The Brooklyn Rail

Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), a self-described “European anarchist born on a train,” is the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien. Around fifty of Rosso’s sculptures—variants from his thirty-nine proto-original subjects cast in the archaic lost-wax method—are installed over two museum floors. These multiples, each unique in color, finish, material, and scale, are produced over numerous series that constitute his entire output.

Rosso explores trace processes evident throughout the splattering, clots, scarring, pits, and protrusions he sought by experimenting with non finito surfaces, obsessing to capture life and the surrounding atmosphere of his figures. His preference for an unorthodox use of wax over plaster, which his peers considered poor preparatory materials, creates life-like luminosity or the pallor of a recent exhumation, depending on the description.

In Émile Zola’s 1886 novel L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece), the hapless but brilliant painter Claude, accompanied by the writer Sandoz (allegedly based on Paul Cézanne and Zola), visit the eccentric sculptor Mahoudeau, with his “thick black hair and low forehead.” They enter a studio “filled with clay….a formless heap,” that in the harsh light vaguely suggests a woman’s limbs. Momentarily, they are astonished to see the sculpture seemingly come to life only to “collapse forward,” nearly crushing the sculptor and his visitors.

Zola’s sardonic passage, an inversion of the classic Pygmalion myth, recalls Rosso’s obsession with pushing his work past the tipping point. This can be seen when comparing Rosso’s two “Madonna Lactans,” which dispense with any religious connotation in favor of celebrating the sensual bond between mother and child. In 1886, to commemorate the birth of his son, he created The Golden Age (Aetas aurea), a double portrait emphasizing touch through the tender sensations of a maternal kiss. Deep imprints from Rosso’s fingers add a reflexive aspect, alluding to the fluid themes of birth and artistic creation into solid form.

In 1890, his approach became more radical in the making of Enfant au sein (Child at the Breast). A single surviving photograph documents an earlier version altered by a casting accident that broke off the head of the mother. Undeterred, Rosso cast the surviving headless edition, seamlessly fusing near-abstract forms with the mother’s breast, leaving the nursing child adrift in lava-like flow spilling over the edge of the pedestal and beyond.

Provoking class society and his patron’s haute-bourgeoisie taste, Rosso’s choice of outlier subjects was befitting his anarchistic streak and empathy for the underrepresented. When Rosso described the circumstances leading to the creation of Portinaia (Concierge)(1883–84), he wondered if his concierge’s insistent presence might be the source of his distraction. Rosso brought his clay to her ground-floor flat and captured her likeness and stoic resignation in a frenzied sitting. He wanted to solidify “the effect that she had always made upon me as I went by and looked at her in passing.” Rosso expressed his relief, as if an unspoken truce had been struck following their existential staring contest.

One must consider Rosso’s La conversazione (A Conversation) (ca. 1899) and Bookmaker (1894) in the context of Auguste Rodin’s better-known Monument to Balzac, completed in 1897. After moving to Paris in 1884, Rosso befriended Rodin, creating a potentially powerful alliance and friendship in an exchange of letters. Eventually, the relationship soured due to Rosso’s printed allegations that Rodin was plagiarizing him, with his off-kilter Balzac statue commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres.

Rodin’s unexpected, tilted Balzac caused an outcry as, like Rosso’s work, the figure was placed directly on the ground and considered to bear only a casual likeness to the novelist. The statue was also controversial for utilizing a simplified bronze mass to represent the cloak, a shorthand style Rosso had employed in many earlier works. Rodin broke all contact with Rosso after he made his accusations public, taking to the press. As an immigrant, losing Rodin’s support may have hindered Rosso’s success, but by standing up to him, Rosso found a path to triumph in posterity. For a rebel like Medardo Rosso, the Maestro Rodin had become another monument waiting to be knocked down.

Medardo Rosso was successful during his lifetime, but nearly forgotten until his work was introduced to America with an exhibition at the Peridot Gallery in New York in 1960, followed by an exhibition at MoMA in 1963.¹ Throughout the 1950s, Louise Bourgeois exhibited at the Peridot, and her admiration for Rosso is well documented. By discovering his explorations of the dematerialization of sculpture, Rosso reached a new generation of artists, influencing them directly or indirectly.

With over fifty invited artists, curator Heike Eipeldauer creates a profound dialogue over time and emulates Rosso’s own curatorial outings—as seen in century old photographs—with works by Cézanne, Rodin, reproductions of Michelangelo, and others scattered throughout Rosso’s shows.

With the mumok installation pairing such luminous figures as Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuși, Andy Warhol, and Louise Bourgeois, it’s the less immediate choices like David Hammons, Maria Lassnig, Phyllida Barlow, Carol Rama, Paul Thek, Senga Nengudi, which strikingly dramatize Rosso’s radicality the most.

In 1906, Rosso completed his thirty-ninth and last original modeled sculpture: a portrait commission involving a six-year-old boy entitled Ecce Puer (Behold the Child). Contemporary accounts describe Rosso’s frustration and false starts until he caught a glimpse of the boy behind a curtain, or rather a glimpse of light undulating against a soft contour of the boy’s face shrouded in fabric. Rosso went to work and concentrated on the liminality between the impression of the boy’s face and rays of sunlight across the curtain, transfixing the moment into a timeless visage.

Refusing approval for the finished work, the parents seemed spooked by the shroud-like aspect of Ecce Puer. At mumok, large multiple casts of this final work are installed in series that vary in color across identical plinths. Shockingly modern, the installation is testament to Rosso’s triumph over Charles Baudelaire’s denouncement over boring sculpture, tipping the scale in favor of the anarchist.

Upon learning of the death of Rodin, celebrated poet and fellow outlier Guillaume Apollinaire wrote, “Rosso is undoubtedly now the greatest living sculptor. The injustice of which this prodigious sculptor has always been a victim is not being redressed.”