“In art, one does not aim for simplicity, one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.”
Lurking beneath the reflective and seemingly simple polished surface of Constantin Brancusi’s L’Oiseau d’or, is a work of art imbued with all of the enigmatic complexity and power found in the artist’s best sculptures. The subject of the bird would be preeminent in Brancusi’s oeuvre—indeed he created at least thirty versions of these upright birds during his lifetime out of a limited corpus of only around two hundred works. He used brass, marble and bronze in a variety of sizes, hewing to three primary shapes: the Maiastra, L’Oiseau d’or and L’Oiseau dans l’espace. Over the course of thirty years this form evolved towards ever greater abstraction seemingly charting the course of movement: from a bird at rest to a bird in flight (see figs. 1-3).
His first sculpture from this series, the Maiastra now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, takes as its subject the mythical golden-plumed bird of Romanian folklore whose voice, whose very presence, held great power. Perhaps not coincidentally this first iteration on what would become a life-long focus began in 1910, the same year that Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird debuted at the Palais Garnier for Segei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In 1919 the L’Oiseau d’or, the form of the present work, was first created followed within a few years by the first iteration of L’Oiseau dans l’espace. Writing about the transition in form between these works Margherita Andreotti describes: “If we compare Golden Bird to the type that preceded and followed it, we see that it played a pivotal role in Brancusi's move away from a descriptive, analytical approach to his subject toward a more synthetic mode of expression…. Maiastra presents a still-identifiable tail, legs, body, neck, head, and eyes. In Golden Bird, the sculptor abandoned any suggestion of a clear differentiation of parts in favor of a continuous surface that evokes a bird through its subtle inflections rather than representing it. Golden Bird is also the work in which Brancusi first began to focus on what he called ‘the essence of flight,’ an aspect that clearly dominated later versions of this subject, as the bird's form became increasingly attenuated in the many versions of Bird in Space" (Margherita Andreotti, “Brancusi’s ‘Golden Bird’: A New Species of Modern Sculpture,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1993, p. 141).
"The bird has me in its charms and will not let me go.”
Setting off on foot from Romania in May of 1904, Brancusi arrived in Paris in July of that same year. Working first as a dishwasher, he was soon enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, before a brief stint assisting Auguste Rodin in 1907. It was at this time that he pulled firmly away from a more traditional, academic style. His first iteration of Le Baiser, now in the Muzeul de Artă, Craiova, was created at this time and would prove to be one of his most emblematic sculptures (see fig. 4). It seems almost impossible that Brancusi had not encountered Rodin’s composition of the same name while working in his studio some months previously, but Brancusi’s carving visually shares more commonalities with one of the most ancient sculptures recorded—the Venus of Willendorf, dating from 28,000-25,000 B.C.
Within a few years of Brancusi’s Le Baiser, carved heads and fragmentary body parts began to emerge from the stones in his studio as did his first Maistra along with a grouping of penguins and his first upright and sleeping Muses. Several of Brancusi’s sculptures would journey across the Atlantic, where their inclusion in the seminal 1913 Armory show, which shocked Americans with the abstraction of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, brought Brancusi’s work to the United States for the first time. It was to be a fruitful relationship. Brancusi’s success in the United States was compounded by his involvement with Marcel Duchamp and the Brummer Gallery, both of whom brought further attention to his work and promoted his sculptures amongst their own colleagues and patrons both in New York and farther afield. The marble and the bronze L’Oiseau d’or were both exhibited in the United States in 1922 and the artist’s own photo of the sculpture had been published the year prior in a photograph in Ezra Pound’s “Brancusi” The Little Review (see fig. 5).
The reflective quality of the polish in Brancusi’s works, as in L’Oiseau d’or, was quite intentional. Brancusi intended for the surroundings of his polished sculptures to be reflected; thus in his studio his works would reflect his other works and would also include anyone viewing his work. “Light preoccupied Brancusi throughout his lifetime,” wrote Margit Rowell, “both in his sculpture and in his photography. Whether in the discreet sheen of marble or in the brilliance of polished bronze, his tireless quest was to catch its reflection: ‘We do not see real life except by reflections,’ he wrote in 1919. His works invite a further step in interpreting the singular phenomena of his use of high polish. Aside from the fact that the radiance of his bronze sculpture seems to transform the substance of the work into an immaterial reflection, the reflective surface admits the studio, the environment, the whole sensory world, into the sculptural volume, effacing all boundaries between object and surroundings and creating the higher Unity to which Brancusi aspired” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Constantin Brancusi 1876-1957, 1995, p. 47). The interplay of light and reflection on the surface of the present work creates an indelible impression on the viewer and beautifully complements the artist’s intention of conveying movement and flight in his sculpted birds.
The present bronze was cast in 1971 by Susse Fondeur from a copy of the original plaster at the instruction of the artist’s heirs Alexandre Istrati and Natalia Dumitresco. This couple, originally also from Romanian, lived and worked out a studio adjacent to Brancusi’s in the Impasse Ronsin alongside other artists from Jean Tinguely to Max Ernst to Yves Klein. Niki de Saint Phalle created her “shooting paintings” here a few years after Brancusi’s death while the Lalannes, as Claude Lalanne would recall years later, “were just a young couple, living next door to an old Romanian, who came around with vodka most nights” (James McAuley, The Artists and Their Alley, in Postwar France,” The New York TImes Style Magazine, 22 September 2016, online).
Istrati and Dumitresco were constant companions of Brancusi, especially in his later years and the early posthumous casts were created under their direction. To our knowledge, three casts were made by Susse Fondeur from this plaster, this, the first cast in 1971. The other two casts were made subsequently in the 1980s. Other posthumous bronzes of works including Une Muse, Le Nouveau-né, Tête, L'Oiseau dans l'Espace. Le Poisson and Grand Coq IV are found in museum collections around the world. The present work was acquired by Nelly Baer (Bär) shortly after it was cast. A sculptor in her own right she and her husband Werner donated a large portion of their art collection to the Kunsthaus, Zurich. L’Oiseau d’or has remained in the same family until today.
Constantin Brancusi’s Birds: Maiastra, L’Oiseau d’or and L’Oiseau dans l’espace
