The Maiastra
Constantin Brancusi
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, c.1912. BRASS ON LIMESTONE BASE.
A beneficent, dazzlingly plumed golden bird flew around Brancusi’s mind since childhood. The Maiastra is a character in the Romanian folklore he heard growing up and his preoccupation with the bird as a formal object, plastic and changeable, started in his teenage years. 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. 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.