Constantin Brancusi

Romanian-French, 1876-1957. Constantin Brancusi moved to Paris in his late twenties and quickly found his home in the avant-garde movement. Though he was employed by Auguste Rodin, he quickly realized that the traditional methods of producing sculpture was not for him. Instead, Brancusi struck out on his own to create simplified, abstract forms by directly carving the material, usually wood or stone. Five of his sculptures were included in the 1913 Armory Show, prompting Alfred Steiglitz to give him his own show at his gallery the following year.

Brancusi explored several themes such as idealized form and the relationship of his sculptures with the space they occupy, with a particular fascination with birds and figures. In 1935 Brancusi was commissioned to create a war memorial in his home country of Romania which demonstrated those themes as well as functional sculpture. Though his production slowed in the 1950s, he had over 80 sculptures and hundreds of photographs in his studio at the time of his death wthich he bequathed to the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.