Constantin Brancusi | Art for sale, auction results and history

One of the pioneer sculptors and avant-garde artists of the 20th century, Constantin Brâncuși is celebrated for his singular ability to capture the essence of forms through simplification and abstraction. His work has had a profound impact on modernism, Minimalism and conceptualism, inspiring sculptural giants who followed him including Isamu Noguchi and Richard Serra and continuing

Brâncuși was born in 1876 in the small village of Hobița, Romania. He attended the Scoala de Meserii (School of Arts and Crafts) in Craiova and the Scoala Natzionala de Arte Frumoase (National School of Fine Arts) in Bucharest, before moving to Paris in 1904. It was in the cultural capital that Brâncuși’s artistic career flourished. He studied in the École des Beaux-Arts a year after his arrival and did a brief stint at the studio of Auguste Rodin in 1907. Brâncuși left the atelier soon after, with a desire to break away from the conventional mode of sculpture.

Thus began Brâncuși’s quest to create sculptures that focused on the purity of form, eschewing details in favour of abstracted shapes. Many regarded this as the beginning of Brâncuși’s maturity as an artist. He worked directly with the material, sculpting and carving without having a model cast or made by others. Brâncuși became enmeshed in the avant-garde movement, prevalent in Paris at the time and befriended contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Rousseau.

In 1923 Brâncuși created Bird in Space, the first sculpture that would become his most well-known series of sculptures. These highly polished, elongated forms, depicting the graceful essence of flight, have become iconic representations of modernist sculpture. Brâncuși’s other significant works include a sculptural ensemble, comprising of The Table of Silence, The Gate of Kiss and Endless Column, created in 1935 as part of a war memorial in Târgu Jiu, Romania.

Brâncuși exhibited widely during his lifetime. His first solo exhibition was presented by Alfred Stieglitz at his New York gallery 291 in 1914. In 1955 the first retrospective of his work was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and travelled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Constantin Brâncuși died in 1957 at the age of 81.