Pace Gallery Lands Brancusi Estate On Eve Of Potential $100 Million Sale

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Pace Gallery Takes on the Constantin Brancusi Estate as Christie's Prepares a $100 Million Sale

Pace Gallery has announced global representation of the Constantin Brancusi Estate, a move that places one of modern sculpture's most important legacies at the center of the market just as Christie's prepares to auction a major Brancusi work in New York. The gallery also said it will stage a Brancusi exhibition in London this fall, curated by art historian Jérôme Neutres.

The timing is deliberate. This evening, Christie's will offer Danaïde, a 1917 sculpture from the collection of the late media mogul S.I. Newhouse, with an estimate of $100 million. If it reaches that figure, the work will establish a new auction record for Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), the Romanian-born sculptor whose spare, distilled forms helped define modernism.

Brancusi's market has long been unusually tight. Major works rarely come up for sale, and when they do, auction houses have typically been the preferred route. Newhouse acquired Danaïde at Christie's in 2002 for about $18.2 million, then the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture. Brancusi's current record stands at $71 million, set in 2018 for Jeune fille sophistiquée (Portrait de Nancy Cunard), also at Christie's.

Pace's move follows the closure of Kasmin gallery, which had previously represented the estate. The estate, owned by Théodor Nicol and managed by the Nicol family, holds posthumous casts, archival material, and information about the whereabouts of other Brancusi works. That combination gives Pace a rare position: not only as a dealer, but as a potential hub for scholarship, placement, and market intelligence around the artist.

Marc Glimcher, Pace's chief executive, framed the shift as part of a broader change in how major artists are handled. In his view, the old backroom model has given way to a market that prizes authority, visibility, and institutional framing. He also suggested that the coming generational transfer of wealth could reshape demand for Brancusi, whose works have been held tightly in a small number of major collections for decades.

Born in Romania and active in Paris, Brancusi became a central figure in the School of Paris and one of the 20th century's most influential sculptors. His work drew on Romanian folk art, African wood carvings, and Cycladic figures, while his integration of the base into the sculpture itself helped expand the language of avant-garde art. With a London exhibition ahead and a headline auction in New York, Pace is betting that Brancusi's next chapter will be written as much in public view as in private collections.

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