The Brancusi retrospective at the Centre Pompidou was not simply a museum exhibition. It was an institutional statement.
 

I attended the opening in March 2024, where Laurent Le Bon, formerly Director of the Musée Picasso Paris, gave the introductory speech. The moment carried particular weight. This was the first exhibition overseen by Le Bon since becoming President of the Centre Pompidou, and a project that had taken roughly two and a half years to prepare.

 

That matters.

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A museum director’s first exhibition is rarely accidental. It reveals something about how an institution sees itself, which histories it considers worth revisiting, and what kind of conversation it wishes to have with the present. In choosing Brancusi, the Centre Pompidou did not simply return to one of the founding figures of modern sculpture. It returned to the question of what modernism still makes possible.

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The exhibition ran from 27 March to 1 July 2024 and was organised around an exceptional circumstance: the complete relocation of Brancusi’s studio as part of the Centre Pompidou’s renovation programme. This allowed the museum to stage the largest Brancusi exhibition ever organised, bringing together nearly two hundred sculptures alongside photographs, drawings, films, archives, tools and furniture from the studio.

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This was the real intelligence of the show.

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Brancusi was not presented through a sequence of masterpieces alone. He was presented through the world he built around them.

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The studio was not treated as background. It became the key to understanding everything.

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For decades, the reconstructed Atelier Brancusi has stood beside the Centre Pompidou as one of the museum’s quiet treasures. Brancusi bequeathed the contents of his studio to the French state, and it remains one of the rare examples of an artist’s working environment preserved almost intact. In this exhibition, that universe was brought into the museum itself and placed in dialogue with major loans from institutions around the world.

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For a collector, this shift is important.

Brancusi is often approached through the aura of individual works: Bird in Space, The Kiss, Sleeping Muse, Endless Column. These works possess enormous historical, institutional and market significance. Yet the exhibition moved beyond the trophy-object reading of Brancusi and returned to the deeper structure of his practice.

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It showed how he thought.

To understand why that matters, it helps to remember the world into which Brancusi arrived. Born in rural Romania in 1876, Brancusi came from a background far removed from the artistic capitals of Europe. He trained initially as a woodcarver before studying in Bucharest and eventually making his way to Paris in 1904. Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century was unlike any city in the world. Picasso, Matisse, Apollinaire, Duchamp and countless others were redefining what art could be. Scientific discoveries were challenging established assumptions. Industrialisation was transforming daily life. New technologies were changing perceptions of time, movement and space.

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The old world was breaking apart.

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Artists were searching for a new visual language.

Brancusi’s response was distinctive because he moved in the opposite direction to many of his contemporaries. While others embraced increasing complexity, he pursued reduction.

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His brief period working in Rodin’s studio is revealing. Brancusi soon left, reportedly observing that “nothing grows under large trees.” Whether the phrase is entirely authentic hardly matters. It captures an important truth. Rodin represented the culmination of nineteenth-century sculpture. Brancusi understood that a different path was needed.

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His radicalism was not simply that he simplified sculpture.

His real revolution was that he changed the relationship between object, pedestal, space and viewer.

A pedestal was no longer a neutral support.

A polished surface was no longer merely finish.

A studio was no longer merely a place of production.

Everything became part of the work’s field of meaning.

That is why the exhibition felt so contemporary.

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Many ideas now associated with installation, spatial practice, seriality, photography and the artist’s archive were already present in Brancusi’s world. He did not only make sculptures. He choreographed relationships between forms.

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The studio was central to this. Brancusi arranged and rearranged his works with obsessive care. When a sculpture left the studio, he sometimes replaced it with a plaster version to preserve the harmony of the ensemble. By the end of his life, the studio itself had become almost a living composition: a theatre of form, light and balance. The exhibition made this visible.

 

Rather than presenting Brancusi as a remote modernist monument, it revealed an artist intensely concerned with atmosphere, display, photography, rhythm and perception. Sculptures appeared beside archival material, films and studio objects, allowing the visitor to see not only the finished works but the conditions in which they came into being.

This also changed the emotional register of the show.

Brancusi’s forms are often described as pure, but they are not cold. They carry traces of Romanian folk culture, African sculpture, archaic Greek art and the spiritual dimension of making. He absorbed these sources without quoting them literally. What interested him was not motif, but essence.

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A bird becomes flight.

A head becomes presence.

A column becomes ascent.

A kiss becomes compression, unity and weight.

The apparent simplicity is therefore deceptive. It is not minimalism in the decorative sense. It is concentration.

The work feels inevitable because so much has been removed.

This may also explain why Brancusi continues to feel remarkably contemporary more than a century later.

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Many artists become trapped within the aesthetics of their own period. Brancusi largely escaped that fate because he was not responding to fashion. He was asking fundamental questions about form, space, perception and meaning.

Minimalism inherited his belief in reduction.

Installation art inherited his understanding that space is part of the work.

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Contemporary design continues to reflect a visual language surprisingly close to his pursuit of essential form.

Standing in the exhibition, one is struck by how little of the work feels historical. The sculptures do not appear trapped in 1910 or 1920. They remain strangely present.

For the Centre Pompidou, mounting this exhibition at this moment was especially symbolic. The museum is approaching a major renovation and temporary closure. To place Brancusi at the centre of its programme before that transition was to return to origins before rebuilding the future.

 

That is what made Laurent Le Bon’s role so interesting.

Le Bon has always had an instinct for exhibitions that are more than displays of objects. His best projects reveal the mental architecture behind an artist’s work. With Brancusi, that approach found an ideal subject. The exhibition was not just about what Brancusi made, but about the world he constructed around the act of making.

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That distinction is crucial. For serious collectors, the lesson of the exhibition was not simply that Brancusi is important. That is already understood. The more interesting lesson is that greatness in art often lies in the construction of an entire visual and intellectual system. Brancusi did not produce isolated icons. He produced a language. And that language remains one of the foundations upon which modern and contemporary sculpture continue to stand.

 

The exhibition’s ambition lay in making that visible. It allowed visitors to move from object to studio, from sculpture to photograph, from form to environment, and from historical modernism to questions that remain completely current.

How should sculpture occupy space?

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When does a pedestal become part of the work?

Can reduction carry more force than accumulation?

How does an artist turn a studio into a world?

These are not historical questions. They remain active.

That is why the exhibition felt less like a closing chapter than a beginning. A museum preparing for transformation returned to the artist who transformed sculpture by stripping it back to its most essential conditions.

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Seen in that light, Brancusi at the Centre Pompidou was not only a retrospective. It was a declaration of intent. Rigorous, ambitious, historical and contemporary at once, it offered a powerful opening statement for Laurent Le Bon’s Centre Pompidou — and a reminder that the most radical gestures in art are sometimes also the most disciplined.