Sanda Miller is the first Western European historian to have subjected Brancusi to exhaustive analysis: being Romanian by birth, she has a full knowledge of the literature and is able to bring to bear Romanian memoirs, literary texts, histories, and recent scholarship with confidence and to make a new range of knowledge accessible to western readers.

The material on Brancusi's childhood and training both as a craftsman and fine artist at the School of Arts and Crafts in Craiova and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest respectively, provides a new basis for the assessment of his work, after as well as before his arrival in Paris.

Brancusi is accepted as a major figure in histories of twentieth-century sculpture. Where the problems of sculpture, craft and materials, of formalism and the avant-garde or of 'primitivism' in modernism are concerned, he will remain a major figure to be discussed. This is a substantial contribution to knowledge about Brancusi and his work which includes many illustrations never previously published.