A version of famous Romanian Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture The Kiss (Le Baiser) is among works of art to be sold by Christie's in an auction of impressionist and modern art organized this week in New York.

The starting price for Brancusi’s sculpture is USD 5 million, and the organizers estimate to get between USD 5 million and USD 8 million for this piece.

This is the second work of art signed by Brancusi auctioned at Christie’s in New York in the last two years. In 2012, the auction house sold Brancusi’s Une Muse for USD 12.4 million.

Other art works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí and Wassily Kandinsky are also auctioned in the same batch.

The auction will be organized on May 6, at the Rockefeller Plaza in New York.

Known as the “the father of modern sculpture”, Constantin Brancusi was a painter, architect and a master of “abstract art”.

He was born in 1876 at Hobita, in Oltenia, southern Romania. In 1883, he started working as a shepherd in the Carpathian Mountains. Later on, he worked as a dyer, as an assistant in a grocery and then as a servant at an inn.

While working at the inn he was challenged to make a violin as a bet. He succeeded so well, that the owner of the shop decided to help him to enroll in the provincial Craiova School of Arts and Crafts. From Craiova he went to Bucharest in 1898 to study sculpture at the School of Fine Arts, then to Munich, Zurich and Basel before arriving in Paris in 1904. More about Constantin Brancusi here.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com