The Brooklyn Rail

“Where does anyone appreciate the sculpture of Medardo Rosso?” Thus the Italian Futurist artists demanded to know in the first of their many manifestoes from the early 1910s. The group’s attacks on painting and sculpture’s modern histories found them disavowing essentially all recent achievements, especially in an Italy still seemingly beholden to millennial conventions. The work of Rosso (1858–1928) formed a telling exception.

Born in Turin to a railway inspector, he came of age in Milan: Italy’s only truly industrialized city and generative of the peninsula’s more innovative experiments (including, eventually, the Futurist movement itself). Like the Futurists after him, Rosso spent significant time in Paris, relocating there for several years in 1889. His exchanges with Auguste Rodin confirmed affinities in their respective approaches to sculptural form—approaches which would fundamentally shape the medium’s twentieth-century potential. Yet Rodin’s reluctance to acknowledge Rosso’s influence upon his work—his infamously off-kilter portrait of Honoré de Balzac (1891–1897) plainly cribbed from Rosso’s diagonally-oriented Bookmaker (1894)—strained their friendship. After a fruitful stint in his Parisian studio and the sale of various works to a range of collectors, Rosso returned to Italy. It was chiefly in his native land that his work’s reputation resided for decades thereafter.

First mounted at Vienna’s Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), this stimulating exhibition reveals the breadth and depth such appreciation came to take in the century to follow. Wide-ranging influences and echoes appear by way of striking installations and juxtapositions, including work by Eva Hesse and Nairy Baghramian, Paul Thek and Richard Serra—to name only a few of the numerous artists included. Also included are European contemporaries—Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Loïe Fuller, Edgar Degas, and Mary Cassatt—whose work lends context to Rosso’s particular achievements. As the inclusion of Cassatt, Degas, and others would suggest, those achievements were long discussed in terms of Rosso’s Impressionism: an importation of painting’s newfound concern with atmosphere into the domain of sculpture. The medium’s fixity had forever seemed to preclude it from the effects of temporal duration. Its solidity appeared impervious precisely to the phenomena which galvanized impressionist painting and its irreducibly modern energy.

“A work of art that is not concerned with light,” Rosso pronounced in 1907, “has no right to exist.” His Enfant au soleil [Child in the Sun] (1891–92) responds directly to that self-imposed imperative. How might mass and material be made to evoke something as fugitive and intangible as sunlight on a face and neck? Realized in bronze, wax, and plaster versions, his eponymous sculpture does not simply depict a boy’s visage; it suggests how flesh and skin respond to a changeable environment. Fluctuations of contingencies like temperature and light are evinced in subtle gradations of surface. Around a third of Rosso’s extant works take the theme of the young child—a predominant motif in the history of art, even leaving aside its Christological iconographies. Rosso exploded the genre. In a certain sense, quite literally. The surfaces of these works rival their subjects. Whether in Enfant à la Bouchée de pain [Child in the soup kitchen] (1897), Enfant au sein [Child at the Breast] (1890), or Ecce Puer [Behold the Child] (1906), the boundaries between the body and its surroundings becomes zones of encounter and activation, rather than fixity and finitude. Human presence appears to come continually into being out of its own materiality, in and out of physical coherence. Rosso would also continually rework the seams and edges of his various castings, lending each version a sense of particular, shifting contingencies. Drawing played a significant role in capturing contingency (a paradoxical task)—not in a preparatory sense, per se, but rather a record of fleeting impressions (often of bodies in motion) and atmospheric conditions. Whether the image of a woman combing her hair or figures glimpsed from behind on an omnibus, the pencil sketches bear the same raw immediacy as his sculptures.

Whereas Rodin sent his molds to the foundry for copies, Rosso cast nearly everything himself. He reworked nearly all of his sculptures in multiple guises and media (producing his Bambino ebreo [Jewish Boy] [1892–93] in six different materials, for instance). He also personally photographed them in various states and stagings. Though Rosso continued to work up until his death, he abandoned modeling in 1906. His activities revolved thereafter around recasting and re-photographing previous works. A large swathe of that prodigious photographic activity is on view here, presented both on its own terms and in dialogue with the work of other artists. Both his reiterations and his dynamic photographic practice amplified and extended his sculptural work in striking ways. The exhibition thus intelligently considers the artist’s afterlife not merely in terms of form, but also the ways in which he presented and re-presented sculptural form: repetition, iteration, and photographic illustration.

We find Alberto Giacometti’s La Jambe [the leg] (1958), evoking Rosso’s sculptures in its rough-hewn corporeality, and the smeared face of Francis Bacon’s Man in Blue IV (1954) recalling the turbulence of his physiognomies. Yet we also revisit Rosso’s multiple castings by way of vis-à-vis serialized imagery by Andy Warhol (Optical Car Crash [1962]) and Sherrie Levine (Cathedral: 1–9, after Monet [1995]). The performative dimensions of Rosso’s studio practice (he occasionally cast his bronzes in public) and installation strategies (he frequently exhibited his sculptures alongside works by other artists) extend the exhibition’s scope well beyond the “pseudomorphic” comparisons which often haunt exhibitions on artists’ legacies. That said, some of the formal rhymes are compelling, and hardly coincidental. The sympathies linking Rosso’s Madame X (ca. 1896) to Constantin Brâncuși’s Sleeping Muse (1910) transcend the latter’s notable appreciation of Rosso’s photographic practice. To be sure, Brâncuși’s licked and sealed surfaces most often suggest the opposite of Rosso’s affinity for unfinishedness. Yet a work like Madame X (ca. 1896) reveals how keenly he anticipated modernist tropes—fragmentation, anonymity—as much as he recalled Michelangelo’s non finito.

In the art historian Rosalind Krauss’s pioneering account, however, Rosso’s most vitally modernist consequence lay in how his works activated time, rather than space. That activation obtained not by a mere contemplation of the works’ frequently frontal orientation, but rather their circumnavigation. That is, his sculptures refuse scrutiny from any single vantage point. Their meaning becomes ramified and thickened by passing around them, extending the work’s significance from its material envelope to the dimensions of the gallery space. And the back sides of Rosso’s works offered up more for visual contemplation than perhaps any other “frontal” sculptures to date. Consider how much the back side of Uomo che legge [Man Reading] (1894) flares up and swirls behind the work’s image. The verso of nearly all his sculptures reveals the record of his thumbprints—a working and reworking of surfaces registered in wax, plaster, or some combination thereof. Here indeed lies so much of Rosso’s consequence: not simply an insistence upon process (as much as finished product), but also a self-consciousness of sculpture’s brute objecthood. Beginning with Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana, a large number of post-war artists would call attention to the canvas as an object in its own right. At least some of that impetus can be traced to frankness with which Rosso insisted upon sculpture’s materiality—always already an object before (or while) it becomes an image. Works by Bruce Nauman, Marisa Merz, and Robert Morris underscore Rosso’s reverberations—both direct and oblique—in the sculptural experiments of the 1960s.

This is not to say that all juxtapositions hit their target here. Some of the more conceptually threaded connections—Rosso’s bronze Laughing Woman (1891) next to one of Giovanni Anselmo’s torsion pieces from 1968—dissipate inconsequentially. Coiled against the wall, Anselmo’s object evinces a tacit precariousness and threat, and incites in the viewer a self-consciousness of their own body. Any possible correspondence in Rosso’s evocation of laughter—a different, Bergsonian kind of contingency—proves hard to grasp. Likewise the appearance of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Enigma of Fatality (1914) (which had been absent in the show’s Viennese debut). De Chirico’s pictorial and architectural concern for “fatality” evokes precisely a sense of irreversible finality—a sense of chance that is not unfolding but rather a fait accompli (accomplished fact). His immovable Nietzschean poetics of fate suggests the opposite of Rosso’s Bergsonian becoming.

Some of the exhibition’s less straightforward inclusions prove its most poignant. A fresh addition to the original iteration in Vienna, Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) is a case in point. Measured to weigh about the same as his partner before his body wasted away from AIDS, the work’s pile of candies is meant to be taken and consumed by visitors, and the candy pile intermittently replenished. The sense of both physical change and temporal flux relate to Rosso’s work in provocative ways—less formally or aesthetically articulated than the work of Umberto Boccioni (also a new addition to the Basel hanging) but no less notable. Rosso’s innovation, in Boccioni’s words, to have “open[ed] up the field of sculpture by giving a plastic representation to the forces of the environment and the atmospheric links that bind them to the subject.” Those links, as the presence of Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) suggests, and as the exhibition underscores in other intelligent ways, were more than physical or atmospheric.

To be sure, Rosso was also what we might call a sculptor’s sculptor, in the same way that Giorgio Morandi—for all his influence upon conceptual aesthetics—was first and foremost a painter’s painter. Morandi’s absence from the exhibition seemed like a missed opportunity. A few other artists—Tony Cragg, Berlinde De Bruyckere—might likewise have traced affinities in other directions and dimensions. This is testament less to the exhibition’s shortcomings, however, than to the exponential resonance of Rosso’s work. If he was not “the only great modern sculptor”—in Boccioni’s peremptory claim—his innovations echo in a staggering range of practices. And if he did not invent modern sculpture tout court (in short), he arguably invented the sense of its plasticity in a conceptual as much as a material sense.