Constantin Brâncuși — Photographie, Otto Piene — Rouge et Noire

“Don‘t search for obscure formulas or mysteries. lt is pure joy that I give you. Look at them until you see them.”

• Constantin Brancusi

Galerie Gmurzynska proudly brings to Zürich a luminous group of Brancusi’s original vintage photography. Among this exhibition of 18 vintage silver gelatin prints count his most iconic sculptures as well as still lifes and a portrait – amounting to an essential selection of his less than 200 photographs left in private collections.

Brancusi used photography throughout his working life as a tool for cataloguing, selling, creating and refining his sculptures and most importantly as standalone works of art.

Brancusi’s photographs tell us everything we need to know about how to look at his sculpture. In control of framing, lighting, coloration, Brancusi shares with his viewers how he would like his radical sculpture to be seen.

He used photography initially as a way to record and sell his work. His friendship with Edward Steichen led to his first exhibition in New York with Alfred Stieglitz in 1914 and both these photography masters photographed his work. He had been sent a photograph by Alfred Stiegltiz of his sculpture installed in a New York exhibition in 1921, which he frustratedly felt did not depict his work accurately.

In 1921 Brancusi met Man Ray and enlisted his help with purchasing the right equipment and installing a darkroom and with lessons in darkroom technique. Man Ray lauded Brancusi 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 adored women and women adored Brancusi and after a visit to the studio many were given photographs. Some complained that after an overnight stay it was impossible to take a bath as it was being used to wash his photographs. Apart from photographing his studio and sculpture Brancusi photographed his friends and lovers, there are dozens of self-portraits and still life’s of flowers often given or sent to girlfriends, many inscribed. “Tonight during the dress rehearsal, I will be amongst these flowers celebrating your triumph” reads one inscription.

From 1921 until his death in 1957, all exhibition catalogues, magazines and Monographs authorized by the Artist only used his photographs. Many of these were used again by Marcel Duchamp in the catalogue he designed for Brancusi’s exhibition at the Brummer Gallery in New York in 1926.

Brancusi first exhibited his Photographs in Romania in 1925.

On his death Brancusi left his studio and all its contents to the French state, included in this donation were approximately 700 negatives and just over 1600 prints. Apart from the collection in the Pompidou in Paris there are approximately 200 prints in major public collections worldwide (MoMA, the Metropolitan, Art Institute of Chicago , Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kunsthaus Zurich, etc.) and no more than 200 in private collections.