Brancusi, Constantin

Constantin Brancusi (Modern Masters Series)

Constantin Brancusi: Sculpting Within the Essence of Things

Constantin Brancusi is one of the greatest of all sculptors, and a key sculptor of the modern era, with Rodin and Picasso. His influence can be seen in a wide range of Western sculptors, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Minimalists and 'land' artists. This new book studies the religious and mythical dimensions of Brancusi's distinctive 'eggs', 'fishes', 'heads' and 'columns'. His central quest was for the 'essence of things', which resulted in purifying a form until the essence was left.

Brancusi: The White Work

This catalog, published in conjunction with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Venice, documents the first major exhibition of Brancusi the photographer. While Brancusi's attraction to the medium is well-known, his photographs have always been seen as secondary to his other studio work. But the 96 photographs collected in this volume are to be seen as an oeuvre in their own right, formally autonomous, showing exceptional aesthetic and technical quality.The book opens new dimensions in space and time of Brancusi's work, especially for three plaster works featured: The Sleeping Muse, The Torso of a Youth, and The Baroness. The exceptional quality and openness of Brancusi-the photographer-gives vantage points on the aesthetic world beyond the realm of his bronze, marble, or wooden works.

Brancusi Photographs Brancusi (Art Memoir)

Brancusi Cameo (Great Modern Masters)

Constantin Brancusi

In twentieth-century sculpture, one name towers above all others: Romanian-born Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). This book accompanies a major retrospective exhibition of Brancusi's sculpture, drawings, and photographs, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Profusely illustrated throughout, with photographs by the artist and images culled from a wide range of archival sources, it is the most definitive work yet published on this influential artist. The authors provide a detailed reassessment of Brancusi's work, incorporating and extending the profound revisions in scholarship that have been taking place since the last major retrospective in 1969-1970. The three major essays present new information on such diverse issues as the sculptor's sources of inspiration, his formal approach, and the works' original presentation. Friedrich Teja Bach rejects the notion of Brancusi's oeuvre as hermetic, timeless, and pure, and examines instead the heterogeneous combinations of form and material that make Brancusi's works compellingly paradoxical. Margit Rowell explores the sculptor's place in the artistic climate of Paris in the 1910s and 1920s and his rejection of dominant styles and subject matter in favor of non-Western sources, particularly Asian art. Ann Temkin traces the history of Brancusi's American patronage during his lifetime by such influential collectors as John Quinn, Katherine Dreier, James Johnson Sweeney, and Louise and Walter Arensberg. The plate section features full-color reproductions of over 100 sculptures, with accompanying texts and visual references. In addition, 55 photographs by Brancusi in full-page duotone are shown for the first time alongside a major selection of his sculptures. There are also color and black and white reproductions of over forty of his drawings -- the richest documentation to date of this aspect of Brancusi's work -- as well as prefatory essays on the photographs and drawings, a chronology, and bibliographic and exhibition listings. Distributed for the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things

It's hard to imagine a more perfect depiction of love than "The Kiss," Constantin Brancusi's blocky stone sculpture of a nose-to-nose, belly-to-belly couple bound by encircling arms. Brancusi's powerful elemental shapes, carved from stone, wood, and marble, remain touchstones of modern art. But compared to contemporaries like Picasso and Modigliani, the Romania-born artist, who died in 1957, still remains something of an enigma. A slender, attractively designed book, Constantin Brancusi: The essence of things examines the artist's folkloric cultural and artistic heritage, his years in Paris and his revolutionary sculptural language. Along the way, the essayists attempt to refine the standard view of Brancusi as the poster boy for "truth to materials"-—the self-reliant peasant who struck a blow for modernism around 1907 by cutting directly into the stone block and responding to its unique qualities. Unfortunately, many of the scholarly adjustments to the legend come across as nitpicking footnotes that don't illuminate the bigger picture. (So what if his father was a small landowner in a poor Romanian village, not a real peasant? Why must we therefore view his self-identification with humble folk as a phony public image?) Yet the book contains key insights into Brancusi's stunning reductions of human and animal form, some from the artist himself. About his large marble "Fish" from 1926-—a smooth oval shape with a single facet—-he wrote, "When you see a fish . . . you think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through water. . . . Well, I've tried to express just that." While a reproduction of "Fish" appears in a small photo alongside the text, quite a few of the works discussed by the essayists are not illustrated at all. Even when Brancusi is supposedly boiled down to his "essence," as in this book, it seems a shame not to grant him a better showing. The 37 full-sized color plates correspond with the contents of an exhibition organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (where it is on view through September 19, 2004). —Cathy Curtis

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) was a towering figure among early 20th-century modern artists. Born in Romania, he worked in Paris for more than 50 years, but he became renowned worldwide. This new book, published to accompany an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, shows why his work, in which figurative elements were refined into ever purer, near-abstract forms, was so important in the development of modern sculpture.

This splendid book focuses on some 40 works that represent the essence of Brancusi's art. Essays focus on the themes and series in his work and the use of carving, as opposed to modeling in clay, that set him apart from his contemporaries. A selection of Brancusi's aphorisms, illustrated with photographs of the artist's studio, complete this thorough and up-to-date assessment of one of the 20th century's greatest artists.

Brancusi's Endless Column: Targu-Jiu, Romania (World Monuments Fund)

The Endless Column Ensemble, by famed Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), has been hailed as one of the great works of twentieth-century public art. Commissioned by the National League of Gorj Women to honour the soldiers who had defended the town of Tfrgu Jiu against a German force in 1916, the tripartite ensemble, erected between 1937 and 1938, is composed of the Endless Column, a 30-metre-high column of zinc and brass-clad, cast-iron modules, and two stone monuments: the Gate of the Kiss and Table of Silence. Over the years the elements took their toll on the sculpture, and although the Column s modules had been replated several times since its construction, by the 1990s it was in dire need of conservation. This stunningly llustrated volume celebrates the history of this extraordinary work of art and tells the story of its recent restoration, landscaping and presentation, supported in large part by the World Monuments Fund (WMF). Brancusi s Endless Column Ensemble launches a s

Brancusi, Photographer

Immaterial: Brancusi,Gabo,Moholy-Nagy