Rarely Loaned Brancusi Sculptures Head to MoMA for Massive Show
“Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio” features pieces from Atelier Brancusi, including fabrication tools, furniture, photographs, and more
Constantin Brancusi has long been in the pantheon of sculptors. In particular, his 1928 Bird in Space is lodged in our minds as a perfect example of Modernism—form reduced to its essence. The Kiss, 1912, turns two lovers into a single blocky form.
But his familiarity in the canon may be obscuring the radicality of his achievements and our sense of his quirky, particular process and life. He is ripe for a reexamination, and he is getting just that in a new show at the Museum of Modern Art, “Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio,” running from October 25 to February 27.
The big new feature of this show is that its contents and shape are made possible because the Atelier Brancusi—a relocated recreation of his studio that has been adjacent to the Centre Pompidou in Paris for decades—is closed while the Pompidou is being extensively renovated. The Atelier is part of the French national art collection.
“It was recreated when he passed away in ’57,” says the veteran curator Anne Umland, the chief organizer of this show. “He left the entire contents of his studio to the French state on the condition that it be reconstructed. By the end of his life, it had become an all-encompassing environment that he had spent his career assembling, and he wanted to keep it together.” (There have been several updated iterations of it over the years, the last in 1997.)
Brancusi (1876–1947) was born in Romania, but his move to Paris in 1904 set him on a course to be a legend. Famously, he spent just one month working for Auguste Rodin, but that was likely too stodgy for Brancusi, and he went off to break tradition and make his mark.
He was also part of one of the most amusing, but also telling, anecdotes about how the public took a while to understand 20th-century art movements: U.S. customs officials in the 1920s classified a Brancusi work being shipped to America as “an object of manufacture” and not art, and hence it was subject to certain taxes; the decision was eventually reversed after lawsuits.
“Brancusi is part of the language of modern sculpture,” says Umland, formerly a MoMA senior curator who is guest-curating this show. She has worked on many prominent shows at the museum, presenting deep dives on artists from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí to Meret Oppenheim and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
Umland notes that this show is the first major museum retrospective for Brancusi since 1995—not coincidentally, that was the last time the studio was closed—and so it’s a good time to see his work with new eyes.
“Brancusi was so ahead of his time in terms of his artistic language, which looked beyond the surface of things,” says Umland. “He moved completely away from memetic representation and instead sought an essence. He arrived at this vocabulary that is never purely abstract but quasi-abstract, and it points ahead to so much later in the 20th century and beyond.”
The MoMA show is quite large, taking over the entire 6th floor of the museum with 210 objects, and not all are artworks per se—the haul from his studio includes fabrication tools and furniture as well as photographs taken by Brancusi’s own hand. The sculptor, who both carved and cast his works, was fussy not only about how he made sculpture, but how it was presented and seen.
“He let very few other people photograph his work,” says Umland, noting that Brancusi liked to have multiple works shown in the round (so that people could see them from all sides) and in specific combinations with his other pieces, and he strongly preferred “a pedestal as a live, active part of the sculpture.” The bases of his works, whether in marble or wood or brass, were anything but afterthoughts.
For Brancusi, the studio was a social place, and he entertained there often. Visitors remembered a lot of white plaster dust. The MoMA show will be evoking it without “pretending we’re really recreating the space,” says Umland (and without the dust).
In the center of the show, she says, “We have what we have been referring to as the ‘ghost studio,’ an evocation using translucent fabric and a colored flooring of the final footprint of the Brancusi studio.” It will include filmed projections of the studio, plaster pieces that Brancusi used as studies for works, as well as hand-carved stools and other furniture.
Brancusi was early in adopting now-familiar approaches, notably the notion that “an environment is as important to your experience of the work as the art itself,” Umland says. She adds that another prescient stance of Brancusi’s is “the idea that there is no separation between sculpture and what supports it.”
Given those features, the show should be catnip for contemporary makers. As Umand puts it, “I’m so curious to see what this generation of artists will take away from it.”
“Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio” runs Oct 25, 2026–Feb 27, 2027 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.