Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi is a Romanian sculptor born February 19, 1876 in Hobita, Romania and died March 16, 1957 in Paris. He studied arts at the School of Arts and Crafts in Craiova from 1894 to 1898 then at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest from 1898 to 1901. In 1904, he arrived in Paris and enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts in 1905.

His work is influenced by Auguste Rodin, but his style of sculpture transforms over the years from figurative naturalist representation towards elegant stylized forms, smoother and less figurative, until sometimes only the most bare outline remains. of the original subject. He is one of the first sculptors to experiment with abstract art

In 1907, he produced a first version of Rodin's kiss, in total opposition to the original work, and in 1910, he installed one of his versions on the tomb of a young Russian woman who committed suicide for love, Tatiana Rachewskaïa, in the cemetery. from Montparnasse to Paris. He then produced several metal sculptures called "birds in space" and then a monumental ensemble in tribute to heroes of the homeland who fell during the First World War, commissioned in 1935 by the National League of Gorj Women. This set was nominated as World Heritage by Unesco in 1991.

An extremely influential artist, he is considered to have taken sculptural abstraction to a stage never before reached in the modernist tradition and paved the way for surrealist sculpture and the minimalist movement of the 1960s.