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For decades, Brancusi’s sayings have been repeated like relics: translated, altered, mythologized, and made to serve the legend of the artist. This book returns them to the workshop. Drawn from the Brancusi archive at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, these notes, aphorisms, reflections, literary writings, and autobiographical fragments recover the artist’s thought before it hardened into quotation.

Brancusi wrote in an idiosyncratic Franco-Romanian, outside ordinary grammar and outside every artistic school. His sentences have the pressure of his sculpture: stripped, elemental, difficult, exact. They move through art, beauty, truth, matter, spirit, work, solitude, creation, and death.

Edited, annotated, and introduced by Doïna Lemny, Art Is Absolute Truth restores Brancusi’s words to the severity, strangeness, and force of the work itself.

DOÏNA LEMNY is an art historian and Brancusi specialist. She received her doctorate in art history from the University of Paris I–Sorbonne with a thesis on Brancusi’s artistic and cultural milieu, based on the artist’s legacy to the Musée National d’Art Moderne. From 1991 to 2019, she worked at the Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Pompidou in Paris and participated in the reinstallation of Brancusi’s studio. She is the author of numerous books on Brancusi and has curated several international exhibitions devoted to his work