Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi reduced sculpture to the fewest forms it could survive on and had to prove in a New York court that one of them was art. He was born to a peasant family in Hobita in the Carpathian foothills, ran away at eleven, worked his way through the craft schools of Craiova and Bucharest, and in 1904 walked most of the way to Paris. Rodin offered him a place in his studio and he refused it, saying nothing grows in the shadow of great trees. What followed was a lifetime of returning to a handful of subjects - the sleeping head, the kiss, the bird - and taking material away from each version until only the gesture was left. Bird in Space was seized by American customs in 1926 and taxed as a manufactured metal object; the 1928 judgment in his favour is a landmark, because it accepted that a work need not imitate nature to be sculpture. He carved directly in stone and wood at a time when most sculptors modelled and let others cut, and he made his own bases and photographed his own work. The Endless Column at Targu Jiu is nearly thirty metres high. He left his studio and its contents to the French state and it has been reconstructed beside the Pompidou. Isamu Noguchi worked in his studio in 1927 as an assistant and said the discipline of cutting stone directly was the whole of his training. The Kiss, a single block in which two figures are barely separated, exists in several versions including a grave marker in Montparnasse. He lived and worked in the same Impasse Ronsin studio for forty years, dressed as a peasant, and cooked for visitors. Romania refused his bequest of works in 1951 on the ground that his art was bourgeois formalism, a decision the country has regretted expensively ever since.

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