About | Book tickets | Room guide | Events & Education | The Brancusi Trial - audio | Teachers kit
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Brancusi photographs

Photographs were the easiest means by which sculptors could make their work known and this was especially so for Brancusi who avoided having a dealer. It was important that he controlled the quality of the photographs and, from an early period, he would not allow anyone else to take pictures of his work. Frequently he enriched the photographic image of the work through dramatic juxtapositions in the studio.

Visitors spoke of Brancusi's studios as miraculous places. The quality of light and the harmony between works were especially powerful. In 1916 he moved to 8 impasse Ronsin, a cul-de-sac of studios to the west of the Gare Montparnasse. It was here that he made many of his most remarkable works but, in 1927, a combination of their weight and subsidence made the floor collapse. Luckily, Brancusi was able to transfer to 11 impasse Ronsin, across the courtyard, and this remained his studio until his death in 1957. Gradually Brancusi absorbed adjacent studios, leaving the original space for displaying his works.

In 1935 Brancusi won a public commission for a war memorial in Tárgu Jiu, near his birthplace in Romania. His photographs record the final stages of its
completion in 1937-8.

The monumental ensemble has three parts. In the town gardens The Table of Silence evokes the presence of those who died defending the town during the First World War, while The Gate of the Kiss suggests a universal, and unifying, ideal of peace. They stand at the lower end of the Avenue of Heroes that runs to a hill above the town. The scheme culminates in a 30 metre (100 foot) high steel Endless Column which Brancusi saw as a mystical link between earth and heaven.