The point, though commonplace, cannot be made too often: for works of art to reveal themselves to the fullest, installation matters above all. Placement, lighting, the size and shape of the room, even the character of the floor and color of the walls—all these affect the way we perceive a painting, sculpture, drawing, or photograph. Nowhere is the truth of this principle more evident than at the Museum of Modern Art’s new temporary installation of its sculptures by Constantin Brancusi.1

Going back at least to the 1970s, when I began visiting moma on a regular basis, successive curators have always displayed Brancusi the same way: a half-dozen or so sculptures would be grouped together on a platform, one of whose edges was pushed against a wall. The idea, presumably, was to evoke the atmosphere of Brancusi’s studio, which the artist curated as a kind of idealized sculptural environment—really, a work of art in itself—for the display of the large numbers of works that populated it. (At his death in 1957 at age eighty-one, Brancusi, who lived and worked in Paris his entire professional life, left his studio and its contents to the French state. Today it can be visited in a Renzo Piano–designed outbuilding at the Centre Pompidou.)

Now Paulina Pobocha, an associate curator, aided by Mia Matthias, a curatorial fellow, have dramatically broken with the past, installing eleven sculptures in a second-floor gallery in a freestanding arrangement directly on the floor. (The show also