From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The milk of human kindness has been running pretty dry in recent years. ‘Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture’, which I saw at Mumok in Vienna before it travelled to the Kunstmuseum Basel (29 March–10 August), is right for these mean times. It should be required viewing for anyone feeling a waning of their aptitude for humane attention and empathy.
Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) was regarded by contemporaries, alongside his rival, Auguste Rodin, as the co-founder of ‘Impressionism in Sculpture’. While Rodin was primarily a sculptor of bodies (always highly sexualised, very often headless), Rosso favoured busts and faces. Both artists produced off-balanced, often abruptly truncated figures with an ambiguous relationship to gravity. Both highlighted crude materialities of making, retaining traces of lumpen clay manipulated by fingers, as well as accidents of the casting process. Rosso was even more emphatic than Rodin in foregrounding sculpture as a medium of multiples. He never worked in marble, only casts – in plaster, bronze and, entirely idiosyncratically, cast wax – and, unlike Rodin, he did all his own casting. For the last two decades of his career, Rosso abandoned modelling and simply recast, photographed and rephotographed select figures from his repertoire of around 40 forms, modelled between 1881 and 1906.
Twenty-four sculptures by Rosso appeared at Mumok, most in multiple casts and photographs. The exhibition also included some 50 non-preparatory drawings and their photographic reproductions. Many of these – on torn scraps of hotel stationery – depict streetscapes in Paris and London. Their juxtaposition in the final gallery with casts of Enfant au sein (1889) and Enfant à la Bouchée de pain (1897) exposed the opposition between anonymity and intimacy at the heart of Rosso’s oeuvre. On the one hand, Rosso was the first to translate a typical modern-life subject into the medium of sculpture: Impressione d’omnibus (1884–85) and Impression de boulevard, le soir (Paris la nuit) (1896–99), his most ambitious, multi-figure sculptures (now lost, but known to us in photographs), represented strangers encountering each other fleetingly in urban spaces. On the other hand, Rosso worked most experimentally in the established genre of bust-portraits of children and babies, with and without their mothers.
In Vienna, Heike Eipeldauer’s care in sequencing, grouping and lighting works by Rosso had the effect of cracking his art open. It revealed Rosso’s central preoccupation to be the the emotions absorbed in human face-to-face encounters. His sculptures and photographs make literal questions of sight, light and facial recognition melt into large metaphors about our basic need to be seen, to receive the warmth of a gaze that equates to love. For example, in one of eight vitrines of photos leading into the grand first gallery of 11 sculptures was a small photograph of Enfant au soleil (1891–92), a bust of an infant on view in the adjacent gallery. The bust appears on a table in Rosso’s studio, surrounded by six plants in terracotta pots. The placement of the baby’s head amid photosynthesising plant life makes literal what is implied by the sculpture’s title; the three-dimensional Enfant au soleil comes alive through the gaze of the viewer, whose attention is the sun shining on the figure.
The title of Rosso’s final and most famous sculpture, Ecce Puer (1906), is a quasi-religious command to the beholder to recognise the human figure in the sculpture. Ironic, considering how Rosso’s forms always veer towards formlessness. The human element – a face, in most cases – will click into vision only with optimal lighting and from the right distance and angle, dissolving into raw matter when one moves towards the backs, sides, or edges of the sculptures. Rosso’s busts both invite and frustrate the innate drive of the human visual system to seek out faces. And they did so at a moment when urbanisation was dramatically transforming the emotional tenor of face-to-face interactions, as works such as Impressione d’omnibus attest. Rosso explored the kinds of environments where modern people were described as developing a ‘blasé’, non-responsive affect, at the same time as he turned obsessively towards the motif of the young child at the age when we are most inclined to seek out faces.
Ecce Puer (1906; this version cast 1960), Medardo Rosso. Mumok, Vienna. Photo: Markus Mörgötter/Mumok
The open-endedness of Rosso’s sculptures, their dependence on conditions of light and spatial position, is a metaphor for the inherent receptiveness of people to other people, which is far less disguised in children and infants. This came through vividly in the final gallery, which brought together multiple casts of Enfant au sein and Enfant à la Bouchée de pain – the latter, to my mind, Rosso’s greatest sculpture. Unlike the majority of Rosso’s heads, which evade the gaze by twisting at the neck, Enfant à la Bouchée de pain is a strikingly frontal figure. A graceless mound of swaddling fabric halos the face of an upright baby whose cheeks are puffed out with food and who is presumably being propped up or held, though no supports are indicated. The child’s eyes are prominent yet barely indicated; the left by the vague indentation of a thumbprint, the right with a slight protrusion. The precarity of the child’s condition, underlined by the title of the sculpture, is made material in the figure’s tentative posture of address and solicitation and by the teetering of its form on the edge of irresolution.
In contrast to the archetype of the charity-case infant in European sculpture – Andrea della Robbia’s roundels at the Ospedale degli Innocenti – Rosso’s Enfant à la Bouchée de pain seems to seek out a connection it cannot take as given. If Della Robbia’s bas-relief babies confidently stretch out their arms as if to receive a hug, Rosso’s infant conveys much more hesitancy about how the world might receive him. Enfant à la Bouchée de pain invokes all the ways modern hearts might be hardened to such a figure. Rosso’s process of repeatedly casting and photographing this vulnerable figure models the kind of loving attention the beholder may, or may not, extend. In matters of vision, as Rosso said, ‘your emotion is the only true perspective’.
‘Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture’ was at Mumok, Vienna, from 18 October 2024–to 23 February. It is at the Kunstmuseum Basel until 10 August.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.