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CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUSI
(1876–1957) was a Romanian-born sculptor who lived and worked in Paris from 1904 and became one of the defining figures of modern art. Trained in Bucharest and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he broke with academic naturalism to develop a radically distilled sculptural language attentive to material, surface, repetition, and the relationship between the work and its base. His best-known works include The Kiss, Sleeping Muse, Bird in Space, and the monumental ensemble at Târgu Jiu, culminating in the Endless Column.