Conceived as a hermeneutic exploration of the process of formal essentialization, the exhibition examines the constitutive structures of Brâncuși’s sculptural language: the reduction of form to archetype, verticality as an ontological axis, the relationship between surface and light, the unity between volume and pedestal, and flight as a conceptual figure of transcendence and continuity. In this perspective, sculptural form is understood as an open dynamic that surpasses the limits of the object and symbolically extends “into the sky, into the pedestal, and into the earth,” as the artist himself once stated.
The exhibition structure includes a bilingual documentary wall installation (Chinese–English) integrating several thematic layers: the aesthetic chronology of the artist’s biography; the contextualization of the Bird series within the broader economy of Brâncuși’s oeuvre; a listing of major works and the museums that hold them; an analysis of the legal episode that took place in the Port of New York (the 1926–1928 trial concerning the status of Bird in Space, a defining moment for the recognition of modern sculpture in the United States); reproductions from period newspapers and documentary images; sketches illustrating the process of formal essentialization; and references to the commission created in the 1930s for Maharajah Yeshwant Rao Holkar of Indore (India), for whom Brâncuși executed two marble versions of the Bird in Space cycle intended for the Maharajah’s palace.
The exhibition narrative also addresses the materials favored by the artist—marble, polished bronze, and wood—as well as Romanian symbolic motifs and the structural relationship between volume and pedestal, which in Brâncuși’s conception forms an inseparable unity within the sculptural work.
“Brâncuși’s Birds – Endless Flight” — Introduction
Brancusi had grown up on a Romanian farm and from the age of seven worked as a herdsman. At nine he left home and taught himself to read and write. After working for a grocer and as a waiter, he saved enough money to enroll in the National School of Fine Art in Romania where he became a skilled wood carver. At age 30, he left Bucharest for Munich to further his career in art. After three years in Munich, he decided that his next step was to go to Paris, the heart of the modern art world. It is said that Brancusi walked to Paris, a distance of almost 800 kilometres that on foot would be around 160 hours. He apparently sold his watch so that he could take a boat across Lake Constance. Brancusi enrolled in the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Art for two years before becoming an assistant to Auguste Rodin. After two months he left, claiming, “Nothing grows under the shadow of big trees”. Brancusi continued to explore representational art by simplifying lines, geometric forms, and surfaces. Interestingly, he did not see his work as ‘abstract’. “They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.”
In 1928 when the court case decided if Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ should be classified as ‘art’, he had sculptures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, The Tate Gallery in London, and many other well established art galleries around the world. When the accomplished sculptor was asked to defend his bird as a piece of art, Brancusi replied, “Well it pleases my sense of beauty, gives me a feeling of pleasure. Made by a sculptor, it has to me a great many elements, but consists in itself a beautiful object. To me, it is a work of art. It communicates the notion of flight itself rather than describing the appearance of a particular bird". Judge Waite accepted that a ‘non-representational sculpture’ qualified as an original piece of art and in doing so a new definition of art included abstract forms. He wrote, “There has been developing a so-called new school of art, whose exponents attempt to portray abstract ideas rather than imitate natural objects. Whether or not we are in sympathy with these newer ideas and the schools which represent them, we think the facts of their existence and their influence upon the art worlds as recognized by the courts must be considered". His ruling helped to transform the art movement in New York which contributed to the growth and acceptance of modern art.
Constantin Brancusi became one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century, influencing the work of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and many more. In his will, he left his entire studio to the French State on the condition that an exact replica of it the day he died was kept intact. His studio, the Atelier Brancusi Musee, opposite the Centre Pompidou in Paris, houses a collection of 137 sculptures, 87 bases, drawings, and original prints. Brancusi died in 1957 and his studio was faithfully restored in 1977. His studio is a work of art in its own right. In his later years he stopped making sculptures so that he could concentrate on reorganizing his pieces to achieve a unity through their relationships to each other. If he sold a piece, he would replace it with a plaster replica.
When I entered Brancusi’s studio I was immediately taken aback at how understated, calm, quiet, and serene it felt. I was immersed in a room that had a ‘sacredness’, a purity that is rare and special. It is one of the most beautiful installations of art and sculpture in the world.
Constantin Brancusi’s “Bird in Space’ is considered by many as the best abstract representation of flight created. On May 6, 2005, one of Brancusi’s abstract birds set a world record as the most expensive free-standing sculpture auctioned at $27.5 million USD.
Chronology
CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUȘI (1876–1957)
1876 – Hobița, Romania; peasant family; rural origins.
1894 – School of Arts and Crafts, Craiova; wood carving.
1898 – National School of Fine Arts, Bucharest; academic sculpture.
1904 – Paris; École des Beaux-Arts.
1907 – Studio of Auguste Rodin; artistic independence.
1910 – First Măiastra; mythic bird; vertical abstraction.
1913 – Armory Show, New York; international recognition.
1916 – First Bird in Space; polished bronze; radical reduction.
1923 – Bird in Space, U.S. customs dispute.
1927–1928 – Brâncuși v. United States; abstract sculpture legally recognized.
1930s – Multiple versions of Bird in Space; marble and bronze; vertical purity.
1937–1938 – Târgu Jiu Ensemble; Endless Column; axial monumentality.
1952 – French citizenship.
1957 – Death in Paris; studio bequeathed to France.
The Flight
In a well-known testimony, Brâncuși recounted the story of a bird that had wandered into his studio and could not find its way out because of an invisible pane of glass. Only after a moment of stillness did it manage to fly freely. “Sculpture is the same,” the artist remarked. “If you find the exit, you rise and enter the kingdom of heaven.” Ultimately, Constantin Brâncuși’s “Birds” construct a metaphysics of flight: an expression of the desire for sublimation, of the triumph of spirit over matter. “Flight,” like the “column,” becomes a “tamed infinity” — to use Constantin Noica’s formulation — essential to the human need for meaning, transcendence, and enduring beauty. Asked about the multitude of “birds” he sculpted in stone, wood, or bronze throughout his life, Constantin Brâncuși responded clearly: “I do not create birds, but flights.” This statement encapsulates the profound stake of his work. Brâncușian art does not pursue the representation of reality, but the revelation of essence: the pure idea, the continuous line, the movement that does not stop within sculptural form but extends into space, into air, into thought. As the artist himself affirmed, the line does not end in the pedestal but continues “into the sky, into the pedestal, and into the earth.” Brâncuși’s “Bird” may also be read as a metaphor for the liberation of the spirit, a detachment from matter, and at the same time a return to the primordial memory of nature. The trills of birds in the forests of his childhood, the stillness of the mountains, the primordial sounds of the Romanian rural world seem to have been sublimated into these pure forms, reduced to essence.
“MAIASTRA” and the evolution toward Bird in Space
The version created in 1910, carved in white marble, is today preserved at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, while other variants can be found at Tate Modern in London and at the Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The later cycle Bird in the Air (1931–1936) radicalizes this vision: the form becomes increasingly slender, details disappear, the surface acquires the reflective quality of a mirror, and the connection to the ground is reduced almost to the point of disappearance.
In 1914 Brâncuși installed in his studio the marble version created between 1910 and 1912 on three superposed pedestals. On a tall geometric base he placed an architectural element composed of two caryatids, likely conceived several years earlier during his return to the antique fragment and his transition to the technique of direct carving. The two figures—one shown in profile and the other frontally—support an architrave upon which a third stone pedestal is placed. In 1913 Brâncuși sent to the Salon des Indépendants the first bronze cast made after this white marble version, installing it on a two-part stone pedestal. The upper geometric element is arranged like the architrave of a temple, resting on two bird-caryatids suggested in bas-relief. In this way the artist preserved an allusion to Antiquity, as well as the uneven treatment of forms and the barely suggested figures that evoke the notion of the fragment. The work was purchased by the American photographer Edward Steichen, who intended to install it in the garden of his property at Voulangis. Brâncuși enthusiastically accepted this idea, since he had already begun to imagine sculptures conceived for outdoor environments. Within this context he replaced the pedestal with a larger one. Some observers interpreted this installation as an allusion to Romanian funerary monuments—tall columns surmounted by a bird.
Brâncuși then returned to the motif of Maiastra and purified it even further: the leg disappears entirely, the abdomen becomes more slender, and the beak rises upward. No obvious morphological indication remains, yet the artist preserves the vital impulse of the original version through the flexible curve of the body and the rounded chest that ascends toward the neck.Around 1919 he carved Yellow Bird, named after the color of the marble, and produced several bronze castings of this intermediate version, which he called Golden Bird. Later, this title would also be applied to other works within the Bird series—sometimes by critics, sometimes by the artist himself—as a metaphor for the luminous brilliance of polished bronze. Through the continuous simplification of form and the careful maintenance of equilibrium, Brâncuși gradually distances himself from the image of Maiastra—the mythical symbol of magical song and metamorphosis—reducing the form to an elongated ellipse suspended in space. All attention is concentrated on the expression of flight and on the moment of maximum tension in which the bird detaches itself from the ground to soar into the sky. The earliest titles of this series—Bird in the Ether or Bird in the Celestial Spaces—confirm the ideal Brâncuși sought to express.
Brâncuși’s bird thus becomes almost rocket-like, resting on the ground through an extremely small point of contact, studied by the artist with great care in order to “suspend” the weight of the body on a base scarcely more than a centimeter wide. The result is a nearly abstract figure that astonished both American customs officials and academic artists when it appeared under the title Bird in Space.
Axes of aesthetic thought
• Reduction of form to essence
• Sculpture as idea, not representation
• Verticality as metaphysics
• Light as material
• Pedestal integrated into the work
• Influences: Romanian folk art, African art, archaism, symbolism
Birds Series
MĂIASTRA
Măiastra, 1910 — Marble — Philadelphia Museum of Art
Măiastra, 1911 — Marble — National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest
Măiastra, 1912 — Bronze — Tate Modern, London
Măiastra, 1912–1913 — Marble — Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Măiastra, 1913 — Plaster — Atelier Brâncuși, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Măiastra, 1917 — Bronze — Centre Pompidou, Paris
Măiastra, 1917 — Marble — Private Collection (Europe)
Măiastra, 1918 — Marble — Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Măiastra, 1918 — Bronze — Private Collection (USA)
Măiastra (Studio Variant), c.1910–1912 — Mixed Media — Private Collection
BIRD IN SPACE
Bird in Space, 1919–1920 — White Marble — Philadelphia Museum of Art
Bird in Space, 1920 — Polished Bronze — Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Bird in Space, 1921 — Marble — Centre Pompidou, Paris
Bird in Space, 1922 — Polished Bronze — Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Bird in Space, 1923 — Polished Bronze — Seattle Art Museum
Bird in Space, 1925 — Polished Bronze — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Bird in Space, 1926 — Polished Bronze — Philadelphia Museum of Art
Bird in Space, 1927 — Marble — Centre Pompidou, Paris
Bird in Space, 1928 — Polished Bronze — Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Bird in Space, 1930 — Marble — National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Bird in Space, 1931 — Polished Bronze — Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Bird in Space, 1932 — Polished Bronze — Private Collection (USA)
Bird in Space, 1933 — Marble — Private Collection (Europe)
Bird in Space, 1936 — Polished Bronze — Tate Modern, London
Bird in Space, 1940 — Polished Bronze — Private Collection
Bird in Space, date unknown — Polished Bronze — Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
BIRD (Autonomous Studies)
Bird, c.1919 — Plaster — Atelier Brâncuși, Centre Pompidou
Bird, c.1920 — Bronze — Private Collection
GOLDEN BIRD
Golden Bird, 1919–1920 — Bronze, Stone, Wood — Art Institute of Chicago
Light and Reflection
The reflective quality of the polished surface in Brâncuși’s works, such as Golden Bird, was intentional. Brâncuși wished the surrounding environment to be reflected in his polished sculptures; thus, in his studio, the works reflected other sculptures as well as the images of those who contemplated them.“Light preoccupied Brâncuși throughout his life,” wrote Margit Rowell, “both in sculpture and in photography. Whether in the discreet radiance of marble or in the brilliance of polished bronze, his tireless pursuit was to capture the reflection of light: ‘We see real life only through reflections,’ he wrote in 1919. His works invite a further step in interpreting the singular phenomenon of the highly polished surface. Beyond the fact that the sheen of bronze appears to transform the substance of the work into an immaterial reflection, the reflective surface admits the studio, the environment, and the entire sensory world into the sculptural volume, erasing the boundaries between object and surroundings and creating the higher unity to which Brâncuși aspired.”(Exhibition Catalogue, Paris – Centre Pompidou and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Constantin Brancusi 1876–1957, 1995, p. 47)The interaction between light and reflection on the surface of these works creates a powerful impression on the viewer and perfectly fulfills the artist’s intention to convey movement and flight in his bird sculptures.
Over the course of four decades, Brâncuși explored the theme of the bird in flight through more than thirty versions in marble and bronze. Further remarkable insights can be discovered by visiting the exhibition “Brâncuși’s Birds – Endless Flight,” officially inaugurated on 1 March 2026 at 18:00 at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Beijing, accompanying the extraordinary concert “Brâncuși 150: The Sound of Forms,” performed by violinist Diana Jipa and pianist Ștefan Doniga.The exhibition will remain open until the end of 2026.The project is realized with the support of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and museum specialist Peter Huestis.
We warmly invite you to visit the exhibition.
