Constantin Brancusi

~Constantin Brancusi~

Constantin Brancusi (February 19, 1876 - March 16, 1957) is the most famous Romanian sculptor, born in Hobiţa, Gorj, near Târgu Jiu, where he placed his masterpiece, The Infinite Column.Brancusi studied art at the Şcoala de Meserii (school of arts and crafts) in Craiova from 1894 to 1898 and at the Şcoala Naţională de Arte Frumoase (national school of fine arts) in Bucharest from 1898 to 1901. Willing to further his education in Paris, he arrived there in 1904 and enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1905.His sculpture is noted for its visual elegance and sensitive use of materials, combining the directness of peasant carving with the sophistication of the Parisian avant-garde. After attending the Bucharest School of Fine Arts and learning of the sculpture of August Rodin, Brancusi traveled to Paris in 1904. Brancusi created his first major work, The Kiss, in 1908.om this time his sculpture became increasingly abstract, moving from the disembodied head of Sleeping Muse to the virtually featureless Beginning of the World and from the formal figure of the legendary bird Maiastra to numerous versions of the ethereal Bird in Space.
In the 1930s Brancusi worked on two ambitious public sculpture projects, an unrealized temple in India for the Maharajah of Indore and the installation at Tirgu Jiu, Romania, of his Gate of the Kiss, Table of Silence and a 100-foot tall cast iron version of Endless Column.Constantin Brancusi died on March 16, 1957 and was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France.

"The people who call my work 'abstract' are imbeciles; that which they call 'abstract' is the purest realism, whose reality is not represented by exterior form but by the idea behind it, the essence of the work."