Constantin Brâncuși Fish Paris 1930

  • MoMA, Floor 5, 508 The David Geffen Wing

This sculpture is the last of the seven Fish Brâncuși created, and the largest. It attests to the artist's deep interest in movement; not only does its heavy body, made of flecked blue-gray marble, evoke aquatic motion, it rests on a pivot that once allowed the work to spin. Even when still, the work changes as one moves around it. Broad and horizontal, the marble transforms into an attenuated sliver from particular points of view.

Gallery label from Constantin Brâncuși Sculpture, 2018
Additional text

Less an image of a fish than an embodiment of the idea of one, Fish conjures the animal's liquid course by simplifying details like fin and scale, tail and head, into smooth streamline. ("Simplicity," Brâncuși believed, "is not an end in art, but we usually arrive at simplicity as we approach the true sense of things.") The material too contributes: a blue-gray marble veined with flecks of flowing white, its surface intimates both movement through water and moving water itself.

Brâncuși was fascinated by animals, and believed in the primacy of animal consciousness. In reducing animals to elemental shapes, he felt he was approaching the essence of nature. Also, like a number of European artists of his period, he was excited by art from outside the classical tradition so influential in Western aesthetics. The art of Africa, Native America, and the Pacific, and also the art of prehistory (including Cycladic sculpture, a particular influence on Brâncuși), took imaginative liberties with human and animal bodies, alternately exaggerating, attenuating, and eliminating their features. These examples liberated Brâncuși and others in their treatment of form. By the time he made Fish, in fact, Brâncuși seems almost to have left form behind altogether, for something more incorporeal: what he described as the fish's "speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water . . . the flash of its spirit."

Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 166.

This _Fish_—the last and largest of the seven Brâncuși made—attests to the artist’s deep interest in movement: not only does its heavy body, made of flecked blue-gray marble, evoke aquatic motion, it rests on a pivot that once allowed the work to spin. Even when still, the work changes as one moves around it. Broad and horizontal from one point of view, the marble transforms into an attenuated sliver from another.

Gallery label from 2019
Medium
Blue-gray marble 21 x 71 x 5 1/2" (53.3 x 180.3 x 14 cm), on three-part pedestal of one marble 5 1/8" (13 cm) high, and two limestone cylinders 13" (33 cm) high and 11" (27.9 cm) high x 32 1/8" (81.5 cm) diameter at widest point
Dimensions
21 × 71 × 5 1/2" (53.3 × 180.3 × 14 cm) Pedestal: 5 1/8" (13 cm) Other (cylinder): 13 × 32 1/8" (33 × 81.6 cm) Other (cylinder): 11" (27.9 cm)
Credit
Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange)
Object number
695.1949.a-d
Copyright
© Succession Brancusi - All rights reserved (ARS) 2018
Department
Painting and Sculpture

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1949, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased from the artist.

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