Art: Rosso Re-Evaluated

Medardo Rosso was a rebel. A shaggy, red-bearded bohemian, he called Greek and Roman sculpture “nothing but paperweights.” The curly beard of Michelangelo’s Moses was “Neapolitan spaghetti” to him. While studying at the Brera Academy in Milan, he punched a fellow student and was expelled. He took haven in Paris’ Montmartre district in the days of Degas, Lautrec and Rodin. What did he think about Rodin, his senior by nearly 18 years? “Rosso loves Rosso,” was his cool reply.

Yet in his rebellion against the classical notion that sculpture is petrified people striking noble poses, Rosso knew that he loved far more than himself. He was a romantic, full of the 19th century sentiment that still put women and children first. His subject matter concentrated on them, their preening, their chance encounters, their intimate moments of tenderness, love and sadness (see color). He sculpted fleeting human gestures as they appeared through sunlight, shade, haze, even gaslight. And he thus became the first sculptor to travel into the transient world of the French impressionist painters—a little-acknowledged fact that is well substantiated in a show of 28 of his works, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Institute Italiano di Cultura in New York, which opened last week at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.

That Rosso wasted no love on Rodin is no surprise. He had ample reason to believe that the famous French sculptor had snitched at least one good idea from him. While exploring the play of light on figures, Rosso came to feel that a man’s shadow cast on the ground seemed solid as flesh. So he molded in solids the natural penumbras of cast shadows, like a cape sloping from the figure’s shoulders. Several years after Rodin had visited his studio and written Rosso that he was “struck by a wild admiration for you,” the older sculptor employed the technique in his monumental Balzac, whose bulk heaves backwards out of solid shadow like an immense startled walrus.

“We are nothing but a play of light,” said Rosso, and to let it play, he used a material most sculptors would shudder at—wax. Rosso built up his figures in clay first, cast them in bronze, or in plaster which he then coated with warm translucent wax thick enough to let him lightly edit the original version. Increasingly he left his sculptures as mere impressions, with fewer and fewer fine details, submerging behind veils of light. In one of his last busts, Madame X, barely more than a lopsided oval of wax, Rosso nearly dismisses the tactile world entirely. The mystery lady’s features are barely perceptible, pulled to one side in a manner presaging Picasso, the surface as sleek as a latter-day Brancusi egg.