Hours before a $100 million sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși is to come to auction, Pace Gallery announced that it had taken global representation of the Romanian modernist’s estate.
Pace, one of the biggest galleries in the world, added Brâncuși to its roster as a retrospective for the artist continues to travel the world. Organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which debuted the exhibition in 2024, the retrospective is currently on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and arrives later this year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Brâncuși is among the most beloved European modernists. His work is prized for its simplicity: He crafted a bird from an arc of marble, a sleeping head in bronze, a kissing couple from a block of plaster, and a column from a towering piece of oak. In using such a minimalist vocabulary, Brâncuși sought to pare familiar forms to their very basics, evoking the elegance of ancient artworks in the process.
The artist died in 1957, and his estate has since been criticized for posthumously casting versions of his sculptures, raising questions about artistic intent and authorship.
In 2014, for example, Kasmin gallery, then the Brâncuși estate’s representative, exhibited five bronze casts made posthumously from plaster originals. On the occasion of that show, the Wall Street Journal quoted collector Asher Edelman as saying, “There is no such thing as a posthumous edition of a Brancusi—there are replicas, which is what these are.” (Edelman later became a defendant in a bizarre Brâncuși-related lawsuit that centered around a sculpture that broke, allegedly while it was entrusted to Edelman’s art financing company Artemus. Edelman called the suit “preposterous.”) To Edelman’s allegation, dealer Paul Kasmin, who died in 2020 and whose New York gallery is now defunct, said that he “can’t decide somebody else’s morals for them” and that the Brâncuși estate was “open for business.”
The Kasmin show was curated by Jérôme Neutres, who is now at work on a Brâncuși exhibition for Pace that will open in London later this year. A Pace spokesperson did not immediately respond to request for comment on whether that show would include posthumous casts.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, one such cast “could fetch roughly one third the price of a lifetime sculpture,” which may explain why Danaïde, the 1913 Brâncuși headed to auction tonight at Christie’s, is priced so highly. Christie’s lot description for that sculpture, which comes to auction from the collection of S. I. Newhouse, notes that the work was cast ca. 1913, during the artist’s lifetime. Priced at $100 million, the work is among the most expensive works headed to auction this week in New York during the marquee sales.
“It’s an honor to begin working with the Brancusi Estate and to share the work of this extraordinary artist with audiences around the world,” Marc Glimcher, Pace’s CEO, said in a statement. “As the father of modern sculpture, Brancusi’s contributions to the medium cannot be overstated; along with Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, he shaped the future of three-dimensional art.”
Theodor Nicol, the owner of the Brâncuși estate, said in a statement, “We look forward to working together to reintroduce Brancusi’s progressive yet ageless sculptures to audiences around the world, ushering his legacy into the future.”
