Brancusi had a near-obsessive interest in oval forms and the ovoid as a symbol of the cosmic, of the beginning of all creativity. The egg is at the end of an evolution he went through. With Head of a Sleeping Child, the face is still easily distinguishable: nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows and hair. By around 1910 he made Sleeping Muse, an ovoid head lying horizontally. In that sculpture he only indicated the facial features with faintly curved lines and gentle curves. In the years that followed he created different variations of this sculpture, each becoming more abstract. In 1924, this process culminated with the perfectly smooth, closed and basic form that is The Beginning of the World.
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