“Constantin Brancusi: 1876–1957,” the exhibition that filled the top floor of the Centre Georges Pompidou this spring and summer, was eagerly awaited.[1] For more than twenty-five years, there had been no major show of this pioneer modernist’s sculpture anywhere, a remarkable enough statistic given Brancusi’s fame, importance, and near cult status among his admirers. What is more surprising, there had never before been a retrospective of his work in France, even though he lived there for more than half a century and bequeathed the contents of his Montparnasse studio to his adopted nation after he died. All spring, the news from Paris was of a really first-rate, really beautiful exhibition; one notoriously hard-to-please New York critic described it as the best show of twentieth-century sculpture he had ever seen in a long career. Crowds were apparently modest at first, but by peak tourist season, lines to buy tickets snaked across the lobby of the Beaubourg and out the door. Enormous posters everywhere in Paris made a casually poised Sleeping Muse—a gleaming bronze egg with schematic features—almost as familiar as the Michelin man.

Among Parisian intellectuals, however, especially among the artists, the exhibition was highly controversial. Along with the arguments about the choice of works that are inevitable with any large show, there were protestations that the exhibition was too large and too repetitious. The truly serious complained that insufficient weight was given to the late pieces and lamented the violations of strict chronology in the sequence.