Constantin Brâncuși - Series

Constantin Brâncuși (1876–1957) was one of the founders of modern sculpture. He moved away from modelled realism toward an abstraction that sought the essence of a form rather than its appearance, working in marble, bronze and wood. Throughout his life, he also photographed his own work, treating the photograph not as a record of the sculpture but as part of the sculpture itself.

Born in the Romanian village of Hobița to a peasant family, Brâncuși studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Craiova and the Bucharest School of Fine Arts. He left Romania permanently in 1904 and travelled across Europe to Paris, where he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1905. There he attracted the attention of Auguste Rodin and briefly worked as his assistant. His reputation grew faster in America than in France following his debut at the 1913 Armory Show. “Without the Americans,” he told The New York Times in 1955, “I would not have existed.” From 1916 onward he worked at 8 and later 11 Impasse Ronsin, gradually taking over adjoining studios and knocking down the walls between them. Flooded with natural light, the resulting space became an ever-changing environment in which his works existed in varying states of completion, and a destination for artists, collectors and visitors.

Brâncuși began photographing his sculptures seriously in 1907, the year he worked for Rodin, initially so that collectors, curators and publishers could see them. Professional photographers were sent to record the work, but he was rarely satisfied with the results. One photographer even dusted his polished metal with powder to suppress the reflections. Brâncuși concluded that only his own photographs should circulate. Rodin, who employed photographers in his own studio but retained control over the lighting and composition, had demonstrated that the sculptor should direct the photograph. In 1921, Man Ray, newly arrived from New York, helped Brâncuși acquire equipment and build a darkroom at the Impasse Ronsin. From then on, he printed his photographs himself.

By directing light across the polished surfaces, Brâncuși produced what he called photos radieuses—radiant photographs in which flashes of light appear to fracture the form and suggest the potential for movement. He photographed his sculptures both singly and in the groupings he called groupes mobiles, as well as making self-portraits, still lifes and views of the studio. He printed everything himself, often returning to a negative years after it was made, so that the date of a print and the date of the work it depicts can be separated by decades. The photographs therefore form not simply a record of his sculpture but a parallel body of work through which he continually reinterpreted it.

Brâncuși died in Paris in 1957. In his will, made the year before, he left his studio and its entire contents to the French state on the condition that it be preserved as it stood at the time of his death. The collection is now held by the Centre Pompidou, which records 137 sculptures, 87 bases, 41 drawings, two paintings and more than 1,600 glass plates and prints. A reconstruction of the studio has stood opposite the museum since 1997. Prints outside the Centre Pompidou collection derive from the few patrons who acquired his work during his lifetime, or received photographs directly from him, among them John Quinn, James Johnson Sweeney, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Pach and Henri-Pierre Roché. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented his work in In Sequence (2025), Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer (2025), Summer Glow (2024) and REWIND (2021).