Golden Bird
Constantin Brancusi
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, c.1919. BRONZE, STONE, AND WOOD.
As a child, Brancusi was told folk tales of a beneficent, dazzlingly plumed golden bird. The Maiastra is a character in the Romanian folklore and the descriptions he heard from stories told by matriarchs flew around his mind as a child. As he begun to understand his calling as an artist in his teenage, his preoccupation with the image of this bird as a formal object, plastic and changeable, began. Brancusi made more than 30 variations of this theme, the most minute adjustments radically changing the sculpture’s weight and feeling within space. The plumage is simplified into medium, polished bronze that catches the light and seems to take flight, and the bird is reduced to it’s constituents parts, delicate in its balance on a small base but imposing in its power. This example is amongst the most minimal, simplified down to a single form with no adornment and little suggestion of subject yet, if you know what you are looking for, the bird takes flight and elegance. Brancusi’s genius was in the finding of an essence, removing the pomp and ornament of people, objects, and beings and distilling them into something approaching pure truth. His bird is a platonic ideal, universally recognisable and yet open to the possibility of immense and infinite variation.