Constantine brancusi biography summary of 100
The Romanian born Constantin Brancusi was a leading sculptor of the 20th century and a pioneer of modern art. My first encounter with the great man was in Paris, the city where he lived for many years and where he met and became friends with many of the great artists, writers and poets of the 20th century such as Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire and Ezra Pound. His Parisian studio still stands today on the same site where the Pompidou Centre of Modern and Contemporary Art is located and he is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery along with other greats like Charles Baudelaire, Serge Gainsbourg and Jean Paul Satre.
Constantin Brancusi
From the city of Timisoara, located in the west of Romania, I embarked on a bus ride lasting nearly six hours to reach the country town of Targu Jiu. I was the only tourist on the bus and most of the journey comprised of driving through rural and provincial Romania. The Romanian countryside is wild, raw and authentic. I notice this especially on the road approaching Targu Jiu. Watching all this scenery from the bus window I already develop a mental picture of the land Brancusi grew up in as a young boy. Brancusi came from very humble beginnings. He was born in 1876 in a small village called Hobita about 20 kilometres outside of Targu Jiu. Both his parents were poor traditional hard working mountain people. His development as an artist began in this rural part of the country where he would frequently carve objects from pieces of wood. Today one can visit the wooden house in Hobita where he grew up although it’s a replica of the original construction.
Targu Jiu is a town with several points of interest. Yet my principle reason for visiting was to see the large outdoor sculptures created by Brancusi in the 1930s as a homage to the Romanian soldiers who fought during the First World War. Beginning at the Constantin Brancusi Memorial Park by the Targu Jiu river is his work, The Table Of Silenc There is a performance in the gallery today. A tall young woman with a page-boy haircut is sitting upright on the parquet floor, her arms crossed over her stomach, her knees pulled up. Her posture mirrors that of a statue in an adjacent room. Initially she is still, then she starts to look around. She relaxes into an attitude that recalls, to me at least, a bored schoolboy waiting for something to happen. Then she sprawls on the floor. Maria F Scaroni in A Luxury That We Can’t Afford (Wisdom of the Earth), at Bozar, Brussels, October 2019 (photo: © Ian Mundell) This schoolboy impression is helped by the way she is dressed: a loose silver shirt and a pair of shorts. She kicks her feet, wiggles her fingers in front of her eyes as if playing games with the light, rolls on to her back, slides a little on the smooth floor. This loose repertoire of movements unfolds for ten minutes or so and eventually leads back to the sitting position. The Wisdom of the Earth by Constantin Brancusi, at Bozar, Brussels, October 2019 (photo: © Ian Mundell) And it is this sitting position that holds my interest. The statue it mirrors is The Wisdom of the Earth by the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi. For the past three years the Romanian government has been trying, unsuccessfully, to buy the statue and so prevent it from disappearing into a private collection. The pointed title of the performance, by Romanian choreographer Manuel Pelmuș, is A Luxury That We Can’t Afford (Wisdom of the Earth). It is something of a surprise to see The Wisdom of the Earth here in Brussels, where it is part of a large Brancusi retrospective at Bozar, a centre for the fine arts. This is the first time the figure has left Romania since the campaign to buy it failed in 2016. Afterwards it was on display in the National Museum of Art in Bucharest, but in June 2018 it was withdrawn by the owners, reportedly because the museum could not meet the insurance payment Known as the “the father of modern sculpture”, Constantin Brancusi was a painter, architect and a master of “abstract art”. Through his original work he became one of the most well-known sculptors of the 20th century and Romania’s most famous international artist. By Alexandra Fodor Constantin Brancusi was born in 1876 at Hobita, in Oltenia, southern Romania. In 1883, he started working as a shepherd in the Carpathian Mountains. Later on, he worked as a dyer, as an assistant in a grocery and then as a servant at an inn. While working at the inn he was challenged to make a violin as a bet. He succeeded so well, that the owner of the shop decided to help him to enroll in the provincial Craiova School of Arts and Crafts. From Craiova he went to Bucharest in 1898 to study sculpture at the School of Fine Arts, then to Munich, Zurich and Basel before arriving in Paris in 1904. He exhibited at the Salon de Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1907 and attracted the attention of Auguste Rodin. For a short time he worked as an assistant to Rodin, but soon left to work on his own, saying “nothing grows under the shade of great trees” and soon developed his highly individual style. One of his earliest works Écorché (1903), which shows the inner muscular structure of a male body, remains a masterpiece for the anatomical studies. The Kiss (1901-1921 various versions) was his first truly original work and the most abstract sculpture of the period representing two embracing figures locked together in the same block of stone. Other works include Sleeping Muse (1910), several versions of Mademoiselle Pogany (1913-1931), Bird in Space, The Prodigal Son (1925) and the Sea-Lions (1943) Constantin Brancusi became a pioneer of metal carving, but did not remain limited to it; he also created masterpieces out of wood, marble and stone. Brancusi reached the high point of his career by creating the monumental Ensemble from Targu J MODERNIST SCULPTURE In 1906 Brancusi exhibited his work in public for the first time since leaving Romania, and in 1907 he received his first commission - a statue for the tomb of a compatriot. Another tombstone followed the next year. This was "The Kiss", an abstract sculpture with two embracing figures locked together in the same block of stone. In style this announced Brancusi's mature work; the theme itself was one which he was to use repeatedly for the rest of his career. By this time Brancusi had made many friends in the Paris art world. Among those to whom he was closest were Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), whom he taught to carve, and Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau (1844-1910), who once said to him jovially: "Well, old boy, you've made the ancients modern." No more perceptive remark has ever been made about Brancusi's work. Another friend was the difficult Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). The two men used to go to the Bobino Music Hall and the Theatre de Montparnasse together. They relished the bedroom farces presented there, and sometimes made such a noise that they were thrown out. He also began exhibiting his work at the Salon d'Automne, along with other Russian expatriates like Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine. In 1913 Brancusi's reputation as one of the leading abstract sculptors was established in the United States, thanks to a group of five pieces included in the New York Armory Show. The patronage he found there, and at "291", the gallery owned by Alf
Archives
Famous Romanians: Constantin Brancusi
Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)
Daniel Chester French (1850-1931)
Aristide Maillol (1861-1944)
Ernst Barlach (1870-1938)
James Earle Fraser (1876-1953)
Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973)
Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916)
Jean Arp (1886-1966)
Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967)
Naum Gabo (1890-1977)
Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973)
Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)
Alberto Giacometti (1901-66)