Sculptor's Revenge

For more than 50 years, the Rumanian-born Sculptor Constantin Brancusi hvec in Paris--and for more than 50 years, Paris studiously ignored him. He lived in a studio-shack among a cluster of crumbling shanties in the Impasse Ronsin, a coal-begrimed dead-end street in Mont parnasse inhabited by struggling artists.

With each passing year he became more cantankerous, his beard more scraggly, his clothes more rumpled. He had his shar of French visitors--but they were mostly adoring women, whom he would feed tiny onions coated with cheese. His buyers usually came from abroad. When he sent some sculpture to the Salon des Independants in 1920, it was rejected as phallic In all the years that he worked in Paris, the National Museum of Modern Art bought only three of his works.

Brancusi's whole world was his studio, and his "children" were the soaring birds, the metal eggs, the highly polished ' essences" that filled it. When the city threatened to tear down the studio t make room for a hospital, the old man m desperation promised to leave the National Museum of Modern Art his entire collection if only he could be left alone. Paris agreed-and left him alone more than ever. When the doctors finally told Brancusi that he would die unless he went to a hospital, he replied, "I shall wait for God here, in my studio, death claimed him in 1957 early in his 82nd year.

In his will, Brancusi had made one surprising stipulation in his bequest to the museum: his collection must be shown in an exact replica of his old studio. For five years the museum dragged its feet, and it was not until this month that the public could see the studio reproduced, at last cracks and all. There were his rusting tool's the gleaming Blond Negress, the blocklike figures of the Kiss, various versions of the Comb, all looking like upside-down thunderbolts, and a wooden King of Kings resembling vises piled on top of each other, topped by an egg. Each day Brancusi had caressed these pieces, and each night covered them with cloth.

"It is pure joy that I am giving you, Brancusi had said, but whether he intended to or not, he was also taking ; subtle kind of revenge on those who had ignored him. Acknowledging his country s guilt, Critic Pierre Schneider wrote in L'Express:"In France officialdom has shown itself faithful to its old principle: too indifferent at the hour of discovery; too poor at the hour of consecration.

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