Brancusi Makes the Modern World Look Stale

It has been almost thirty years since the last big Brancusi show—his works are so fragile and scattered that only the craftiest negotiations can bring them together. “Brancusi,” curated by Ariane Coulondre, has managed a hundred and twenty sculptures, plus a slightly cheesy reconstruction of the artist’s studio, which he bequeathed to the French state before his death, in 1957. Like most of the show’s historical contextualizing, the studio comes early and doesn’t linger, allowing the pieces to speak with minimal interruptions. Theme trumps chronology, so we get a sampling of his woodwork, an ark’s worth of animals, a vitrine of heads, some androgynous blobs. Why did he sculpt blobs? Why did he sculpt anything? Just savor it, already.