Bird in Space

A tapering, highly polished bronze form, widest at its middle and narrowing to a knife edge at the top, mounted on a cylindrical base: not a bird, but the sensation of a bird's ascent. Brancusi returned to the motif for decades in marble and bronze; when a version reached New York in 1926, customs officials refused to classify it as art and taxed it as industrial metal, and the 1928 ruling in Brancusi v. United States forced the law to accept non-representational sculpture. A 1928 bronze is in the Museum of Modern Art, and the series remains the century's clearest demonstration that abstraction could carry feeling.