The Romanian Cultural Institute and Reaktion Books launch the book Constantin Brancusi by art historian Sanda Miller, in London, today.
Part of the series ‘Critical Lives’ published by Reaktion Books, Sanda Miller’s new addition focuses on Brancusi’s odyssey from a small village in his native Romania to the heart of bohemia in Paris and the people he gathered around him: friends, dealers, collectors, lovers, and assorted sycophants who regularly visited his ‘white’ atelier in Montparnasse filled with the numinous sculpture. Brancusi’s self-mythology remained intact until the publication of “Brancusi” in 1986 by Romanian artists Alexandre Istrati and Natalia Dumitresco, who made available a small selection of the archive of Brancusi’s correspondence. And in 2003, a comprehensive catalogue, which made the bulk of Brancusi’s private correspondence public for the first time, was published by the Centre Pompidou to accompany a retrospective on Brancusi’s work.
In Constantin Brancusi, Sanda Miller employs these extensive new resources to better assess Brancusi’s life and work. Acknowledged as one of the major sculptors and avant-garde artists of the twentieth century, Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) was also one of the most elusive, despite his fame. His mysterious nature was not only due to his upbringing in Romania – which, at the time, was still regarded by much of Europe as a backward country haunted by vampires and werewolves –but also because Brancusi was aware that myth and an aura of otherness appealed to the public. Sanda Miller is a senior lecturer in fashion writing and culture at Southampton University.
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