1914, five of his sculptures were shown at a cubist exhibit held in Prague. Brancusi’s first one-person exhibition was held at the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery in New York, marking the beginning of the sculptor’s long and lasting relationship with the American public and collectors. In both Europe and the United States, Brancusi’s work was steadily gaining critical recognition.

Although Brancusi had his “artistic and social roots” in Paris, he often traveled to his native Romania. Before World War I, he made two trips to Bucharest, where he participated in nine exhibitions. After the war, he also returned to the United States, where in 1926 he opened a one-person show at the well-known Wildenstein Galleries in New York City. At the end of the same year, he was back in New York to participate in his third one-person exhibition, opened this time at the Brummer Gallery. During this trip, Brancusi got involved in lengthy litigation with the U.S. Customs Office. The Customs Office claimed that Brancusi’s bronze sculpture Bird in Space was not a work of art but an “object of manufacture.” After an unpleasant trial, at the end of 1928, the tribunal finally decided in the artist’s favor. Overnight the solitary Romanian sculptor had become a public figure.

While in Paris, Brancusi was a regular of the small, family cafés of Montparnasse. He became a friend of many other artists, poets, and writers who frequented the same establishments. Among his numerous friends were Amedeo Modigliani, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Fernand Léger. Shy and solitary, Brancusi liked to take long walks through the woods of Clamart, near Paris, to escape the often suffocating Parisian summers and to be alone with nature. In his studio, Brancusi re-created some of the familiar surroundings of his native Oltenian village. A wooden gate adorned the entrance; a millstone surrounded by four wooden stools occupied the middle of the room. In this small Romanian universe, Brancusi liked to entertain his friends with Romanian folk music played on his guitar and with Romanian dishes that he had prepared himself. Brancusi’s best friend, however, was his sheepdog, Polar, who accompanied him during long walks in the woods.

Brancusi’s last trip to his native country took place in the summer of 1937, when he was commissioned to do an ensemble of sculptures for a park in Târgu-Jiu. The monument was to commemorate the Romanian resistance to the Germans during World War I. The result was a large public conception. It was a group of sculptures composed of Table of Silence , a travertine-like stone called bampotoc encircled by twelve round stone stools, and Gate of the Kiss , constructed of a number of blocks and slabs of stone. The table and the gate, located in the public park, are connected by an alley lined by square stone seats, also designed by Brancusi. In line with the Table stands his famous Endless Column . The Column, designed by Brancusi, was built under the technical supervision of the Romanian structural engineer Stefan Georgescu-Gorjan, a friend and an artist in his own right. The Column’s repeated elements extending to the sky create a sensation of upward flight, of infinity. Its decorative elements in diamond shape are similar to those found in the borders of Romanian peasant rugs and on the carved capital posts of wooden Oltenian houses.

Before the beginning of World War II, Brancusi made his last trip to the United States, to participate in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. During the German occupation of France, Brancusi stayed in Paris, working on a monumental version of one of his early sculptures, the well-known Cock . The first study, done in clay, reveals the bird’s nervous energy. The second, large-scale version of Cock is considered to represent an expression of the sculptor’s art and craft in rendering the boldness and the strength of a cock crowing. This was one of the last large sculptural works done by the artist. Brancusi, in poor health, was unable to attend the 1955 one-person exhibition of his works organized at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. One year prior to his death, to celebrate Brancusi’s eightieth birthday, the Art Museum in Bucharest held an exhibition of works from Romanian collections. Brancusi died on March 16, 1957. He was buried in the Cimetière Montparnasse, in Paris. His studio and all of its contents were willed to France, whose citizen he had become shortly before his death.

Significance

Recognition came rather late to Brancusi, after World War II. The Parisian literary and artistic world rapidly adopted the shy Romanian peasant, whose childlike simplicity charmed everyone who knew him. Famous himself, he knew almost every prominent artist in Paris. His private life, however, remained a mystery even to his closest friends. During his long and productive artistic life, Brancusi produced a relatively small number of works. The extant works, excluding numerous plasters of objects in stone, bronze, and wood, slightly exceed two hundred. All, however, are overpowering in their perfection. He was against the empty grandiloquent and the fake monumental. Clarity and simplicity are the trademarks of his sculptures.

A fine artistic intuition helped Brancusi assimilate the forms and the shapes of the mythic world of Romanian folklore. Brancusi, in his pursuit of essence, also succeeded in assimilating the shapes of the natural world around him to the extent that he was able to produce forms that seem to be free from their reliance on nature. Nevertheless, his synthesis did not lead to a simplistic system of forms. The shapes of his sculptures always carried a meaning and a hidden intimacy of expression.

Bibliography

Brancusi, Constantin. Constantin Brancusi. Translated by Maria Jolas and Anne Leroy, edited by Carola Gideon-Welcher. New York: George Braziller, 1959. One of the most authoritative works on the Romanian sculptor. It includes an in-depth analysis of his work. The volume is illustrated with numerous photo-documents.

Comarnescu, Petru, Mircea Eliade, and Ionel Jianu. Témoignages sur Brancusi. Paris: Arted, 1967. Three essays written by three of the artist’s Romanian friends. Each essay presents Brancusi from a personal viewpoint, yet all essays are unified by the strong bonds of the same cultural milieu. In French.

Geist, Sidney. Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1983. A solid and well-documented monograph on Brancusi’s work and life. The volume provides an extensive description of the artist’s major works and how they related to various stages of his life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Constantin Brancusi, 1876-1957: A Retrospective Exhibition. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1969. The listing of Brancusi’s works is accompanied by a pertinent presentation of each individual work. The book explores Brancusi’s artistic universe and provides valuable insights into his manner of work.

Giménez, Carmen, and Matthew Gale, eds. Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things. London: Tate, 2004. Focusing on forty works that were included in an exhibition, this collection of essays examines Brancusi’s work and his cultural and artistic heritage.

Lewis, David. Constantin Brancusi. New York: Wittenborn, 1957. Richly illustrated, this relatively small book contains one of the best accounts of Brancusi’s themes and techniques.

Selz, Jean. Modern Sculpture: Origins and Evolution. Translated by Annette Michelson. New York: George Braziller, 1963. The book contains a good analysis of Brancusi’s life and work. The author emphasizes the modernity of the artist’s works.

Spear, Athena T. Brancusi’s Birds. New York: New York University Press, 1969. One of the best summaries of Brancusi’s recurrent theme: the bird. The author discusses the bird motif in Brancusi’s work and its folkloric implications.

Varia, Radu. Brancusi. 2d ed. New York: Rizzoli International, 2002. A new edition of a highly praised study of Brancusi’s life and work. Contains hundreds of photographs.