Among the mass migrations that artists undertook to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, none of those trips was as extraordinary as that of Constantin Brancusi, who walked from his village in the foothills of the Romanian Carpathians with a sack on his back and a violin in hand. He crossed Hungary, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, until reaching the French capital on July 14, 1904. The bearded and protean young man had worked as a dyer, altar boy, dishwasher and violin maker, and when shortly after arriving Auguste Rodin invited him to collaborate in his workshop, he rejected the offer because “in the shadow of a big tree,” he said, “nothing grows.” In return, he decided to plant his own inside his study, his lair, so that there was no separation between life and work, keeping the hammers and chisels next to the bed. Today he is the world's favorite modern sculptor, spiritual and mundane, sensual, wild and sophisticated, complex and accessible, capable of turning matter into an improbable and gigantic piece of truth.
It deserves its popularity. These days, endless queues of visitors happily wait in front of the doors of the Pompidou Center, which dedicates one of the year's exhibitions to him. Inside the crowded rooms, two embraced lovers emerge from a block of stone, their faces pressed together and their eyes merged into one (The Kiss); the sleeping head of a baby rests like a slightly flattened egg from which emerges a huge, moaning mouth (The Newborn) and the sculptor's lover, Princess Bonaparte, metamorphoses into an erect bronze phallus, so polished that it looks like an explosion. of lightning (Princess The police removed it from the Salon des Indépendants in 1920, but he maintained that it was the body of a woman, the head and both breasts.
Brancusi played with ambiguity, without imposing himself, challenging the imagination even of American customs officials who, in 1927, perplexed by the possibility that one of the Birds in Space that now swarm in front of the gallery's large windows as if about to To take off into the sky of Paris, it was really a sculpture, they imposed a high tariff on it, putting it in the “kitchen utensils and hospital supplies” category. The arguments of his friend Duchamp, who accompanied the gigantic sculpture on its transatlantic journey, were of little use. How could they call that spindly object a bird if it had no beak, no wings, not even a few miserable feathers? Brancusi faced court. “Would you say that what you have made represents a bird?” they asked him. "No sir. That represents the idea of a bird in flight,” he replied. There was a parade of experts and the judges ended up agreeing with him. The next day, the newspapers published the photograph of the sculpture with a triumphant headline: “It's a bird!”
