Constantin Brâncuși - Madame LR. Portrait de Mme LR 1914-1917
Madame LR. Portrait de Mme LR 1914-1917
117cm bois de chêne sculpté (oak)
Sold for: USD 37,6 million
Auction house: Christie's, Paris
Sale date: 24 February 2009
Seller: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé
Buyer: Private collection
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Constantin Brâncuși; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957 was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered a pioneer of modernism, one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought inspiration in non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain and others. But other influences emerge from Romanian folk art traceable through Byzantine and Dionysian traditions.