Constantin Brancusi Photographs

If we limit ourselves to exact reproduction, we halt the evolution of the spirit. — Constantin Brancusi

Thaddaeus Ropac London presents the first UK exhibition dedicated to Constantin Brancusi’s photographs in over two decades – and the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since his landmark Tate Modern show in 2004. The exhibition brings together three decades of the Romanian artist’s photographic work, the majority of which will be shown in London for the first time. In 2026, the 150th anniversary of the modernist sculptor’s birth will be marked by a programme of institutional exhibitions worldwide, including Brancusi, The Birth of Modern Sculpture at the H’ART Museum in Amsterdam and Constantin Brancusi at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, both organised in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Photography formed an integral part of Brancusi’s practice, as both a documentary tool for his sculptural works, and an artistic medium in its own right. Some of Brancusi’s sculptures survive only through photographs, including Woman Looking into a Mirror (1909–14), which was later adapted into Princesse X (1915–16; Centre Pompidou, Paris), his controversially phallic portrait of psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte. In 1956, Brancusi bequeathed his entire studio to the French State, including a significant body of photographs, which later became the focus of an exhibition presented alongside his first major retrospective in France at the Centre Pompidou in 1995. 

The artist began experimenting with photography following his arrival in Paris in 1904. Immersed in the city’s vibrant avant-garde scene, he befriended numerous photographers including Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and Man Ray. In 1917, Brancusi met John Quinn, a prominent collector who, crucially, acquired many of his sculptures through photographs. The relationship was pivotal in transforming Brancusi’s photographic practice from a spontaneous to a systematic creative endeavour; during his lifetime, he would only allow his sculptures to be reproduced with his own photographs, believing that only these images ‘could convey the artist’s emotional exchange with his creation,’ as curator Elizabeth A. Brown has written. As such, the exhibition offers an invaluable insight into the evolution of Brancusi’s sculptural language,  tracing his radical purification of form – from his early Study for Laokoon, created while still a young student in Bucharest, to his monumental sculptural ensemble at Târgu Jiu in Romania (1937–38), which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2024. 

While Brancusi’s photographs function as records of his oeuvre, they also enabled him to sculpt with light, capturing the reflections and patinas on the surfaces of his works. Through photography, he could enhance the visual impact of his sculptures. As Man Ray described in his autobiography, ‘one of his golden birds had been caught with the sunrays striking it so that a sort of aurora radiated from it, giving the work an explosive character.’ Brancusi generated bursts of light that lend his work a metamorphic quality and, as art critic Michel Gauthier observes, ‘allow the sculpture to escape its strict contours, to live in space beyond itself.’  

The photographs on display invite the viewer into the sanctified environment of Brancusi’s studio on Impasse Ronsin in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, which he considered ‘a living space for his sculptures,’ as Brown writes. Acutely attuned to the relationships between his works and their surroundings, Brancusi continually reconfigured his sculptures into ‘mobile groups’ within his atelier, exploring the infinite possibilities of their arrangement and capturing their synergies through photography. In Mlle Pogany II, marble and bronze* (1920) two versions of his sculpture Mademoiselle Pogany are staged so that they appear to bow towards each other, immortalised in eternal dialogue from their respective pedestals. 

Brancusi’s photographs are ‘true portraits’, as Brown writes. ‘Just like the most striking portraits, they reveal the different facets of the sculpture’s personality and reveal its particular sensibility.’ This is as evident in the photograph Leda (c. 1921), in which Brancusi masterfully captures the sensuousness of his marble sculpture and its corporeal forms, as it is in his Autoportrait avec une cigarette dans le train Paris-Le Havre (c. 1933), or even Still Life with The Newborn, Leda and The Sorceress (1934), described by art historian Friedrich Teja Bach as a ‘symbolic tableau’ and the only version of this image known to exist today. With each photograph, Brancusi distils the ineffable essence of his subject.