03 / 2026
The Shape of Scandal
A sculpture of a woman — or was it?
In 1920, a single sculpture was pulled from a Paris exhibition not for being violent or obscene, but for refusing to be only one thing. A hundred years later, I stood in front of it in Berlin. And I couldn't look away.
I genuinely felt lucky walking into the Brâncuși exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Seeing his original works in person, not in a textbook, not on a screen, was something else entirely. There is something about standing in front of the actual object, the real bronze, the real marble, that hits you differently. The light moves across the surface in a way no photograph ever captures. I wasn't expecting to feel that emotional about it, but I did.
And then there was Princess X. I couldn't stop looking at it.
Who Was Brâncuși?
Before getting into the work, I think it matters to understand where he came from, because it explains a lot about who he was as an artist. Brâncuși grew up in a tiny village called Hobița in Romania. A very humble background, very rooted in rural life. He left home at eleven, which when you think about it is quite something, and eventually made his way to Bucharest to study art. He stayed in Romania until his thirties, so by the time he left, his identity was already deeply formed. You can feel that in his work. There is something raw and grounded about it, something that doesn't feel like it came from a fancy art school tradition.
In 1904, he moved to Paris right at the moment when everything in the art world was being turned upside down. Picasso was there. Matisse. Modigliani. It was one of those rare moments in history where everything was changing at once, and Brâncuși landed right in the middle of it. He even briefly worked in Rodin's studio, the most prestigious place a sculptor could be at the time. But he walked away. His reason has stayed with me: "Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees." That tells you everything about him.
"Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees."
— Constantin Brâncuși
The Controversy
What I didn't fully appreciate before visiting was just how viciously Brâncuși was attacked. The exhibition displayed original newspaper clippings from the 1920s, with headlines like "It's Clever, but Is It Art?" and "Whatever This May Be, It is Not Art." Reading them was honestly shocking. People weren't just confused. They were angry. Something about his work threatened them.
There was even a famous legal case. When his sculpture Bird in Space was shipped to the United States, customs officials refused to classify it as art. They called it a "household utensil." He had to go to court to prove his own work was art. And he won. Standing in front of those old newspaper pages, I kept thinking that anger, that need to dismiss something, is usually a sign that someone is doing something real.
Princess X
Princess X started as a portrait of a woman. Over time, Brâncuși kept simplifying, kept removing, kept stripping away detail until almost nothing was left except the pure gesture of the form. What remains is a smooth, polished bronze, vertical and forward-leaning, with a rounded upper form and two curved shapes below. It is unmistakably a female torso. It is also unmistakably something else.
The exhibition audio guide didn't shy away from it: yes, it looks like a phallus. Even Picasso, when he first saw it, apparently said exactly that out loud. The work was removed from a Paris exhibition in 1920 for being obscene, twice actually. Both times Brâncuși showed it, it got pulled.
"He didn't set out to make a provocative work. He set out to find the essential form of a woman, and ended up creating something that contains both."
But here's what I found so moving about it: he didn't set out to make a scandal. He followed his process so honestly, so completely, that he ended up creating something that holds both feminine and masculine in the same form, inseparable. The wall text called it perfectly: Ambiguity of Form. The sculpture doesn't choose a side. It just exists, holding both at once.
What It Felt Like to Be There
Princess X is not a large sculpture. It's intimate. You walk around it, and as you move, the form changes. It becomes something slightly different from every angle. It never settles. It never lets you pin it down. Next to it was another piece, Torso of a Young Man, carved from an upside-down forked maple branch. Despite the title, it has no clear male features. No female ones either. It just looks human. The audio guide said something I keep thinking about: "This ambiguity in attributing gender is one of the reasons why Brâncuși's work was so modern and sensational."
I kept coming back to that word. Ambiguity. Not confusion. Not failure to commit. Ambiguity as an intentional, honest place to exist. And I thought about my own work. About what it means to make something that doesn't choose a side, that just holds both quietly, and lets people sit with what they find.
"To dress between definitions is to do what Brâncuși did in bronze. To reduce yourself to something true, and let people sit with what they find."
Brâncuși was dismissed, mocked, taken to court. And yet here we are, a hundred years later, and his sculptures still make you stop. Still make you feel something you can't quite name. That, for me, is what art is supposed to do. And maybe, quietly, in a completely different medium, it's what I'm trying to do too.
Coral Journal · April 2026