Quotes about Constantin Brâncuși

6 Sourced Quotes

My conscious tradition is through Constantin Brâncuși, and Brâncuși just strikes me as an infinitely wiser and infinitely more talented, an infinitely stronger figure than Marcel Duchamp. I think I could have done my work if Duchamp had not lived. I could not have done my work if Brâncuși had not lived.

Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.

[Brancusi] has had more influence on my work than most architects.

The work of the sculptors of my age and somewhat older – Brancusi – Arp – Lipschitz – Laurens – Giacometti – has gradually approached a freedom & moved into space, compared with the sculptors of earlier period – Rodin – Maillol and the young sculptors of today all have the tendency to work with space – to model rather than carve – but it is very necessary in my opinion to have been able to get the refinement and completeness of a single form before going on to space form with no body.

All I'm doing is putting Brancusi's 'Endless Column' on the ground, instead of in the sky. Most sculpture is priapic with the male organ in the air. In my work, Priapus is down on the floor. The engaged position is to run along the earth.

Modern industrial design has advanced at a rapid pace during the last ten years. Its successes are no longer confined to objects which, like automobiles and airplanes, are themselves the product of new conditions. Modern design has also begun to conquer the traditional arts, and the feeling for abstract form, first expressed in our time in the works of Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Duchamps-Villon in Europe, or Stieglitz, Benton, and Storrs for example in the United States, has finally entered architecture and the decorative arts.