Quotes

Constantin Brâncuși was an extraordinary figure within 20th century sculpture whose personality was equally memorable and bold.

Quotes from his life and career below have helped us to get a better understanding of the man himself.

Famous Quotes by Constantin Brâncuși

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.

I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands.

Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one's self by entering into the real sense of things.

Theories are patterns without value. What counts is action.

There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.

There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

To see far is one thing, going there is another.

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things... it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.

Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god.

Quotes by Art Historians and othe Artists about Constantin Brâncuși

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 (static) 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.

Henry Moore

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.

Lewis Mumford

Brâncuși held a large spectrum of interests, from science to music. He was a good violinist and he would sing old Romanian folk songs, often expressing by them his feelings of homesickness. After the installment of communism, he never considered moving back permanently to his native Romania, but he did visit it eight times.

Wikipedia