Golden Bird

This is a sculpture just over seven feet tall, made of bronze, stone, and wood. At the top is a golden bird, smoothed into one long, elegant, streamlined shape. Its beak tilts up, as if the bird were crowing. Below it stands a heavy, rough, blocky base. Your eye goes first to the contrast between the two parts. Above, a shining surface catches the light. Below, a solid mass seems to hold the whole sculpture to the ground. Step back to take in the full height before you move closer.

Start at the very top, where the beak points upward. Then follow the bird's body down to its lower end, where a tail and feet are only hinted at, not carefully drawn. Next, look at the middle of the base, the large block with many flat sides. Its surface shows a pattern of circles. These are the rings of a tree, because this block was cut from the middle of a tree trunk. Notice how the rings seem to spread outward from a center, like a sun.

Constantin Brancusi was born in Romania and worked in France. He lived from 1876 to 1957. Around 1907 he set out to find his own way of making sculpture. He used direct carving, which means shaping the material yourself rather than copying a finished model. He also combined different materials in one work and simplified shapes to reach what he saw as a subject's essential character. This bird dates from 1919 and 1920, and its base from about 1922. It is one of twenty-seven Bird sculptures he made over several decades.

Brancusi once said that all his life he had tried to show the essence of flight. The Bird series, begun around 1910 and finished in the 1940s, sums up that search. His earliest versions were called Maiastra, after a bird in Romanian folklore that leads a prince to his princess. His work has deeply shaped abstraction, the kind of art that moves away from copying how things look. Before you leave, look again at the circles in the wooden block. They seem to turn like a sun, sending light up toward the bird.