Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957)

"There is an aim in all things, to reach it we must detach ourselves from ourselves... It is not making things that is difficult but putting ourselves in condition to make them... Simplicity is not an end in art, but we arrive at simplicity in spite of ourselves as we approach the real sense of things... They are fools who call my work abstract. What they think to be abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the outer form, but the idea, the essence of things... Don't look for obscure formulas or mysteries. Look at the sculptures until you see them. Those nearest to God have seen them."

Brancusi walks from Romania to Paris in 1904, and at. age 30 enters Auguste Rodin's studio. He leaves Rodin's studio after just one month to work on his own, explaining: "Nothing grows beneath great trees." Influenced by Asian, African and ancient Greek Cycladic sculpture. Support from Philadelphia collector Walter Arensberg crucial. Brancusi's Bird in Space subtitled Project of Bird Which, When Enlarged, Will Fill the Sky. Starting point for Bird in Space was the image of a bird standing at rest, with its wings folded. Portraits of Margit Pogany use memory to filter out irrelevant detail. Endless Columns, monuments to Rumanian dead in World War I, suggest infinity by many repetitions of the same shape. Brancusi influenced by an 11th century Tibetan monk named Milarepa, who preached the universality of all things.