It’s a funny piaf, a firecracker blue, swollen like a wineskin, with its beak straightened. For a year, this plaster bird has been sitting in Gilles Perrault’s office, rue de la Paix, in Paris. The sworn expert believes “90%” that it is a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), from the family of “ Maïastra”, a fabulous bird inspired by Romanian folklore that the sculptor has produced in series. He takes as proof this label stuck to the base, referring to number 283 in the catalog of the twelfth exhibition of the artistic youth society, organized in 1913 in Bucharest, in Romania. From a sheaf of papers Gilles Perrault unearths this comment from a visitor to the show, a certain Léo Bachelin, whose mention he found in a book published in 1998 by a Romanian Brancusi specialist, Barbu Brezianu: “Here is a bird which stands on its tail, which is not ordinary, and whose heart is round like an egg, from which a neck in the shape of a pipe emerges, all painted electric blue. »
Brancusi is one of those names which, with Picasso or Matisse, hits the art market. The Romanian sculptor has indeed revolutionized modern art with pure, immediately identifiable forms, like this Kiss fusionnel, a copy of which is in the Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris. In 2018, a 1932 bronze, inspired by activist Nancy Cunard, exceeded $71 million (€65.4 million). Gilles Perrault who says he only swears by “scientific truth”, has already issued negative opinions on six works attributed to Brancusi. But this time, he assures us, this bird ticks almost all the boxes: “The pictorial layer is compatible with a painting from the presumed period, the metal framework of the plaster resembles that used by Brancusi, the paper of the label is old, the ink conforms to that of the period. »
Sulfur Merchant
One problem, however: the other works that appeared in the 1913 exhibition, now kept at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bucharest, do not have labels. Have these disappeared over the years, or have they simply never existed? The shape of the bird also differs from the Maiastra in bronze held by the Tate Modern in London. Its dimensions would be closer, in the eyes of the expert, to a marble example owned by MoMA. But the New York museum did not give him permission to scan it.
Gilles Perrault’s stubbornness is not without irritating Theodor Nicol, Brancusi’s successor, who believes that the bird is not authentic. Through his lawyer, Me Jean-Jacques Neuer had already reported this in March 2021 to Artcurial, who had been offered the object. Bruno Jaubert, associate director of the auction house, did not take offense: “The information surrounding the object was vague, and there was no documentation of tangible provenance. »
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