25 September, 10:30 AM
Brancusi: Sculpting with Light
Speaker: Doina Lemny

The lecture will be held in English Cinema Elvire Popesco (Bd. Dacia 77) Free admission, registration required

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Brancusi passionately pursued photography alongside his work as a sculptor. Captivated by Edward Steichen’s photo shoots and benefiting from the lessons provided by his friend Man Ray, Brancusi mastered this art to the point of developing his own personal style, recognised and accepted by the greatest professionals.

Initially, this was by necessity – because he disliked the photographs of his sculptures taken by professional photographers, which failed to express his intentions – and later out of a genuine passion that allowed him to see and reveal previously unseen aspects of his sculptures. Photography had become his way of communicating with collectors and people interested in his art. His work in the darkroom set up in one of his studios was his secret, personal space, where he treated the image like an alchemist, enriching it through different fixation times and different framing.

Whilst he did not usually offer sculptures to his friends, he was, on the other hand, very generous with photographs, giving them to anyone who showed an interest in his work and wished to better understand his sculptures. He kept sets of these in his studio: firstly, negatives on transparent film and on glass, and several prints of the same work, in order to illustrate his creative process. As a result, the Centre Pompidou holds around 2,000 of them, comprising negatives and prints.

Recently, entire collections of photographs have been appearing on the art market, bringing with them stories linked to their owners, and through them to Brancusi. I would like to present two collections of original photographs: one presented at an auction in Paris and another, very rich, previously unseen, which I discovered at the University of Art and Design in Cluj – the largest and most extensive in Romania.

Doina Lemny was a curator at the Centre Pompidou in Paris from 1991 to 2019, where she managed the museum's Brancusi archive and collection. She has written several books on Brancusi's life and work, and in recognition of her contribution to Brancusi scholarship, she was decorated by the President of Romania with the National Order "For Merit". She is a speaker and a member of the sculpture jury for the Unboxing Brancusi programme.