Who can claim Brancusi's The Kiss sculpture? Not ANOTHER court case!

Tatiana Rachewskaia (1887-1910) was a wealthy Russian woman, apparently a relative of the great Tolstoy, who appeared in the novel of the revolutionary wr­it­er Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years, Life. She had gone to prison in Rus­sia and then fled to Paris to study medic­ine. This was where she fell passion­ate­ly in love with the Roman­ian Solomon Marbais (1874-1955), an affair ravag­ing everything in its path in the over-the-top Russian way.

lovely Tatiana Rachewskaia, suicided at 23
Credit: Prestige'S

 
Constantin Brâncuşi (1876–1957) was the son of a poor Rom­anian pea­s­ant who began his car­eer as an apprentice to a cabinet maker. Later he bec­ame an app­rentice of the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin, greatly influen­­ced by Rodin’s moving from natur­alist rep­res­entation to styl­is­ed, elegant forms.

Bran­cusi in turn became a mentor to Italian artist Amedeo Mod­igliani, another recent immigrant to Paris. Modigliani had entered 7 paintings in Paris’ Salon d’Automne exhibition in 1907 and 5 works in the Salon des Indépendants in 1908, but few paid attent­ion. Embittered, Modigliani threw himself instead into carving stone, again inspired by Brancusi, his friend and neighbour.

In 1908-9 the not-yet famous Brâncuşi had just finished a rough stone scul­pture depicting two entwined, abst­ract­ed lov­ers in an embrace. This was The Kiss. Only 2 years after Brancusi made this sculpture, Rach­ew­­skaia committed love-tortured suicide in Par­is in late Nov 1910, at 23. Sadly it was Solomon Marbais’ sister who found Tatiana hang­ed in her Boulevard de Port-Royal room.

Marbais, a friend of Constantin Brancusi’s, purch­ased the scul­p­ture di­r­ectly from the ar­t­ist to decorate the top of Tatiana’s grave at Cim­et­ière du Montparnasse. Marbais paid the very modest price of 200 francs.

After WWI, Marbais worked on typhoid vaccine research and nursed desperate cases of Spanish flu in Cochin Hospital. He got his medic­al decree from Paris Uni and became famous having designed a vacc­ine against one of the most devastating disease then, TB.

Augustus John; Constantin Brancusi; Frank Owen Dobson, c1925

National Portrait Gallery

In 1938 Peggy Guggenheim opened Guggenheim Jeune mod­ern art gallery in London, and was delighted to display works by Wassily Kandinsky, Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Pablo Pic­asso & Jean Miro. Peggy was becoming one of the art world’s most sig­nif­ic­­ant patrons and prom­oters in London & Paris, so when she inc­l­uded Con­s­tantin Bran­cusi, his career rocked. Her patronage also allowed her to boast of having had 400+ lovers, including Brancusi and Marcel Duch­amp.

Brancusi bequeathed his entire studio to the French state before his death in 1957, and was buried in Cimetière du Montparnasse. In the cen­t­ury since its creation, The Kiss has become one of this cemet­ery’s most popular attractions, drawing thousands of admirers.

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In 2005 Parisian art dealer Guillaume Duhamel inquired about The Kiss, follow­ing a steep rise in Brancusi’s market value. A version of Bran­cusi’s sculp­ture Bird in Space 1922–3 sold at Christie’s in New York for $27 million in 2005, making it a very expensive sculpture! Dealers now looked for Bran­cusi’s multiple vers­ions of The Kiss, including those in Buch­arest’s National Museum of Art and in Phil­ad­elphia’s Museum of Art. The Montparn­asse vers­ion was valued at $45 million, with six different people claiming ownership rights!!

In 2006 Duhamel and the French auction house Millon tracked downTitania Rachew­sk­aia’s heirs in Ukraine, who filed an application with the Fr­en­ch Min­istry of Culture to ex­p­ort the sculpture to Russia. Sus­p­icious that The Kiss would end up at auction, the City of Paris de­clined the export re­quest and listed it as a cultural mon­ument. The Russian heirs arg­ued that the sculpture was created 2 years before Tatiana’s death, supp­ort­ing the view that the artist could not have predicted her death and therefore it wasn’t created for her grave.

The Kiss sculpture, placed on top of Tatiana Rachewskaia's grave
by her lover, Solomon Marbais in 1910
Mont­parnasse Cemetery

In 2018, visitors discovered that the work had been hidden from public view in a mys­terious box, leading to the authorities to reveal that it was subject to a legal cl­aim. 6 people claimed they owned the rights to the Mont­parnasse Cemetery ver­s­ion of The Kiss, so dealer Guillaume Du­hamel and the French auction house Mil­lon recontacted Rach­evskaïa’s descendants. 

For years Titania’s Russian heirs had been seeking permission to claim The Kiss. A decision was made by the Administ­rative Court of Appeal of Paris in Dec 2020, siding with the heirs’ claim. But when the family went to the grave to claim the sculpture soon after, the City of Paris refused to allow them to take it to Russia. More court cases loomed.

The endless legal battle over a Brancusi sculpture, long a be­loved fix­ture of Paris’ Montparnasse Cemetery, ended in 2021 in a win for the City of Paris. The French court deemed the marble sc­ulpture, desig­nated since 1992 a Historical Monu­ment and integral compon­ent of Titania’s tombstone, barring its removal from the fun­er­al grounds. But why was this sculpture still part of Brancusi’s estate, even though Marbais definitely bought it in 1910? And what will happen now?