Curatorial Assistant, Samantha Small: In 1945, Brancusi was 69 years old. He had spent World War II in Paris, and Boundary Marker is one of the last works that he created.
This work consists of two blocks placed around a central column, all of which are inscribed with this motif of The Kiss. This is one pair of lovers; this is every pair of lovers. As you move around the work, they keep going in an endless unfolding.
A boundary marker shows where one country or property ends and another begins. After the war, Brancusi was really devastated by the loss of Romanian territory to the Soviet Union. And so, in one respect, this work is political because it is associated with this loss of territory.
But in another sense, he wanted it to encourage international harmony. While we do think of lovers kissing as sort of a romantic love, we can also think of them as representations of two countries coexisting side by side in this way, their boundaries pressed firmly against one another, but doing so in harmony.