To the Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso, the history of Western sculpture had produced little more than “paperweights”. He did not care for marble, the worthiest of the sculptor’s materials, choosing instead the poverty and impermanence of wax and plaster. Used together, as in Portinaia (1883-84), he created sculptures that appear to be disintegrating before our eyes. Even bronze he insisted on casting himself, rather than delegating the work to an elaborately staffed foundry. He also invited audiences to watch as he performed the role of “artist-labourer”, expanding the notion of a work of art to include the act of creation itself, and the circumstances of its reception. Champagne was served, and his imperfectly cast sculptures were praised for their uniqueness and authenticity.
If you have not heard of Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), you might be surprised to learn that he was working not in 1960s Turin (his birthplace) alongside the Arte Povera artists, but instead in Paris around 1900, where, say the curators of a major exhibition dedicated to him opening in March, he “revolutionised sculpture”.
Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture comes to Basel following its debut at Mumok in Vienna, and presents a comprehensive survey of an artist whose influence is matched only by his remarkably persistent anonymity. The show is co-curated by Heike Eipeldauer of Mumok, and Elena Filipovic, the director of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Rosso’s Ecce Puer in the artist’s studio Private collection
“It always seemed to me that he was far too little known, given the weight of his influence and the radicality of his ideas,” Filipovic says. “Across my career, I have organised solo exhibitions of artists including Marcel Duchamp, Alina Szapocznikow, Felix González-Torres, Kaari Upson and Andra Ursuța, or organised group shows that have included the works of Nairy Baghramian, Danh Vo, Paul Thek and others. I realise now that each of these artists, in their own way, was engaging with ideas central to Rosso: his undoing of form, his embrace of impermanence, his experimentation with materiality, his challenge to the very notion of sculpture as final and fixed.”
To make the point, these artists are among more than 50 whose works will be featured in dialogue with Rosso’s sculptures, addressing themes including “Process and Performance”, “Repetition and Variation” and “Appearance and Disappearance”. A section titled “Mise-en-Scène” will include artists as diverse as Francis Bacon and Jasper Johns. It is a style of presentation that Rosso experimented with himself, notably at the 1904 Salon d’Automne in Paris, when he placed sculptures in rooms dedicated to Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Many admirers
He was highly regarded among his contemporaries as much as by later generations, Filipovic says. “He was admired by Boccioni and the Futurists, who saw in his work a proto-Modernist embrace of movement and flux,” she says. “Boccioni even wrote about Rosso as a precursor to [the Futurist’s] ideas. Later, Brancusi and Giacometti both credited Rosso with shaping their own thinking on perception and instability in sculpture”.
Rosso’s rejection of the classical sculptural tradition, and his focus on light and atmospheric effects, has inevitably drawn comparison with the Impressionists, confirmed perhaps by his self-proclaimed “preoccupation with the impression, the intuition of life, and the neglect of matter”.
“You can see Rosso’s influence in Giacometti’s textured surfaces and his figures that seem to waver between presence and disappearance, but also in Giacometti’s construction of framing devices into so many of his sculptures,” Filipovic says, adding that Brancusi’s interest in photographing his sculptures was directly inspired by Rosso’s practice.
The exhibition will include hundreds of Rosso’s photographs and drawings, intrinsic to his ideas about the display and reception of his work, and which “foreshadowed the installation and environmental design practices of the 1960s,” writes Heike Eipeldauer in the catalogue.
Of his direct contemporaries, Auguste Rodin was the most famous, and similarly interested in exploring the use of plaster, multiples and photography. But their initially friendly relationship broke down when Rosso accused Rodin of stealing his ideas, specifically, Filipovic says, “how Balzac’s figure [in Rodin’s sculpture] emerged from rough, unformed material—a hallmark of Rosso’s work. Critics at the time noted this, as a consequence Rosso himself felt betrayed, and denounced Rodin.”
Rodin’s reputation rests heavily on public commissions. Rosso, on the other hand, received very few and seems not to have sought them out. His use of fragile materials further affected his reputation in posterity. In addition, Filipovic says, “he would create a sculpture then change it and then change it again and title it differently each time, which is a nightmare for a market or historian.”
Consequently, “making his radicalism visible” has been a challenge, Filipovic says. Rosso’s importance lies in his rejection of durability and monumentality. “He was working at the margins,” she says, “but those margins proved to be where modern sculpture was headed.”
• Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture, Kunstmuseum Basel, 29 March-10 August
