Constantin Brancusi

Brancusi devoted himself over many decades to the sculpture of birds, which he presented in numerous versions and in ever new variations and materials right up to the 1940s. The bird sculpture in the Fondation’s collection was produced at a point when, strictly speaking, this Bird series had actually been concluded. Brancusi returns to the subject one more time and brings it to perfection with supreme artistic maturity. In his concentration upon the energy of the solid marble, Brancusi allows the slender sculpture to soar. What he seeks to portray is not the bird, but its flight. In order to dispel the sense of heaviness from the material, the artist has incorporated the pale, bluish-grey veins of the marble into his design. The extremely delicate lines running across the stone indicate the wings and suggest the softness of the bird, while the two serrated, ‘sawn out’ elements of the plinth seem to be what truly catapults it into the air.