Assistant Curator, Mia Matthias: Brancusi had moved through a succession of studio spaces since arriving in Paris in 1904, but 8 Impasse Ronsin provided him the opportunity to bring all of his works together and live amongst these works.
My name is Mia Matthias, and I am an Assistant Curator working on Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio.
Throughout the exhibition, you will encounter a number of films. Some were created with the help of his friend, the artist Man Ray, and others were created by Brancusi himself. He used these films to document his sculptures, his studio, his daily life, himself. They essentially allow us to see the studio through Brancusi’s eyes.
Video Producer, Sarah Cowan: A studio really tells you about the material realities of being an artist. You start to see and really understand the labor that goes into art.
My name’s Sarah Cowan and I work here at MoMA, where I make films about art and artists, often filming in artist’s studios.
This film is so fun to look at—like a scavenger hunt. And the glorious mess of it is what I love. These rocks are kind of haphazardly dumped, almost like an explosion just went off in a quarry. You get to see the roughness of the raw stone next to the refinement of his finished sculptures. You can see so many of his works just shoved into a corner. And I think you really feel the crowding here, like his studio’s not big enough for his work. But I think that that cluttering just says a lot about how he wants to have these things all available to him, to think and rethink his forms.