Over 30 works on view until January 18
The H’ART Museum, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, presents more than thirty works by Constantin Brancusi in the exhibition titled “The Birth of Modern Sculpture”, on view until January 18, 2026.
Born in Romania in 1876, Brancusi soon abandoned his academic studies in Bucharest to move to Paris, where he arrived in 1904 after a journey said to have been made almost entirely on foot. In the French capital, he quickly came into contact with Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso.
It was during this early period that The sleeping muse (1909-1910) first appeared, a subject destined to become recurrent, also in the variant Sculpture for the blind (1920): a stylized female face resting gently on its cheek, its features barely carved into the marble, just perceptible enough to suggest a deep slumber that transforms and transports the figure into another dimension. The softly incised oval, white and exquisitely polished, recalls the faces of Amedeo Modigliani, with whom Brancusi struck up a friendship around that time, and reflects his “subtractive” technique, a process based on simplification.
After completing his academic studies in Bucharest, he moved to Paris in 1904
But while the Sleeping muses embody the idea of the “unfinished” through a delicate, refined approach, this is not the case with the celebrated The Kkss (executed in several versions between 1907 and 1916).
For this work, which Brancusi provocatively gave the same title as Rodin’s famous sculpture, the artist adopted an almost primitive method: rather than using molds or intermediate casts, he carved the figures directly through the technique of “direct carving”. The two lovers, roughly hewn from a single limestone block, appear awkward and disproportionate, facing each other in profile, almost inscribed within a rectangular prism, their embrace enclosing the entire volume of the stone.
It was, one might say, another way of pursuing those simple and stylized forms that Brancusi would reproduce throughout his artistic career in wood and bronze, curiously favoring the hardest and most resistant materials, such as ancient oak and, following its invention, stainless steel.
A recurring theme in his work The sleeping muse, created with various materials
His experimentation eventually extended to reimagining the function of the pedestal (which Symbolist artists tended to conceal or suppress) making it instead more visible and integral to the work. From the replica of a base emerged The endless column, a cast-iron structure composed of fifteen modular elements, 29.33 meters high, forming one of the three works that make up the monumental ensemble created between 1937 and 1938 in Târgu Jiu, Romania.
This work, a true legacy from Brancusi to his homeland, miraculously survived Ceaușescu’s regime (it was once deemed “useless for the construction of socialism” and demolition had even been considered). In 2024, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The work, bequeathed to the French state, is now housed in his namesake studio in Paris, the city where the artist died in 1957.
The endless column, miraculously spared under Ceaușescu’s regime, was inscribed in 2024 on the UNESCO World Heritage List
