[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2110562234.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tHours before a $100 million sculpture by Constantin Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i is to come to auction, Pace Gallery announced that it had taken global representation of the Romanian modernist\u2019s estate.<\/p>\n
\n\tPace, one of the biggest galleries in the world, added Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i to its roster as a retrospective for the artist continues to travel the world. Organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which debuted the exhibition in 2024, the retrospective is currently on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and arrives later this year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.<\/p>\n
\n\tBr\u00e2ncu\u0219i is among the most beloved European modernists. His work is prized for its simplicity: He crafted a bird from an arc of marble, a sleeping head in bronze, a kissing couple from a block of plaster, and a column from a towering piece of oak. In using such a minimalist vocabulary, Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i sought to pare familiar forms to their very basics, evoking the elegance of ancient artworks in the process.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe artist died in 1957, and his estate has since been criticized for posthumously casting versions of his sculptures, raising questions about artistic intent and authorship.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 2014, for example, Kasmin gallery, then the Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i estate\u2019s representative, exhibited five bronze casts made posthumously from plaster originals. On the occasion of that show, the Wall Street Journal<\/em> quoted collector Asher Edelman as saying, \u201cThere is no such thing as a posthumous edition of a Brancusi\u2014there are replicas, which is what these are.\u201d (Edelman later became a defendant in a bizarre Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i-related lawsuit that centered around a sculpture that broke, allegedly while it was entrusted to Edelman\u2019s art financing company Artemus. Edelman called the suit \u201cpreposterous.\u201d) To Edelman\u2019s allegation, dealer Paul Kasmin, who died in 2020 and whose New York gallery is now defunct, said that he \u201ccan\u2019t decide somebody else\u2019s morals for them\u201d and that the Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i estate was \u201copen for business.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe Kasmin show was curated by J\u00e9r\u00f4me Neutres, who is now at work on a Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i exhibition for Pace that will open in London later this year. A Pace spokesperson told ARTnews<\/em> the show will include museum loans and works available for sale on the secondary market, but the spokesperson did not comment on whether the show would include posthumous casts. In Artnet News<\/em>, Katya Kazakina reported that the estate no longer holds any original sculptures that it plans to sell.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to the Wall Street Journal<\/em> report, one such cast \u201ccould fetch roughly one third the price of a lifetime sculpture,\u201d which may explain why Dana\u00efde<\/em>, the 1913 Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i headed to auction tonight at Christie\u2019s, is priced so highly. Christie\u2019s lot description for that sculpture, which comes to auction from the collection of S. I. Newhouse, notes that the work was cast ca. 1913, during the artist\u2019s lifetime. Priced at $100 million, the work is among the most expensive works headed to auction this week in New York during the marquee sales.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt\u2019s an honor to begin working with the Brancusi Estate and to share the work of this extraordinary artist with audiences around the world,\u201d Marc Glimcher, Pace\u2019s CEO, said in a statement. \u201cAs the father of modern sculpture, Brancusi\u2019s contributions to the medium cannot be overstated; along with Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, he shaped the future of three-dimensional art.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTheodor Nicol, the owner of the Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i estate, said in a statement, \u201cWe look forward to working together to reintroduce Brancusi\u2019s progressive yet ageless sculptures to audiences around the world, ushering his legacy into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/pace-gallery-constantin-brancusi-estate-representation-1234785860\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2110562234.jpg?w=1024″] Hours before a $100 million sculpture by Constantin Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i is to come to auction, Pace Gallery announced that it had taken global representation of the Romanian modernist\u2019s estate. Pace, one of the biggest galleries in the world, added Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i to its roster as a retrospective for the artist continues to travel the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1942351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1942351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1942351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1942351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1942351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}