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The city of Timișoara is hosting the country’s first major show of the sculptor’s enigmatic works for more than 50 years

Constantin Brâncuși’s sandstone column “The Boundary Stone” was the last in an almost life-long series that developed his signature emblem, “The Kiss”, towards ever greater abstraction. It may also be his only sculpture with an overt political meaning, created in 1945 as the Soviet Union wrested territory from his homeland, Romania. Seen as a message of peace, with its intimately entwined couples, eyes and lips locked, it might also embody a challenge to imposed borders — a desire for inseparable union.

This work from the Pompidou Centre in Paris is now on show in the first major Brâncuși exhibition in his native land for more than 50 years: Brâncuși: Romanian Sources and Universal Perspectives, at the Timișoara National Museum of Art (MNART) in western Romania. Conceived by the Art Encounters Foundation behind the city’s biennale — as the finale of Timișoara’s European Capital of Culture 2023 programme — the show is a symbolic homecoming. It assails what its curator, Doina Lemny, describes to me as myths about the pioneering Modernist, who seldom revealed the sources of his art. Though Brâncuși (pronounced Bran-kush in Romanian) lived in Paris from 1904 until his death in 1957, becoming a French citizen at 76 and bequeathing his collection to the French state, his ties to Romania, Lemny contends, were never cut.

Romanian museums furnish early works. But many loans, from the Pompidou, the Guggenheim in Venice and Tate in London, have never been seen here before, signalling a momentous shift in a country still scarred by the Ceaușescu dictatorship. MNART, in the Baroque Palace of Timișoara (cradle city of the 1989 revolution), was awarded national museum status in 2020. A €2.5mn county council grant has since transformed it into one of a growing number of museums in the country geared for high-value international loans. The purpose-built Museum of Recent Art (MARe) in Bucharest — a short walk from the Ceaușescus’ former mansion — was founded in 2018 as Romania’s first private museum, and recently hosted 46 masterpieces from the Picasso Museum in Paris. They were stunningly displayed in The Picasso Effect alongside 65 Romanian artworks inspired or provoked by them since the 1960s.

In Timișoara, Brâncuși’s path to abstraction is traced in more than 100 works, which include the exquisite bronzes “Sleeping Muse” (1910) and “Danaïde” (1918). There are rare photographs by the artist (lent by the collector David Grob), such as “Self-Portrait with his Dog Polaire in Front of the Studio” (c1924). While Brâncuși kept his studio in Montparnasse for five decades — his Paris friends ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Erik Satie — his work was also shown among an appreciative avant-garde in Romania.

His skinless man, “L’Ecorché” (1902), a debut made in coloured plaster as an anatomical teaching aid, astonished compatriots with its expressive power. It was proof of Brâncuși’s classical training to those who mistook his as the raw genius of a Carpathian peasant. Born in 1876 in Hobita village, at the foot of forested mountains, he studied arts and crafts in Craiova and was an apprentice woodcarver in Vienna, before graduating from the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest.

At 28, he arrived in Paris. “Pride” (1905), a naturalistic bust of a girl, was praised by Auguste Rodin, in whose studio Brâncuși spent a few months in 1907. Yet he left, because “Nothing grows in the shadow of a big tree.” His first “The Kiss” (1907), in pale Marna stone, was a direct challenge to Rodin’s symbolist sculpture. Breaking with portraiture (“We come at simplicity as a way to approach the truth,” he wrote), it was also a revolution in technique. Abandoning the moulding prevalent since the Renaissance for direct carving, he tapped sources from Romanesque churches and Carpathian woodcarving to African sculpture and Gauguin.

Brâncuși’s photograph of “The First Step” (1914) captures his wood carving of a child, its diagonal slash of an eye above a gaping triangular mouth. According to Lemny, the artist destroyed this figure as too obviously African in influence, keeping only the ovoid head. “Head of First Step”, here in a 1917 plaster version, inspired the pared-down Newborn series, ultimately refined into an egg in “The Beginning of the World” (1920).

“He adored African sculptures,” Lemny says. He discussed African art with Modigliani, “but he didn’t collect masks like the Cubists. He admired, but didn’t want to approach.” Brâncuși, who favoured salvaged wood for its past lives, noted that African sculptors “also preserved the life of matter in their sculpture. They worked with wood. They did not wound it.” Perhaps he sensed affinities with Romanian woodcarvers steeped in pre-Christian beliefs about the natural world.

“Brâncuși didn’t need to look at Africa; he had his own backyard,” Dan Popescu, of the H’Art Gallery in Bucharest, tells me. “Modernists harvested the peasantry.” The birdlike bronze “Maiastra” (1911), from Tate, takes its title from Romanian folklore about a songbird-turned-princess. It may also allude to wooden birds on Romanian grave columns, symbolising the soul’s flight.

The show offers reminders of how shocking and contested such sculpture could be. “The Kiss” installed in Montparnasse cemetery in 1910, revealing the lovers’ squatting legs, scandalised with its hint of pagan fertility. The polished bronze “Bird in Space”, refined to an aerodynamic spear, appears alongside news headlines asking “But is it art?”: Brâncuși sued US customs for levying import duties on the metal as though it were no artwork — a court battle he won in 1928.

The view from communist Romania was as complex. “The communists needed heroes,” Lemny says. Yet the Romanian Academy blocked Brâncuși’s induction in 1951. After Ceaușescu took power in 1965, “stylistic diversity” in art ousted socialist realism — partly to annoy the Soviets. (“Romanians were nationalists before they were communists,” Popescu says.) When Ceaușescu opposed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a cultural door to the west reopened, and Brâncuși’s official standing rose. Following a posthumous exhibition in Bucharest in 1970, a house museum opened in his natal Gorj county in 1971. Yet the three-room wooden hut with geraniums on the veranda is not the original: a stone in the front yard marks where his vanished birthplace stood.

Nearby, Brâncuși’s monumental ensemble to the first world war dead, constructed in the city of Târgu Jiu in 1937-38 (documented in his photographs in the exhibition), was neglected until the 1960s. Today the place of pilgrimage is guarded by an attendant with a whistle. “The Gate of the Kiss”, a travertine arch with a familiar lovers’ frieze, leads to a round-stone “Table of Silence” beside the river. “The Endless Column” soars at the park’s centre, its metallic yellow rhomboid beads recalling both funerary columns and a rustic oil-press screw in the artist’s studio, whose motion conjured infinity.

Persistent disputes about the sources of Brâncuși’s art — stressing or downplaying Romanian motifs — seem curious today, as though inspiration from folk art might diminish his universality. “He is not a Romanian sculptor,” the critic Sidney Geist once asserted. “He is international.” Surely, at last, he can be both? Cutting through these debates is Brâncuși’s plea for his own sculptures: “Do not look for . . . mysteries. I give you pure joy. Look at them until you see them.”