At MoMA this fall, rarely loaned sculptures, photographs, films, tools, and studio objects offer a new way to encounter Constantin Brancusi—not only through the forms he made, but through the creative world he built around them.
When Constantin Brancusi looked at the New York skyline in 1926, he reportedly called it his studio: a landscape of blocks and shapes to be shifted and rearranged. The remark offers a revealing entry point into an artist whose work transformed sculpture through reduction, rhythm, and the relationship between an object and the space around it.
This fall, the Museum of Modern Art turns its attention to that relationship with Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio, on view October 25, 2026, through February 27, 2027. Spanning MoMA’s sixth floor, the exhibition brings together rarely lent works from the artist’s Paris studio, alongside pieces from the Museum’s own collection and important local loans. The presentation includes sculpture, photographs, films, hand-carved furniture and pedestals, tools, and archival material from the Centre Pompidou’s Atelier Brancusi.
A studio that was more than a workplace
For more than four decades, from 1916 until his death in 1957, Brancusi’s studio at impasse Ronsin in Paris served as his home, workshop, exhibition space, and meeting place. It was where he made work, welcomed friends and clients, and arranged his sculptures in carefully considered groupings.
That setting was central to how the work was experienced. Brancusi did not treat a sculpture as an isolated object whose meaning ended at its surface. Bases, pedestals, lighting, placement, and the relationships between different works all helped shape the encounter. His studio became an evolving composition in which sculpture and surroundings were closely connected.
MoMA’s exhibition takes this environment as its organizing idea. Rather than presenting Brancusi’s achievement only as a sequence of celebrated objects, it considers how the artist’s working space helped define the art itself.
The changing life of a sculpture
Brancusi’s work is often associated with forms that appear strikingly simple: a curve, an oval, a vertical line, a polished surface. Yet that simplicity emerged through sustained experimentation with materials, scale, repetition, and the tension between abstraction and recognizable subjects.
His sculptures also challenged familiar distinctions. A pedestal could become part of the artwork rather than a neutral support. A series of related forms could be understood as variations within a larger whole. The exhibition highlights this approach, showing how Brancusi blurred boundaries between object and base, movement and stillness, and originality and repetition.
One work associated with this history is Bird in Space, which became the subject of a notable US customs dispute after an official questioned whether it qualified as art. The episode points to the difficulty of placing Brancusi’s streamlined forms within conventional categories—an issue that remains relevant to the way modern sculpture is understood.
Seeing through Brancusi’s own photographs
Photography is an important part of the exhibition’s story. Brancusi made hundreds of photographs documenting his sculptures and the studio in which they developed. These images were not simply records of finished objects. They captured works in progress, changing arrangements, tools, raw materials, and the visual relationships between sculptures.
The MoMA Design Store’s exhibition publication describes a selection of more than 130 reproductions, including images of visitors such as Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Marcel Duchamp, and Mina Loy. Together, the photographs present the studio as a place of concentrated work and social exchange.
For visitors, this material offers a different kind of access. A sculpture seen in a gallery today may appear fixed and complete. Brancusi’s photographs, by contrast, show how its appearance could shift according to its surroundings, its companions, and the artist’s decisions about display. They also reveal the studio as an active environment rather than a static backdrop.
Preserving an artist’s total environment
Brancusi understood the importance of preserving the relationship between his work and its setting. In 1957, he bequeathed the contents of his studio to the French state. The space was subsequently preserved as the Atelier Brancusi, now part of the Centre Pompidou’s collection in Paris.
That legacy gives the MoMA presentation particular significance. With the Atelier Brancusi currently closed for renovations, rarely lent sculptures and related materials are traveling to New York. The exhibition brings them into dialogue with MoMA’s Brancusi holdings, offering a concentrated opportunity to consider the studio’s role in the artist’s practice.
The exhibition is organized by Anne Umland, guest curator, and Mia Matthias, assistant curator in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Samantha Small, curatorial assistant. It was developed in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre Pompidou, whose institutional partnership made the presentation possible.
An intimate view of modern sculpture
Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio arrives at a moment when museums continue to reconsider how artworks are shaped by the spaces in which they are made, displayed, and encountered. Its focus is not simply the artist’s biography or a survey of individual masterpieces. Instead, it asks visitors to look at the conditions of making: the tools, materials, arrangements, and repeated acts of observation that informed the finished forms.
The result promises a more layered view of an artist whose influence on modern sculpture is often discussed through formal innovation alone. At MoMA, Brancusi’s studio becomes a way to understand that innovation as an ongoing process—one in which art, architecture, photography, and daily life continually informed one another.
Exhibition details
Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio
The Museum of Modern Art, Floor 6
October 25, 2026–February 27, 2027
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY
Member previews: October 22–24, 2026.
