“Constantin Brancusi: 1876–1957,” the exhibition that filled the top floor of the Centre Georges Pompidou this spring and summer, was eagerly awaited.[1] For more than twenty-five years, there had been no major show of this pioneer modernist’s sculpture anywhere, a remarkable enough statistic given Brancusi’s fame, importance, and near cult status among his admirers. What is more surprising, there had never before been a retrospective of his work in France, even though he lived there for more than half a century and bequeathed the contents of his Montparnasse studio to his adopted nation after he died. All spring, the news from Paris was of a really first-rate, really beautiful exhibition; one notoriously hard-to-please New York critic described it as the best show of twentieth-century sculpture he had ever seen in a long career. Crowds were apparently modest at first, but by peak tour ...

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