The Atelier Brancusi
Constantin Brancusi; pavilion by Renzo Piano (Brancusi 1876 to 1957) · Studio contents 1916 to 1957; pavilion 1997
Not currently on display. Closed for the duration of the renovation; the future arrangement of the studio inside the main building has been announced but not yet built.
Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor who spent his life in Paris, believed that his sculptures only made sense in the arrangement he gave them in his studio. When he died in 1957 he left the whole studio to the French state on the condition that it be rebuilt exactly as he left it. The result is one of the strangest and most moving spaces in the museum: whitewashed rooms filled with polished bronzes, marble heads, rough plaster casts, stone bases stacked like totems, the sculptor's tools and even his bed, all seen through glass as though he had just stepped out.
The reconstruction was designed by Renzo Piano and opened on the piazza in 1997, with the works placed to the centimetre according to Brancusi's own photographs. Look at how a gleaming bronze Bird in Space rises next to a lump of unworked stone, and how the plaster versions of the Endless Column and the Sleeping Muse stand among wooden bases that Brancusi carved himself. He made no distinction between sculpture and base, or between finished work and workshop clutter; the studio itself was the artwork, and the light from above was part of it.
During the renovation of the Centre Pompidou the pavilion is closed. It has been turned into the Maison Pompidou, a free visitor space where you can see plans and models of the future building, and the museum has announced that the Brancusi bequest will be moved into the main building when it reopens, with the pavilion taking the Kandinsky library. So the studio you can visit around 2030 will be a new installation of the same works. Brancusi's gleaming birds and columns are among the collection's most frequently loaned pieces in the meantime.
Did You Know? Brancusi photographed his studio obsessively, and those photographs, developed with advice from his friend Man Ray, are the blueprint for the reconstruction.
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