Pilgrimage to a Small House, Outside a Big Museum

Taken from Volume 5 of Common Thread, available for free in our Savile Row and Canal St stores.

Text by Michael Hainey 

For the last forty years of his life, from 1916 to 1957, Constantin Brancusi lived and worked in an artist’s colony tucked away on Impasse Ronsin, a dead end alley in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. Photos of the time show an old stone building and, written in white  chalk on the side of one was one name—Brancusi—with an arrow pointing to the door.

For lovers of design and art, the Atelier Brancusi is a temple of inspiration like no other By the time he died, his atelier sprawled across five lots, and in the decades after the war it seems every great artist made a pilgrimage to the atelier. From Duchamp, Man Ray, Yves Klein, Henry Moore, Robert Rauschenberg … they, and many others, all came, searching for that name chalked in white on stone, hoping for the pleasure of being invited inside, not just to meet the great Romanian, but to stand in the presence of his soul-stirring work. 

A year before he died, Brancusi decided to leave his studio and all the works inside to the French state, so long as they kept it “as is.” It was, not just an act of generosity but he hoped, a way to keep the small community together, as the alley had been threatened with demolition in the past decade. The forces of gentrification, as they always do, seek out the artist’s quarters. Sadly, the French state didn’t keep its word. After he died, the Impasse was condemned and razed, and all of his 144 works were sent to the National Museum of Design, and later to the Palais de Tokyo.

Fortunately, France later made amends for its sins – though, if you go to Paris, you still might not think so. For years, I used to go to the Pompidou Museum and think that the small limestone-clad structure on the edge of the plaza was some kind of auxiliary building housing plumbing or electrical. Then one day I discovered within these walls, designed by Renzo Piano, is what I can only describe as a temple. If you’ve ever been to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, this might be as close as you get to a spiritual encounter with art and space and an artist. 

Brancusi was fanatical about how his pieces were arranged. How they lived within space and how they interacted with space. So much so that when someone bought a work from the studio, he meticulously repositioned the work. Seeing the sculptures and the knives and chisels he used to carve them from blocks of stone and entire trees, it’s a transportive experience. Each time I go to Paris I make my pilgrimage here, to stand in the presence of his visions.

“Nothing grows well in the shade of a big tree.” 

It’s a quote from Brancusi, what he said after he left his apprenticeship with another master of sculpture, Rodin. 

I’m sure the words were true for him. But here, in Paris, standing in the shade of his big works… well, I promise something inside you will stir and grow.