Exhibition · Midtown West
At MoMA in Midtown, NYC: "Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio" Brings Rarely Loaned Works from Paris
MoMA opens "Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio" on October 25. Rarely lent sculptures from his Paris studio join photographs, films, hand-carved furniture, pedestals and tools, presenting the studio as a place of work and play. It runs through February 27, 2027.
The Museum of Modern Art in Midtown is presenting "Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio" from October 25, 2026, through February 27, 2027. Member previews run October 22 to 24. The show approaches the Romanian-born sculptor through the place where he worked, rather than through finished masterpieces alone.
The core of it is a set of sculptures that rarely leave Paris. MoMA says they are traveling from Brancusi's studio to New York for the first time in decades. With the Centre Pompidou closed for renovation, many of its Brancusi works are coming to the city, and the press describes the show as New York's largest Brancusi exhibition in decades. They join pieces from MoMA's own collection, among them Bird in Space, the sculpture a U.S. customs agent once refused to accept as art.
Around the sculptures are Brancusi's own photographs and films, hand-carved furniture and pedestals, tools and archival materials. MoMA frames the studio as a place of work, play and invention, and the show as an intimate portrait of an artist who transformed 20th-century sculpture through the radical simplicity of his forms.
Brancusi worked for four decades in his studio on Impasse Ronsin in Paris, filling it with sculptures, photographs, furniture, pedestals and tools. When he first saw the New York skyline in 1926, he reportedly said it was his studio, all those blocks and shapes to be shifted and juggled as an experiment grows and changes. He left everything to France when he died in 1957, and the studio entered the Pompidou's collection.
Anne Umland and Mia Matthias organized the exhibition, with Samantha Small assisting. Ariane Coulondre and Valérie Loth, who curated the 2024 Brancusi retrospective in Paris, are collaborating on the project.
A hardcover exhibition publication features some 130 reproductions of Brancusi's own photographs and is sold through the MoMA Store. Members can also visit during Member Early Hour, Saturdays and Sundays, 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. The exhibition is made possible by MoMA's partner Hyundai Card, with funding from the Romanian Cultural Institute. For Japanese visitors who know these forms from books and other museums, it offers a look at the furniture, tools and photographs behind them. MoMA is at 11 West 53 Street.
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