Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi is a powerful drawing created by Amedeo Modigliani in 1909. This early portrait of his fellow artist, the pioneering Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, demonstrates Modigliani’s emerging style, blending formal restraint with deeply felt psychological insight. The work, classified as a drawing, utilizes graphite with subtle traces of crayon, applied across three meticulously joined sheets of paper before being mounted to paper board. This unusual construction highlights the provisional and exploratory nature of Modigliani’s early drafting methods as he moved away from traditional academic training.

The sitter, Brancusi, had a significant artistic and personal relationship with Modigliani during their time among the Parisian avant-garde, influencing each other’s moves toward abstraction. While the sculptor is rendered with a seriousness often seen in the artist’s subsequent portraits, the drawing lacks the extreme elongation and stylized, mask-like features that would define Modigliani’s signature aesthetic later in the 1910s. Instead, Modigliani captures Brancusi with a concentrated intensity, relying on precise contour lines and subtle shading to define the sitter's bone structure and contemplative mood.

This exceptional example of early Modernist portraiture remains an important record of the friendships that fueled the artistic breakthroughs of the era. Since its creation in 1909, the drawing Constantin Brancusi has been celebrated for its raw immediacy and technical ingenuity. The work currently resides in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. High-quality fine art prints of Modigliani’s influential drawings are increasingly sought after, especially as images of these seminal works enter the public domain, making them accessible to a global audience.