Offers information on the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1956), presented as part of the Artchive Web site of Mark Harden. Highlights Brancusi's techniques and contains images and descriptions of some of his sculptures.

Text by Carolyn Lanchner.

Acknowledged as one of the major sculptors and avant-garde artists of the twentieth century, Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) was also one of the most elusive, despite his fame. His mysterious nature was not only due to his upbringing in Romania—which, at the time, was still regarded by much of Europe as a backward country haunted by vampires and werewolves—but also because Brancusi was aware that myth and an aura of otherness appealed to the public. His self-mythology remained intact until the publication of Brancusi in 1986 by Romanian artists Alexandre Istrati and Natalia Dumitresco, who made available a small selection of the archive of Brancusi’s correspondence. And in 2003, a comprehensive catalogue, which made the bulk of Brancusi’s private correspondence public for the first time, was published by the Centre Pompidou to accompany a retrospective on Brancusi’s work. In Constantin Brancusi, Sanda Miller employs these extensive new resources to better assess Brancusi’s life and work in relationship to each other, providing valuable and innovative insights into his relationships with friends, collectors, dealers and lovers. Miller’s perceptive book allows Brancusi to finally take his rightful place among the most important of the intellectual personalities who shaped twentieth-century modernism.

"Constantin Brancusi - the most influential sculptor of the twentieth century - is usually viewed as a sculptor of pure, perfect, essential forms and as a lone visionary and exotic peasant-sage, aloof from both the social concerns of his age and from avant-garde affiliations." "In this fascinating book, Anna C. Chave explodes many of the myths about Brancusi, offering a revised view of the sculptor as an artist creatively responding to avant-garde and social concerns of his day. Using both feminist and social-historical lenses to view Brancusi's art, she explores the complex ways in which his works undermine established cultural hierarchies, challenge the fixed nature of sexual identity, and renounce notions of mastery and authority. She discusses, most specifically, how the imperiled status of the subject in an alienated, technological age is addressed by Brancusi's fragmented figures and by the displacement of the masculine by the feminine subject in his production; how the inward-looking, modern subject is invoked by Brancusi's polished, mirroring sculptures, which invite narcissistic reflection; how the changing status of the handmade object in the age of mass production is suggested by Brancusi's use of repetition; how the perceived erosion of gender boundaries in the modern age is treated in numerous sculptures involving scrambled sexual signs; and how the search for new means of transcendence and liberation is evinced in the reinvigorated image of sexual love and spiritual striving glimpsed in certain of Brancusi's most important works. By examining these achievements and his reimagining of the concept of the base - which he generally poised in a dialogic and shifting relation to his sculpture - Chave shows how Brancusi shifted the foundations of art."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Brancusi is one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. He worked in wood, marble and stone, creating works of pure shapes which often took their inspiration from nature.

"The starting point for this book is the work of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), as expressed in his reduction of volume to tease out formal essence. Some thirty-five exemplary works by Brancusi, among them 'The Kiss' and the 'Column of the Infinite', thus initiate a line of inquiry into the essence and the possibilities of sculpture, the discussion of which continues with a selection of works from different periods by Richard Serra (born 1939), whose art opens up new 'ways of seeing' to his viewers. The resulting juxtaposition of Brancusi's sensuous modeling of marble, bronze, wood, and plaster with Serra's minimalist steel sculptures set in motion a fascinating dialogue. The essays by Friedrich Teja Bach, Alfred Pacquement, Oliver Wick, and others conspire with the concentrated selection of works to underscore not only the contrasts between these two pioneering artists, but also their common ground enabling the reader to experience anew the universal power of sculpture." --Jacket.

...The universality of Brancusi, his paradoxical simplicity and inclusiveness, have never been more strikingly demonstrated than in Sidney Geist's study of the artist. The interpenetration of the sculptor's life and his art, and the beautifully logical course of his artistic evolution are brilliantly revealed by Mr. Geist, who is a reowned authority on Brancusi, a professor of art at Vassar, and a sculptor himself. Every facet of the work, including the graphics, is handsomely displayed in the numerous, large-scale illustrations. In addition, this definitive new volume on Brancusi includes a chronology of the artist's life, a bibliography, a fully documented catalogue of Brancusi's complete oeuvre, and a unique concordance which collates the sculptures catalogued in all the major books on Brancusi currently in print. -- from front flap.