Brancusi's Studio

Constantin Brancusi was born in Romania in 1876 and lived and worked in Paris from 1904 to his death in 1957. It was here that most of his work was created. He left the totality of his studio to the French State in his will. It was faithfully reconstructed in 1977 on the Piazza in front of the Centre Pompidou in order to house his collection, consisting of 137 sculptures, 87 pedestals, 41 drawings, two paintings and more than 1,600 photographic glass plates and original prints. 

Beginning in 1916 and continuing until his death in 1957, Constantin Brancusi successively occupied studios at number 8, then at number 11 in the Impasse Ronsin in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The artist occupied two, then three studios, knocking down the partitions to form the first two rooms in which he would exhibit his work. In 1936 and 1941 he added two other adjoining spaces, which he was to use for ongoing works, placing his work bench and tools there. 

The studio, a work of art in its own right 

Constantin Brancusi attached great importance to the relationship between his sculptures and the space containing them. As early as the 1910s, he placed sculptures in a tight spatial relationship, creating new works which he called mobile groups in the studio, thus signalling the importance of the link between the works and the possibilities of moving each one within the group. 

Beginning in the 1920s, the studio became the place where he presented his work and a work of art in its own right, a body made up of mutually generating cells. This experiment with the view inside the studio of each of the sculptures in order to constitute a group of spatial relationships led Brancusi to reorganise their positions daily so as to achieve the unity that seemed most appropriate to him. 

At the end of his life Brancusi no longer produced sculptures in order to concentrate solely on the relations between them inside the studio. This proximity became so essential that the artist no longer wished to exhibit and, when he sold a work, he replaced it with its plaster cast in order not to lose the unity of the group. 

The reconstitution of the studio by Renzo Piano 

In 1956 Constantin Brancusi left his whole studio (e.g. completed works, outlines, furniture, tools, library, records, photographs) to the French State, on condition that it undertook to reconstitute the state of the studio at the time of the artist's death. After an initial partial reconstitution in 1962 in the collections of the Palais de Tokyo museum, an identical replica was made in 1977, in front of the Centre Pompidou. It was closed to the public in 1990 as a result of flooding. 

The current reconstitution, erected by architect Renzo Piano, is presented as a museum space in which the studio is placed. The difficulty for Renzo Piano was to make this space a place that was open to the public, while still respecting the wishes of the artist. Although the architect did not attempt to reproduce the intimacy of the Impasse Ronsin, he retained the idea of a protected and interiorised place in which spectators are isolated from the street and the Piazza, notably by an enclosed garden, from which a part of the studio can be seen through a glass partition.