Bruce Silverstein is pleased to announce "L'Atelier Brâncuși: Photographs 1916 – 1957", an exhibition featuring 40 original vintage photographs, taken and printed by Constantin Brâncuși, depicting the evolution of his most important work, the studio itself. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the reconstruction of L'Atelier Brâncuși, a museum space designed by Renzo Piano containing the studio, and located within the Centre Pompidou.
In 1904, Constantin Brâncuși left his native country of Romania and walked to Paris, crossing Austria and Germany and nearly dying of pneumonia along the way. In 1916, Brâncuși would move into his first studio at No. 8 Impasse Ronsin and then, eleven years later, would relocate to No. 11 Impasse Ronsin, where he would remain for thirty years until his death. Brâncuși's studio, with dirt floors and walls flooded with light, would not only serve as a space to live and work but also as a gathering place for friends, visitors, and collectors who came to pay homage to the artist that would become recognized as the most influential sculptor of the 20th century.
In 1907, at the behest of his mentor Auguste Rodin, Brâncuși began to take photographs of his sculpture. By the time he moved to No. 11 Impasse Ronsin, he would pursue photography with the same rigor and quest for purity as he did with his sculpture. His photographs served to "make permanent" those elements of his practice that were ephemeral but of great importance to him, such as light, shadow, reflection, negative space, and the interrelationship between works. Over time, as his ideas evolved and works were created and destroyed, the studio's layout served as the physical embodiment of the artist's state of mind. The placement of his works within the atelier and the context of his other works would become the artist's preoccupation that would change and evolve. The artist would carefully place each piece alone or within groupings labeled "groupe mobiles." He then would photograph his studio obsessively, from different vantage points and in different light, to understand his
works and the space around them.
By the late 1940s, Brâncuși would stop making new sculptures altogether and would instead focus all his efforts on completing his most important creation, his studio; an epic installation that he would immortalize through his gift to the French State, upon the condition that the studio be displayed as he had left it.
Today, L' Atelier Brâncuși sits permanently within the confines of the Centre Pompidou and consists of 137 sculptures, 87 pedestals, 41 drawings, two paintings, and, surprisingly, more than 1,600 photographic glass plates and original prints; a testament to the artist's dedication to the photographic medium.
Brâncuși printed the works included in this exhibition in his own darkroom and either come directly from him or have passed through the hands of family, friends, and known collectors of his work, who all received them during the artist's lifetime. Among them are prints that belonged to the great American collector John Quinn, Brâncuși's most significant patron; James Johnson Sweeney, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art and Director of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the artists' close friend Marcel Duchamp. In addition, artist and critic Walter Pach, as well as Brâncuși's agent, the writer, and poet Henri-Pierre Roche, are also previous owners.
