Sculpture for the Blindis one of Constantin Brancusi's less well-known—or at least less discussed—works. Nevertheless, it lies at the heart of several important open questions. Among the reasons for its relative neglect may be the difficulty it poses for art historians because the documents that regard it are few, fragmentary and, when not, as some think, actually misleading, in part unreliable or controversial. On the other hand, if we take the title literally, it raises nothing less than the question of blindness, which is an intriguing problem for art.

The first version of the sculpture, in marble, dates to 1916 and was presented at the Independents’ Exhibitionin New York the following year. This must be the same as the piece that Brancusi sold to the collector John Quinn in 1922, that then, in 1935, passed with Duchamp's mediation to the Arensberg Collection and that is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A second version is dated to 1925; it is in alabaster and was first presented at the Salon des Indépendentsin Paris in 1926 and then at the Brummer Gallery in New York in 1933; it is now in the Atelier Brancusi in Paris. All other information is yet more uncertain.

The first version is the object of the most controversial testimony. This is Henri-Pierre Roche's claim that at the Independents’ Exhibitionin New York, it was presented ‘wrapped up in a bag, with two sleeve-holes through which the hands could pass […] and it was a “revelation for the hands” without the eyes, though most of the people thought it must then be a joke’.