James Picard - Artist of the Month, March 2007: Constantin Brancusi

***March 2007***

Constantin Brancusi
February 19, 1876 - March 16, 1957

Constantin Brancusi was born in Hobita, Romania in 1876. Raised in poverty, the son of peasants, Constantin followed in the steps of so many others by showing a talent for art at a young age.After finishing public school, he was employed in a cabinet-maker's workshop for a short while before enrolling at the Bucharest Art Academy in 1898. During his stint at the Academy, Constantin studied the work of August Rodin and felt a kinship to the great sculptor. Brancusi, after finishing his art studies moved to Paris, in 1904 and soon became part of the art scene there where he made a great many friends, including Amadeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Cocteau. Working day and night he created work that he felt could be of importance to the various movements that were happening at the time. Brancusi first showed his work at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in1906.

Although his early work was in the academy tradition, he developed a distinctive style of his own from 1907 onward. Thematically he preferred classical motifs drawn from the nature of his native land, Romania. Brancusi then went about reducing these themes to abstract simplicity, he distilled them into what he saw as the essence of a motif, thus coming ever closer to the essential statement he wanted to make with them. "The Kiss", became his first major piece and is still one of his most recognized pieces. Brancusi's sculpting mediums included stone, bronze and wood and worked in a variety of sizes throughout his lifetime.

Brancusi's sculpture gained international notoriety at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, a city that he visited four times and where his work frequently would be exhibited. His first one-man show was in New York in 1914 and while there became acquainted with important American collectors which helped to secure him financially from then on. The photographer Man Ray taught him the essentials of photography in 1921, and he continued to use photography as a second creative outlet to sculpting. During the 1930s Brancusi was preoccupied with the links between architecture and sculpture. The upshot was a commission for a heroic monument at Tirgu Jiu, Romania, that was executed in 1938. Brancusi's reputation as a leading avant-garde sculptor is based on the fusion of architecture and sculpture he achieved there, which had a tremendous influence on numerous artists and architects. During the last decade of his life, Brancusi was mainly involved in architectural projects on a grand scale, such as a plan to recreate his "Endless Column" as a skyscraper in Chicago. In 1952 the sculptor became a French citizen and in 1956 he bequeathed his studio to his adopted country, on the condition that the studio be installed in the Museum of Art of the City of Paris. A year later Brancusi died and was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery.

Soon after Brancusi's death, the studio was demolished; nearly 20 years later, a replica was built opposite the north-west corner of the Centre Pompidou.

"Things are not difficult to make;
what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them."

Constantin Brancusi

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