3. Final projects, 1935 and after
Source: Oxford University Press
In 1935 Brancusi was commissioned by the maharajah Jaswant Rao Holkar II of Indore to build a Temple of Deliverance in the grounds of his palace in India as a place of meditation; after the death of the maharajah’s young wife in 1936 it was also to be a mausoleum. Brancusi, who had wished to build a Temple of Love as early as 1930, discussed his plans with the Romanian engineer Stefan Georgescu-Gorjan in Paris in 1936 and visited India from December 1937 to January 1938. For political and other reasons the temple was never built.
Brancusi’s only completed monumental complex, considered by some his greatest work, synthesizing the elements of his previous art, was the Tîrgu-Jiu Complex in Romania, inaugurated on 27 October 1938. It consists of the Endless Column , intended as a votive and funerary monument in memory of the soldiers who fell during World War I, the Table of Silence (a circular table surrounded by twelve circular hour-glass-shaped stools), the Gate of the Kiss (flanked by stone benches placed on each of the short sides) and thirty square hour-glass stools arranged in groups of three stools arranged in five recessed niches on each side of the alley uniting the table and portal. He had made four other Endless Columns, one of which was carved from an oak tree in the garden of Edward J. Steichen (c. 1920; ex-Voulangis, see 1969 exh. cat., p. 91). After completion of the ensemble, Brancusi concentrated his attention largely on refining and simplifying his favourite motifs, such as The Kiss and the Bird in Space, to which he remained faithful to the end of his life.
From Grove Art Online