Constantin Brancusi was born in Romania in February 19, 1876.  Since he was a child Brancusi expressed an artistic ability by carving farming tools out of wood.  Through his hard work in school he was able to move to Paris and attend the Ecole Beaux-Arts in 1904.  Brancusi then became an apprentice under the famous sculptor, Auguste Rodin but soon after left because in Brancusi's words, “ nothing grows in the shadow of great trees” (Ayers 1). Coincidentally, the Rodin Museum featuring many of the Rodin sculptures that influenced Brancusi, is also located a few blocks from the Philadelphia Museumof Art.  Brancusi eventually separated himself from Rodin, by exploring new genres of art such as abstraction and used this interest to create one of his most famous works, a series of sculptures known as Bird in Space. (Ayers 1).

Brancusi became fixated with the representation of birds in their simplest of forms.  He created them as uncomplicated geometric figures stripped of wings and feathers.  This allowed the viewer to concentrate on the bird’s movements rather than physical attributes.  Brancusi’s birds were a depiction of a golden bird character in many popular, old folktales.  The ‘solar bird’ is related to the sun and its cycle around the globe each day protecting Earth from the sun’s powerful rays.  As the myth explains, the solar bird is “consumed in fire to be reborn from his ashes – a symbol of the diurnal circle of the sun” (Spear 6).  This bird was believed to be reincarnated every morning, continuing the sequence.  Brancusi’s birds are meant to be a representation of this bird trapped in the underworld with its neck pointed upward wit h an open mouth yearning for morning when it can escape the underworld and once again take flight.

Brancusi’s famous Yellow Bird was just one of his attempts to perfect his image of this bird.  Brancusi’s Bird Series consists of “over twenty-five marble or bronze sculptures formed during the course of four decades” (Temkin 320).  Each bird can be split up into one of three categories.  The first category of Brancusi’s oldest sculpted birds is called Maiastra. As you can see to your right when you enter his exhibit in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, these birds consist of a fattened belly, a long neck, an open beak, eyes, and legs.  The second type, the Golden Bird, is a simplified and sleeker version of the Maiastra. The Golden Bird has neither eyes nor legs. Its back is completely straight, its beak became one with its neck, and “the passage between neck to belly disappeared” (Spear 18). With his Golden Bird in place, Constantin was close to perfecting his birdlike form. The Golden Bird then gave rise to the third category of tranformation, the Bird in Space.  The Yellow Bird, a form of the Bird in Space, is made of yellow marble sitting on top of a  limestone-wood-limestone base. The sculpture itself is very simple. It is an arced piece of marble that goes straight up and down, but has many great sculpting qualities embedded in it. One of these sculpting techniques is its verticality. This up and down position of the sculpture used by Brancusi puts emphasis on “ upwards motion” (Shanes 34). The top yellow marble section also goes from narrow, widens, and then gets narrow at the top again. This simulates a flow throughout the sculpture. The sculpture also has a base which is jagged to contribute to the overall upwards emphasis of the sculpture (Shanes 37).

In terms of interpretation, Brancusi intended for this sculpture to be interpreted in terms of flight instead of looking at it as an actual bird. He once said, “’all my life I’ve been looking for one thing, the essence of flight...What a marvelous thing flight is”  (Shanes 40).  He also claimed “’my birds are a series of different objects in a central research,” that research being flight (Shanes 40). Shanes writes “Brancusi produced more variants of Bird in Space than of any other theme, for the subject was spiritually, aesthetically, and formally fundamental to him”(Shanes 40). Going deeper into interpretation, one might say that Brancusi was even addressing a flight of one’s soul (Shanes 40).  By the end of his life, Brancusi completed and perfected his Bird in Space collection, which he had began in 1923.