| Artist: | Brancusi, Constantin |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Bird in Space | |
| Date of Work: | 1919 | |
| Nationality: | Romanian | |
| Context: | Modern Sculpture | |
| Movement: | Abstraction | |
| Medium: | Bronze | |
| Subject: an abstracted bird or perhaps the idea of "bird" or "flight" has been abstracted down to a single wing shape. It seems a perfectly streamlined form, save for one small "hurt" or flaw: the shaved off edge at the top. Brancusi often includes a little "hurt" like this, which humanizes the piece in a way. It is his way of deflecting or working away from a perfect, ideal geometry. He, in essence, deforms the ideal with the "hurt." Like Mondrian, Brancusi seeks the essence underlying surface phenomena and the universal rather than the particular. He distills nature down to the essence or the minimal so that you see the whole shape at once. It is a reductionist, purifying process, but Brancusi is a firm believer that "less is more." By isolating the essence, you get to the archetypal. Style: abstraction that ends in a minimalist focus on essence expressed through a wholistic shape that cannot be reduced any further. Brancusi is hostile to the idea of part-by-part analysis; he wants you to see the whole at once. There is a mystical fusion here between the disembodied light-reflecting surfaces of the highly polished bronze and the more solid, roughly carved, earthbound mass of the wood pedestal. Brancusi always treated the pedestal as part of the piece: the base functioned as the sculpture's roots, almost literally since many of the wood bases were roughly hacked out of trees. Context: Brancusi does away with the allegorical subject that characterized 19th c. figure sculpture, such as those done by Rodin. He abstracts from nature until he comes up with the essence of the idea. The work is not mimetic, but minimalist. Like Matisse, he knows that it is not easy to be simple; the archetype, or universal essence, is only arrived at after a lengthy distilling process. "What is real is not the exterior form," he tells us, "but the idea, the essence of things." Not everyone got the idea, though. When this work went through U.S. Customs, they imposed a commercial import tax on it because they did not see it as a sculpture at all; they saw it as a propeller blade. | ||
