| Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) is a venerated patriarch of modern sculpture. His work evolved from a pursuit of modeled realism toward formal abstraction – concentrating in his sculptures what he conceived to be the essence of their forms in space. After attending the Bucharest School of Fine Arts, Brancusi traveled to Paris in 1904. He worked as Auguste Rodin’s assistant for a month where he met Edward Steichen. Brancusi created his first major work, The Kiss, in 1908. From this time his sculpture became increasingly abstract, moving from the formalist Maiastra to numerous versions of the ethereal Bird in Space. Brancusi's sculpture gained international notoriety at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, a city that he visited four times and where his work frequently would be exhibited. After his introduction to Man Ray in 1921, Brancusi’s photographic work becomes most prolific and noticeably aesthetically advanced. Brancusi pursued the creation of his own photographic endeavors with the same rigor and quest for purity as he did with his sculpture and insisted that only his images of his sculptures were circulated. His photographs, always printed by him, translated his sculptures into a new art form.
Brancusi died in 1957, leaving 1200 photographs and 215 sculptures to the Museum of Art of the City of Paris. Becoming a topic of growing interest, Brancusi’s photographs have been the focus of several recent exhibitions, including The Original Copy, Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Constantin Brancusi & Richard Serra: Resting in Time and Space, shown at the Foundation Beyeler; and Brancusi, Film and Photography, the monumental exhibition of Brancusi’s photographs exhibited at the Centre Pompidou.
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