Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio

“Why, it is my studio,” Constantin Brancusi exclaimed when he first glimpsed New York City’s skyline in 1926. “All these blocks, all these shapes to be shifted and juggled with, as the experiment grows and changes.” Brancusi’s actual studio, on impasse Ronsin in Paris, was where he lived, worked, entertained friends and clients, and displayed his sculptures. There, he created some of his most groundbreaking works, which blurred traditional boundaries between pedestal and object, movement and stillness, originality and variation. Among them was Bird in Space, notoriously declared by a US custo…