The Endless Column
Coloana Infinitului
Interesting facts
- The column's shape is a stylised version of the carved wooden funerary pillars traditional in southern Romania.
- Brâncuși travelled from Paris to Petroșani to oversee the casting, working with the carpenter Carol Flisec on the wooden model of the modules he called beads.
- Column and core together weigh about 29 tonnes, and each of the fifteen full modules is 1.8 metres tall.
- Hidden inside is a square steel box girder 42 cm wide, assembled from three sections and anchored in a concrete foundation 5 metres deep.
- The brass finish was sprayed on site with a metal-spraying technique brought from Switzerland, used then for the first time in Romania.
- In the town's records the work was named the Column of Endless Gratitude, dedicated to soldiers who fell on the banks of the Jiu in 1916.
- In 1996 the corroding, tilting column was placed on the World Monuments Watch list of endangered sites, which led to its restoration.
- During the 2000 restoration all modules were refinished on site, and the last one was set back on the column at midnight on 17 December 2000.
- Brâncuși first exhibited the design under the name Endless Column at his solo exhibition in New York in 1933.
- Santiago Calatrava's 92-metre obelisk in Madrid's Plaza de Castilla, opened in 2009, was inspired by the Endless Column.
Why it is worth it
At the eastern end of a long axis running through Târgu Jiu, the Endless Column rises almost 30 metres from the grass: a stack of identical rhomboid modules that seems as if it could go on for ever. Constantin Brâncuși had been working with the form since 1918, when he carved an oak version now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; here, in his native region of Gorj, he realised it on a monumental scale.
The column belongs to an ensemble Brâncuși made to honour the soldiers who defended Târgu Jiu against the Central Powers in 1916. It was commissioned by the National League of Gorj Women; Brâncuși, then living in Paris, accepted in 1935 and refused payment. Three works are set along a west to east line about 1.3 km long: the Table of Silence, a round stone table surrounded by twelve hourglass-shaped seats; the Gate of the Kiss, a travertine archway carved with Brâncuși's kiss motif; and, at the far end, the Column. Its modules, fifteen full ones with a half module at each end, were cast in iron in 1937 at the central workshops in Petroșani under the engineer Ștefan Georgescu-Gorjan, threaded onto a steel core and given a coat of sprayed brass. The ensemble was inaugurated on 27 October 1938.
Under the communist regime Brâncuși was attacked as a bourgeois formalist, and in the 1950s there were plans to scrap the column for metal; they were never carried out, and in the 1960s he was rediscovered as a national genius. By the 1990s the column was leaning and corroding, and it was restored between 1998 and 2000 with the World Monuments Fund, the World Bank and the Romanian government. The ensemble is widely regarded as one of the great works of 20th-century outdoor sculpture and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2024.
Târgu Jiu is the county town of Gorj in south-western Romania.
Getting there
The column stands about 1.4 km from the centre of Târgu Jiu. The nearest airport is Craiova International Airport (CRA), about 93 km away.
On these lists
45.03743, 23.28537per Wikidata