Curator, Anne Umland: Brancusi returned to the subject of birds over and over again. And it went through different transformations until the early 1920s, when he arrives at the definitive form of what, today, we refer to as Birds in Space. And he would then return to that motif with different proportions and different materials.
You can see how he has eliminated all naturalistic details. Not a feather or a claw or a beak or anything like that. Brancusi said, “It’s not the bird I want to express, but the gift, the flight, the momentum.” Whenever I stand before one of his Birds in Space, it’s not like you’re looking at an abstraction of flight necessarily, but almost what it might feel like if you were flying.
There was an infamous court case in 1926 when Brancusi sought to import Bird in Space into the United States, and a US customs official declared it not to be a work of art. This was significant at the time because it meant that it was subject to a very high import tax. And a court case was brought, and in the end, it was decided in favor of Brancusi. His Bird in Space was so new at the time that it couldn’t be recognized as a work of art.