The Brooklyn Rail

Two steep stairways lead up to the special exhibition space at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Confronted first by a wall of titles and texts, one never really knows what to expect after that sharp right turn toward the galleries. On this occasion, it was a slow reveal: I approached a white-walled space, empty but for two Egyptian ushabti-like figurines—or were they perhaps modeled after Greek korai?—one plaster, one cast brass, each on a white plinth. Still unseeing, my attention was caught by a wall relief, Untitled (1948–49)—a chair? A person? Turns out it was both. I progressed through the show, awed by the human figure in elemental poses—standing, sitting, reclining, half-figures, full figures, monumental and small scale, heads of gigantic proportions looming over compressed torsos—all still. Some figures are in their original plaster states, others were later cast in brass. In both cases, their worked surfaces veil intelligible expression, their surfaces a kind of reticulated disorder, relentless and absolute. I was dumbstruck.

And for good reason. Hans Josephsohn’s (1920–2012) art practice was hermetic, uncompromising, and obsessive, undertaken alone, principally in and around Zurich. Relatively unknown despite solo exhibitions in Switzerland since the 1950s, this artist’s remarkable body of work was brought to international attention only at the start of the aughts. The current exhibition in Paris is his first one-man show in France, though in 2007 a group show here—The Third Mind, curated by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone at the Palais de Tokyo—included half a dozen of his reclining figures. Unsurprisingly but no less remarkably, it is another contemporary artist, Albert Oehlen, who curated this first French one-person exhibition. As much as Oehlen’s commitment to Josephsohn’s work, his celebrity has made this exhibition possible.

Josephsohn’s concerns began and ended with the figure. Working in parallel with modernism’s expansion into hybridity and fragmentation, his neoclassical throughline lays well outside the aesthetic expressions of his time. His figures are based almost exclusively on three life partners, their forms worked out compulsively, nearly as an aesthetic sexual act—an erotic responsiveness to plaster, an impregnation, a pushing, an entering, a spreading of material by hand that catalyzed outward growth from within. Standing in the same space with these mottled surfaces—primarily brass, cast from plaster—one senses they were shaped incrementally, in bits, through repetitive compressions of thumb and forefinger, then pressed into a surface. Josephsohn leaves his impress everywhere, a powerfully indexical record of his process. As he avers in Josephsohn—Stein des Anstosses (Josephsohn—Stumbling Block) (1977), a film by Jürg Hassler, “I stop when it corresponds to my vision and my feeling.” He further suggests that a film of him at work can suggest nothing close to the essence of his being at work. It is like filming sex, he says; the “deep meaning”—the love—behind the act is lost. “And while I’m doing this … I’m trying to show you my work. And at the same time, I realize, and I tell myself that it’s not possible.”

Even so, the viewing experience is one of empathic identification. Such vividly intense corporeality stirs a sympathetic strain in the viewer. One untitled series of recumbent figures, modeled on the memory of a partner as she lay on a couch, is all voluptuousness. Curators have compared them to rugged mountainscapes, but this misses the point: these types are bodily reenactments of intimacy, seared into Josephsohn’s haptic memory and fleshed out through concentrated labor. The large-scale Standing Figure, Untitled from 1962, with its bent neck, rounded shoulders, arms fused to its sides, and tubular legs, conveys a harrowing gravitas that is at once menacing and benign. It began with the vertical stacking of several sheets of plaster, building up an implied human form that acquired flesh through Josephsohn’s aggressive layering on of plaster with his bare hands, a knife, and a wooden modeling tool. The process was intuitive and swift. These muscular pressures and scrapings achieve a layered textural richness that presents a presence, rather than an individual—the armature, not the likeness, of a wife, a lover, a passing foundry worker. This is equally true of his half-figures mounted on white plinths, erotic embodiments of his second long-term partner, arms bent under pendulous breasts, such as Untitled (Ruth) (1973–74), her face lacking eyes and therefore expression, even as her posture is resolute. Coloristic effects in these works are the by-product of the brass-casting process. Traces of a powdery residue shimmer like gold flecks, flickering as they catch the light.

Some facts: Josephsohn was born in 1920 in Königsberg, Germany (known as Kaliningrad, Russia, since 1945), to Jewish parents during the rise of National Socialism. Increasingly marginalized, he was denied entry into art school in Germany, but in 1938 won a partial scholarship to the Istituto Statale d’Arte, Florence. With Hitler’s state visit to Italy that year and Mussolini’s passage of racial laws in the country, Josephsohn fled to Switzerland, shortly becoming an apprentice in the studio of the Swiss sculptor Otto Müller. Even so, during the next two years he was subjected to two confinements in labor camps. He received a postcard from his parents in Berlin as they were about to be deported to Theresienstadt, the camp where they would be murdered. From that time on, Josephsohn never left Switzerland, living in Zurich until his death in 2012.

In many ways, Josephsohn’s life experiences reflect those of many artists whose works are interpreted, whether by the artist and his or her circle or by later critics, as aesthetic responses to the conditions and trauma of war—persecution, forced migration, penury, genocide. Josephsohn’s oeuvre has much in common with, for example, the reduced and emaciated postwar figures that Alberto Giacometti made after World War II, and with Jean Fautrier’s impastoed “Otages” series (1942–45), which make reference to the practice of taking French citizens hostage when they resisted the German occupation.

Yet despite Josephsohn’s personal history and the similarity between his modeled accretions and those of Fautrier and Giacometti, he was not expressing pathos through his mottled forms, as those artists were. Rather, one might look to his attachment to the massive volumes and thickset walls, pilasters, piers, and lintels of Romanesque architecture. In Zurich, Josephsohn was surrounded by significant examples of the Romanesque, notably the Grössmünster monastery church. He traveled rarely, but when he did, he was drawn to the baptistery and San Miniato al Monte church in Florence, and to the astounding architectural arrangement of the Piazza del Duomo in Pisa. Striking in these sites is their large-scale geometric design, within which the characteristic arcades of arches seem diminished in visual effect. Their strong horizontal and vertical framings find their way into the thick lintels and piers of Josephsohn’s reliefs, which themselves frame representational dramas, elemental stagings of moments of intimacy. Against a rectangular, planar, vertically worked support, often surmounted by a blank entablature-like structure, Josephsohn inlays sculpted figures that enact narrational moments: a woman sits in a chair in front of a geometrical object or, more precisely, another chair; two figures stand before a seated one; a man and woman engage in a sexual act in Untitled (1998), or simply stand, exposed frontally. Figures grow from or recede into geometries, off-kilter squares, triangles, and rectangles. These works are based on sketches in graphite on paper, two-dimensional renderings to which Josephsohn gives volume and plasticity.

Oehlen’s presentation of this overview of Josephson’s sculpture began with his own acquisition of a late work, Untitled (2005), one of a series of half-figures created when the sculptor was in his mid-seventies. While “half-figures” was the artist’s own term, the gargantuan heads of these works seem to absorb the entire anatomy, making it appear more as a single, unified volume than an articulated head and torso. Absent eyes, their proportionately small noses and suggestions of mouths make reading them as busts nearly meaningless. What we see, rather, is an artist at one with his medium. Mute, self-enclosed, seemingly unapproachable, what these works present to us in 2025 is the well-worn paradox of the here but absent. Intensity remains, of course, making these works present to our sensibilities. The sinologist Victor Segalen, in the preface to a book of his prose poems, Stèles (1914), based on thirteenth-century Chinese stone tablet engravings, might also be describing the force of Josephsohn’s sculptures’ indelible presences: “They disdain being read. They do not call for voice or music. … They do not express; they mean; they are.”¹