Seeing and Being Seen

This chapter introduces the modern strategies that Medardo Rosso developed to reach an audience during his Parisian years. He worked mostly on a small scale and cast in his studio rather than having his sculptures cast by commercial foundries. He also began to exploit the new middle-class taste for cheaper sculptural materials, casting works in wax and plaster and selling them as finished pieces. He capitalized on his experience in Italian foundries, where the cire perdue (lost wax) method was regularly employed for casting bronzes, to generate special excitement around his sculptures. Rosso attempted to personalize his relationship with buyers and circumvent the Parisian gallery system that was becoming the intermediary between avant-garde art and a new bourgeois audience.

The Artist’s Experience of Migration

This chapter looks at the shift in Medardo Rosso's position from an outsider in his own country to a foreigner in France. Rosso's move to Paris belongs to the wider phenomenon of increased migration by artists to the principal metropolis of modern art toward the end of the century. It also confirms his awareness of a new kind of transnational mobility. Tracing Rosso's trajectory as a form of self-exile characteristic of cultural anarchists, the chapter examines his hopeful but obstacle-ridden expatriation and his struggle to make avant-garde sculpture in the epoch and city dominated by Rodin. Paris at the end of the nineteenth-century offered Rosso new opportunities, such as a vibrant art scene, a burgeoning market for serial sculpture, and a network of sophisticated artists, collectors, and critics.

The Shifting Viewpoint of the Outsider

This chapter focuses on the sculptures Rosso made during his Parisian years. Medardo Rosso created such extraordinarily advanced work as Après la visite (After the Visit); Impression de Boulevard, Femme à la voilette (Impression of a Boulevard, Woman with a Veil); and Madame X. Rosso registered in these sculptures an uneasiness about personal encounters that related to his own experience as an alienated artist working at the margins. His innovative artistic intuitions and itinerant self-fashioning would pave the way for the next generation of foreign artists in the city, breaking ground for younger sculptors such as the Romanian Constantin Brancusi and the Swiss Alberto Giacometti, who enjoyed successful careers in Paris after 1900 and made significant contributions to the international birth of modern sculpture.

“Impressionist Sculptor”?

This chapter examines the shift that emerged in Medardo Rosso's art from 1883 onward, when he made a new series of sculptural experiments that came to be labeled Scapigliato, Verista, and Impressionist by several critics. Another critic associated his art with the techniques of the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the previous generation; by 1887, it was being explicitly associated with French Impressionism. The chapter analyzes what might have been known in Italy about French Impressionism in the 1880s and assesses its reception in the art and literature of the time. It follows with a close analysis of Rossos innovative sculptures of urban subjects like Carne altrui (Flesh of Others) and La Portinaia (Concierge, both 1883–84), whose broken-up, painterly surfaces became permeable to transient effects of light, shadow, and atmosphere.

Afterword

This concluding chapter explains how Medardo Rosso's posthumous reputation is another story that remains to be told. Except for a handful of enlightened art historians, such as Carola Giedion-Welcker and H. W. Janson, who included Rosso in their histories of modern art, Rosso was forgotten by the world after his death. In 1963 he was suddenly propelled back onto the international art scene by Margaret Scolari Barr, who wrote the first English monograph on Rosso. Since the 1970s, Rosso has been fully reclaimed by Italy and reframed within the nineteenth-century Italian Scapigliatura movement, a tale of local origins that Rosso himself had denied. Today, due to the many international artists inspired by Rosso's work, he has become the only Italian sculptor of his time to be globalized.

On the Move

This chapter follows Medardo Rosso's peregrinations in his last decade of international expansion. At that time, it became clear to Rosso that being in Paris would not suffice to create a truly international reputation and fully disseminate his revolutionary ideas. He began to travel around Europe to promote his art, relying on international networks and new opportunities that characterized the first decade of the twentieth century. At the same time, Rosso's attempt to create a meaningful identity for himself without recourse to fixed symbolic structures of nationalism further intensified his uneasy position as a perennial outsider. He poignantly captured this sense of alienation in his final masterpiece, Ecce puer (Behold the Child, 1906), a haunting, larger-than-life head of the son of a wealthy London collector.

Laying the Foundations for an Antiheroic Approach to Modern Sculpture

This chapter contextualizes Medardo Rosso's early life and the beginning of his career within the uncertain nationalism and ambivalent internationalism that characterized Italy in the two decades after its unification. Rosso grew up in the aftermath of the Risorgimento. Like many Italians of his generation, he was disenchanted by the unfulfilled promises of national unity, a dissatisfaction he dared to express in his early art. His first works of the 1880s define his enterprise within the hopes and disillusionments of these post-Risorgimento decades. His unorthodox approach suggests that, early on, he developed unique artistic solutions compared to those of his compatriots. This approach was especially notable in his rejection of the tradition of heroic mythmaking in sculpture.

Internationalism and Experimentation

This chapter analyzes Medardo Rosso's career in Italy in light of the shifting political climate in the mid- to late 1880s. His increasingly internationalist viewpoint had political and cultural implications that illuminate his career choices as well as the disoriented and fragmented historical moment in Italy and its complex relationship to France. His work was criticized at home during a decade of growing tensions caused by Italy's fragile democratic system and the nationalism of the ruling class and its supporters. This was a delicate time politically, soon after Italy had joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria–Hungary, and imposed trade wars against France. Rosso's early alertness to European prospects resonates with the political currents of progressive democratic internationalism that developed in Italy during the 1880s.

Monuments without Idols

This chapter traces four significant rejections that marked Medardo Rosso's early career in Italy. He made two revolutionary monument proposals for Giuseppe Garibaldi, but the Italian establishment immediately rejected them. In these public projects, Rosso dared to criticize what he saw as falsely reassuring nation-building myths. Rosso also was expelled from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, and his first radical funerary monument, La Riconoscenza, was removed from the local cemetery for its frank and emotionally explicit portrayal of mourning and death. The chapter argues that Rosso adopted an artistic language of protest to experiment with new forms of expression that rejected the heroic idioms of traditional sculpture. His original antiheroic monument proposals expressed far-reaching ideas that aimed to revolutionize the concept of the monument in modern times.