Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), the most innovative sculptor of his day, arrived in Paris when he was twenty-eight, having walked across Europe from Romania, where he was born to a family of peasants. He stayed in Paris for the rest of his life. Now he is back, so to speak, in the same museum, the Centre Pompidou, that produced his previous Parisian show, which was reviewed in The New Criterion of September 1995 issue by Karen Wilkin.
Truly, Brancusi never left Paris. This can be said all the more so of his beloved studio. In Brancusi’s time, his studio was on the Impasse Ronsin off of the rue de Vaugirard, Montparnasse, in the fifteenth arrondissement, and in 1977 it was reconstructed adjacent to the Pompidou. (It was again restored by Renzo Piano, the architect of the Pompidou, after a flood in 1990.) Brancusi considered his studio as much a work of art as the statues and photographs within it. In 1956, he bequeathed it and its contents to the French state on the condition that the studio be preserved. There was no chance, however, that the studio could remain in its spot next to the Necker Hospital, which was expanding and needed the space—French administrators had already tried to force Brancusi to leave in 1952. With Brancusi dead, the studio was partly transferred to the Palais de Tokyo and then rebuilt in its entirety next to the new Pompidou. From 2025 to 2030, the Centre Pompidou will close for renovations, the second time since its opening in 1977, and the studio will close with it, making now a good moment to revisit Brancusi. The exhibition, organized thematically rather than chronologically, makes the studio its center, a choice of which Brancusi would have approved. It features a partial second replica of the studio. In it, because Brancusi never threw anything away, there are plenty of diaries, letters, sketches and records, as well as sculptures and photographs. (Photography became important to Brancusi after he bought photographic equipment from Man Ray in 1921.)
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The exhibition opens with Brancusi’s 1935 white-plaster Cock; the artist also carved a polished-bronze version. The rooster is France’s national symbol, and white was the artist’s preferred shade. Brancusi was a man of light, even if the lighting in the exhibition’s first rooms is low enough to have given me difficulty in jotting down notes. The wall text at the exhibition’s start quotes Valentine Hugo, who, during a 1955 visit to the studio, was impressed by its light and “unknown beams” everywhere. The text also quotes the editor Margaret Anderson on her visit to Brancusi at the Impasse Ronsin:
His hair and beard are white, his long working-man’s blouse is white, his stone benches and large round table are white, the sculptor’s dust that covers everything is white, his Bird in white marble stands on a high pedestal against the windows, a large white magnolia can always be seen on a white table.
She noted that Brancusi once had a white dog and a white rooster. Statues of roosters were visible in the studio reaching for the sky—or at least the ceiling. The exhibition also quotes Man Ray’s remark on first visiting the studio that he was “more impressed than in any cathedral” with its whiteness and lightness.
Soon after Brancusi’s arrival in Paris in 1904, Auguste Rodin engaged him as an assistant in his atelier. Though Brancusi admired Rodin, he stayed with him for only two months, saying, “Nothing grows in the shade of a tall tree.” Brancusi put aside the traditional method of modeling and casting in favor of carving and polishing, intending to capture “the essence of things” rather than their appearances. He wanted to capture people, animals, and objects in action rather than portraying them in a traditional sense. He was soon producing masterpieces. The Kiss (1907–08) recalls Romanesque statues, as if the stone Brancusi used were dug from the same quarries centuries later. The sculpture shows the embrace of two lovers, their slender arms interwoven so closely that the pair seems to blend into one. The Prayer, a moving portrayal of a long-haired woman kneeling, comes from the same year. Brancusi was fascinated by primitive art—as were so many at the time—and also classical and Asian sculptures he saw at the Louvre and the Musée Guimet, respectively. Examples of all of the above are on display here, alongside Gauguin’s 1894 sculpture Oviri, a roughly contemporary work also inspired by primitive art. The exhibition includes a farm door from Gorj, where Brancusi was born: Brancusi’s Romanian peasant roots were deep, and they strongly influenced his art. All of these influences blended into what the exhibition calls a “melting pot,” pointing Brancusi toward a new visual language.
In 1915, he produced The Newborn, which evokes a baby’s movement from the womb to the world outside. The Sleeping Muse (1910), portraying the poet Baroness Renée Irana Frachon and made of polished bronze, is one of Brancusi’s most beguiling works. The exquisite face—oval as Brancusi’s faces often were—is richly expressive even in sleep. Much more curious is Princess X (1915–16), of polished bronze and limestone. It purportedly symbolizes feminine sexuality, but its phallic appearance caused it to be pulled from the 1920 Salon des Indépedants for obscenity. One might also mistake it for a telephone.
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Brancusi created a large number of portraits, many of them of women: Margit Pogany, Baroness Frachon, Eileen Lane, Agnes Meyer, Nancy Cunard. Brancusi met Nancy Cunard—whose portrait he called Sophisticated Young Lady (1925–27)—through the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. That sophisticated young lady gave Aldous Huxley a difficult year, and Huxley portrayed her twice, as Myra Viveash in his novel Antic Hay and as Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point. One of Cunard’s defining traits was her increasingly extreme left-wing politics. Brancusi’s portrait of her may capture her essence, but not her appearance (which her friend Harold Acton called “macabre”). The same goes for Brancusi’s other portraits, all of them taken from Brancusi’s vision of his subjects rather than from life. Take, for example, the polished bronze Leda (1926), which Brancusi set on ball bearings so it turns slowly like an old-fashioned record.
Almost from the beginning of Brancusi’s career, he was known in the United States. His work was shown in the 1913 Armory Show, and Alfred Stieglitz exhibited his work in 1914. In 1928, U.S. customs officials refused to accept Brancusi’s sculpture Bird in Space, just purchased by Edward Steichen, as a work of art and classified it instead under “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies.” The resulting court case, Brancusi v. United States, became famous. In the end, Brancusi and Steichen won. The justice declared Bird in Space “beautiful” and called it an example of a new form of art. “Brancusi: Art is Just Beginning” is also beautiful and will create new admirers of the sculptor, many of whom will look forward to visiting his studio when it reopens.