This catalogue is published to accompany the exhibition of the same name in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (8 February-11 May 2014). The exhibition is a unique meeting of the work of three of the most influential artists of the twentieth century: Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) and Man Ray (1890-1976). The works exhibited and discussed in the catalogue, forty-five sculptures and some hundred photographs they took of them, offer a glimpse over the shoulders of these artists.Not only were Brancusi, Rosso and Man Ray all crucial in the development of modern sculpture, they were innovators in the way they involved photography in their work-not so much for recording it, but as a means of explaining how viewers should look at and interpret their sculptures. They played with the possibilities of the medium-experimental for the time-using overexposure, innovative camera angles and blurring the foreground or background.

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition The original copy: photography of sculpture, 1839 to today, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (August 1-November 1, 2010)"--T.p. verso.

Text by Carolyn Lanchner.

Acknowledged as one of the major sculptors and avant-garde artists of the twentieth century, Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) was also one of the most elusive, despite his fame. His mysterious nature was not only due to his upbringing in Romania—which, at the time, was still regarded by much of Europe as a backward country haunted by vampires and werewolves—but also because Brancusi was aware that myth and an aura of otherness appealed to the public. His self-mythology remained intact until the publication of Brancusi in 1986 by Romanian artists Alexandre Istrati and Natalia Dumitresco, who made available a small selection of the archive of Brancusi’s correspondence. And in 2003, a comprehensive catalogue, which made the bulk of Brancusi’s private correspondence public for the first time, was published by the Centre Pompidou to accompany a retrospective on Brancusi’s work. In Constantin Brancusi, Sanda Miller employs these extensive new resources to better assess Brancusi’s life and work in relationship to each other, providing valuable and innovative insights into his relationships with friends, collectors, dealers and lovers. Miller’s perceptive book allows Brancusi to finally take his rightful place among the most important of the intellectual personalities who shaped twentieth-century modernism.