Exhibition Designer, Lana Hum: The tool room in Brancusi’s studios, we did do a pretty faithful recreation of that very dense wall of tools.
Conservator, Lynda Zycherman: It’s beautifully arranged as a composition. The most frequently used tools are either on the bench already or on the tool wall in these special holders. And the less frequently used tools—for example, the frame saw and the hand saws—are higher up, where he would have to stand on something to reach them.
Exhibition Designer, Montana Gray: He also made a lot of his tools. There are some scrapers, wood scrapers, that we think he made himself, just like he made some of his furniture. So he’s not just creative in his work, he lives in a creative way.
Lynda Zycherman: At the bottom, we have all kinds of chisels, sanding tools, a wooden mallet. You can see on the files and the rasps, remains of white material, which would’ve been the stones or the plaster that he was filing down. You have clamps, which are used to hold the thing to a table so it doesn’t move when you’re applying an enormous amount of force.
These tools haven’t really changed since the ancient world. But this is a 20th-century sculptor. In other rooms, there are lots of electric tools. He knew how to make his work more efficient and easier on the body by using electric tools.