I found it very difficult to find information on Constantine Brancusi in hard copy, therefore, you will see at the end of my paper that all of my sources are websites. The little information I did locate on the artist was very, very little. Therefore, I combined the small amount of information with some research I found on artists that were strongly influenced by Brancusi. Brancusi's imprint on contemporary sculptural practice ranges from the dissemination of furniture-oriented sculpture and the emerging topos of architectural folly to new paradigms for public art. At the same time many postwar artists engaging in a dialogue with his legacy have read and productively misread Brancusi's work. Through the violent but fecund gesture of subjective intervention, these artists have extracted from it new practices of far greater critical and historical significance than might have resulted from an objective, historicist approach.After his death in 1957, renewed interest in Brancusi occurred first and foremost in the United States. The Endless Column and many of the artist's bases and furniture pieces, such as his working tables and stools, proved to be relevant to the concerns of U.S. sculptors who came to prominence in the 1960s. In particular, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra grew specifically interested in the structural makeup of the column based on the cloning of a single, identical unit. Its repetitive, modular, and nonhierarchical morphology provided them with an economical way of circumventing the relational orders of mainstream European art. The public works of Scott Burton and Martin Puryear have contributed not only to the ongoing debate between high art and utilitarian design, but also to a heightened awareness of art's social function. Like the Russian Constructivist, Bauhaus, and De Stijl practitioners before them, or the generation of furniture sculptors succeeding them, Burton and Puryear bo...
