Constantine brancusi biography summary of 100
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Famous Romanians: Constantin Brancusi
Known as the “the father of modern sculpture”, Constantin Brancusi was a painter, architect and a master of “abstract art”. Through his original work he became one of the most well-known sculptors of the 20th century and Romania’s most famous international artist.
By Alexandra Fodor
Constantin Brancusi was born in 1876 at Hobita, in Oltenia, southern Romania. In 1883, he started working as a shepherd in the Carpathian Mountains. Later on, he worked as a dyer, as an assistant in a grocery and then as a servant at an inn. While working at the inn he was challenged to man a violin as a bet. He succeeded so well, that the owner of the shop decided to help him to enroll in the provincial Craiova School of Arts and Crafts. From Craiova he went to Bucharest in 1898 to study sculpture at the School of Fine Arts, then to Munich, Zurich and Basel before arriving in Paris in 1904.
He exhibited at the Salon dem Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 19
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There is a performance in the gallery today. A tall young woman with a page-boy haircut is sitting upright on the parquet floor, her arms crossed over her stomach, her knees pulled up. Her posture mirrors that of a statue in an adjacent room. Initially she is still, then she starts to look around. She relaxes into an attitude that recalls, to me at least, a bored schoolboy waiting for something to happen. Then she sprawls on the floor.
Maria F Scaroni in A Luxury That We Can’t Afford (Wisdom of the Earth), at Bozar, Brussels, October 2019 (photo: © Ian Mundell)
This schoolboy impression is helped by the way she is dressed: a loose silver shirt and a pair of shorts. She kicks her feet, wiggles her fingers in front of her eyes as if playing games with the light, rolls on to her back, slides a little on the smooth floor. This loose repertoire of movements unfolds for ten minutes or so and eventually leads back to the sitting position.
The Wisdom of the Earth by
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The Romanian born Constantin Brancusi was a leading sculptor of the 20th century and a pioneer of modern art. My first encounter with the great man was in Paris, the city where he lived for many years and where he met and became friends with many of the great artists, writers and poets of the 20th century such as Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire and Ezra Pound. His Parisian studio still stands today on the same site where the Pompidou Centre of Modern and Contemporary Art is located and he is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery along with other greats like Charles Baudelaire, Serge Gainsbourg and Jean Paul Satre.
Constantin Brancusi
From the city of Timisoara, located in the west of Romania, I embarked on a bus ride lasting nearly six hours to reach the country town of Targu Jiu. I was the only tourist on the bus and most of the journey comprised of driving through rural and provincial Romania. The Romanian countryside is wild, raw and authenti