Brâncuşi’s bronze sold for almost $15 millions in New York



“Le premier cri”, by Constantin Brâncuşi (1867-1957), bronze, 26 cm (10¼  inches)

"Le Premier Cri" by Constantin Brâncuşi (1867-1957) represents a fabulous polished bronze sculpture and it was sold for $14,866,500 at the Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie's Auction from New York. Conceived in 1917, the sculpture illustrate the artist's rapid trajectory from figural art to pure abstraction in the 1920s.

The art work had 4 owners: Henri Pierre Roché from Paris, who bought it directly from the artist, Claude Bernard Gallery from Paris and Isidore Cohen from New York who bought it in 1968 and sold it in 1975 to the family of the present owner.

The sculpture was last displayed during the exhibition “The unfinished century: Heritages from the XXth century” which took place at the Museum of Modern Art from Tokyo. Also, the bronze was presented in 9 big events organized in New York and Europe: Chicago, Paris, Zurich, Philadelphia and Vienna in 1926.

On Christie’s site, you can watch a presentation of the art work done by Adrien Meyer, Specialist in Impressionist & Modern Art, New York.



The catalogue provides the following commentary about this work:

"The genesis of the present bronze dates to 1913, when Brâncuşi carved “Le premier pas”, his earliest free-standing, full-length figure and his inaugural sculptural effort in wood... That work, which depicts a highly stylized figure of a toddler taking his first, unstable steps, was included in Brâncuşi's earliest solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Session Gallery in New York, March 1914.  Following the close of the exhibition, Brâncuşi appears to have destroyed the body of the sculpture, keeping just the head; the complete figure is known only through photographs... In 1914 or 1915, Brâncuşi re-worked the head of “Le Premier Pas”. In 1917, the sculptor made a series of casts of the head, modeled directly from the wood; four of the casts, including the present example, are polished bronze, while three are plaster and one is black cement... The sculptor's immense confidence in these egg-like works emerged in a remark that he made about them in 1926: “With this form I could move the universe.”