Constantin Brancusi: The Sky Is The Limit

Brancusi’s oeuvre stems from a powerful thrust towards the unknown, which is as visible as ever in his  Columns, a leitmotif of his artistic production. Such tendency comes as no surprise if we think of the elusiveness his biographical evidence suggests: as a child, he attempted to run away from home at least three times before turning 12, he left Romania for Paris in 1904, and then made frequent trips around Europe and to the United States.

Columns, in different dimensions and materials, proliferated in his studio: there is a strong possibility that Brancusi originally conceived them as pedestals, and that it achieved the status of a work of sculpture by an act of imagination, in the course of time and as new opportunity arose. Brancusi more monumental approach to columns started in 1920, when he realised his 7 metres high “Endless Column” for photographer Edward Steichen’s villa located in the environs of Paris.  Being trimmed from a tree cut down from Steichen’s garden, it showed the undeniably organic origin of the column, which thus had a chance to return to its original setting in a sophisticated form as “a human gesture in a natural world”.

What is striking about it is the way the sculpture enhanced the garden: Steichen said he had never been aware of the beauty of his garden until the Column was placed there. In the artist’s words, the column “ had opened his eyes. This is what artists are for, to reveal beauty”.

In 1937, the project toward which all his efforts seemed pointed took shape: his second Endless Column was constructed in Târgiu Jiu (Romania) to celebrate the young Romanians who fell in a battle against a German force in 1916.  The column, bearing references to Romanian culture and to African art, is rooted five meters below the ground, and, like a tree,  springs from earth  for almost 30 metres in a way that seems natural.

As Brancusi said to american sculptor Malvina Hoffman : “Nature creates plants that grow straight and strong from the ground. Here is my column, its forms are the same from the ground to the top. It has no need for pedestal or base to support it, the wind will not destroy it, it stands by its own strength”.

The column being so deeply rooted in the ground together with its pointing upwards to something non-human contributed to identifying it “axis mundi”, the column of heaven, linked to the ascension and the transcendence of the human condition as embodied in the verticality: a true staircase to heaven, as the artist put it. His research continued in this direction for many more years, and in the 1950s he became motivated to export his motif overseas.

His visits of New York, Washington, and many more American metropolises inspired him to make a project for a 400 metres high Column to be erected on Lake Michigan. Although such ambitious project was halted by the death of the artist in 1957, it emphasises the endless thrust towards the unknown and the ongoing process of creation Constantin Brancusi was immersed in: a true attempt to seize the unseizable and convey to the world his experience of that.