These artists pushed their work beyond realism, finding inspiration in abstraction. In his The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau stylizes a lion and a figure, reducing them to a series of flattened shapes and making the sceneseem otherworldly. Pablo Picasso simplifies the form even further in his Colombe avec Fleurs, reducing a bird to only a few lines. Constantin Brancusi carved his Bird in Space from solid marble. Although it looks almost weightless as it arcs upward, the sculpture is actually very heavy. After careful observation of real birds flying, the artist captured “the essence of flight” in a dense, heavy material.