CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/29/2026

Brancusi's legendary Paris atelier, photographed by the artist himself

“’Why write?’ Constantin Brancusi asked the author Robert Payne in 1949. ‘Why not just show the photographs?’ The photographs Brancusi had in mind were his own. By the time of his conversation with Payne, the seventy-three-year-old artist had long been dissatisfied with the efforts not only of writers but also of other photographers to represent or interpret his sculptures. This dissatisfaction had led him, decades earlier, to become the exclusive photographer of his own work and his late-life remark to Payne underscores his fierce protectiveness over how his sculpture met the public eye and on whose terms. Although Brancusi did not consider his photographs works of art, they served multiple purposes: They were circulated to clients and friends, published in books and magazines, and employed as a private means of studying variation, movement, and change. The resulting photographic corpus establishes him as one of the twentieth century’s great sculptor-photographers, and his embrace of the camera reflects his singular modernity and relationship to machine-age technology. This, even as he used photography to document works that aspired to timelessness, universality, and transcendence of the particularities of time and place.” So begins Anne Umland’s essay in Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio, MoMA’s gorgeous new collection of 136 duotone photographs taken by the artist over the course of four decades, published to accompany the landmark exhibition of Brancusi’s relocated Paris studio, on view now through February 2027 at the Museum. Pictured here, Bird in Space (1927, polished bronze), glass negative c. 1929.