Brancusi, Romania and the United States: a love story in the summer of ’69

Abstract

Between 1969 and 1970, the first international retrospective devoted to Constantin Brancusi was hosted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and Gemeentemuseum den Haag. In 1970 the first retrospective of Brancusi’s work in his native Romania was held at Muzeul de Artă R.S.R., Bucharest. This article establishes for the first time that these exhibitions were part of a single project, facilitated by an unprecedented exchange of loans between American museums and the institutions of a socialist republic. Based on extensive archival research, the article details the conflicting interests of the scholars, curators and state officials involved in the project, the geopolitical moment that made it possible, and the ideological contest over the meanings and values represented by Brancusi’s sculpture that lay at its very core. In particular, it brings to light the compromised position occupied by the exhibition’s curator, the American Brancusi scholar Sidney Geist, and the research he conducted in Romania in the mid-1960s; the diplomatic efforts of the Guggenheim’s director Thomas M. Messer, working in concert with members of the US State Department; and the peculiar status of Brancusi as a cultural figure under Nicolae Ceauşescu.