Milan, Italy
Medardo Rosso enrolled at the Brera Academy in 1882.
Milan, Italy
Medardo Rosso enrolled at the Brera Academy in 1882.
Medardo Rosso in his Paris studio in the early 1890s
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Medardo Rosso was born on June 21, 1858, in Turin, Italy. He was the youngest of three children of a middle-class family. His attachment to his mother seems to have had a profound effect that later appeared in the tender, poetic way that he treated his favored themes: women, motherhood, and children.
In 1870 the family moved to Milan, where Rosso spent much of his time in the workshop of a stonecutter. Because he had already decided to become an artist, this experience may have later influenced his having become a sculptor. The three year period of his enlistment in the army, 1879 to 1882, was unpleasant as Rosso was temperamentally unable to adapt to the necessary discipline. Upon being discharged from the army Rosso immediately enrolled in anatomy and sculpture courses at Milan's Brera Academy. He was expelled in 1883 for punching a fellow student who disagreed with his proposed changes to the curriculum.
His earliest works, such as the Hooligan and the Unemployed Singer, both small bronzes of 1882, use his characteristic themes of that period, lower and lower-middle class life of the street. It may have been the example of Giuseppe Grandi (1843-1894), a Milanese sculptor noted for his small figures inspired by everyday life, which drew him in this thematic direction, as well as his own despondency and the impoverished conditions in which he lived.
In examples such as Kiss Under the Streetlamp (1882), Rosso captured what could be described as a snapshot effect. His figures were caught in telling but natural and unselfconscious poses, like random glimpses of life that are probably the most revealing. Under the streetlamp a young man with impetuous tenderness has stolen a kiss from his female companion. What Rosso captured was the emotion and gesture of the kiss without the details of the scene. It was an event momentarily viewed from a distance. In the recollection of this instant the artist remembered only what was to him most significant. This recollected vision characterized his sculpture thereafter. Rosso's technique was one of sketchiness and brevity. Only the lamppost and the kissing gesture are recorded. There is an awareness of the modeling of the clay (from which a mold was made and the bronze in turn cast) and a feel for the medium. Its manipulation is apparent in the varied, textured surfaces. This is related to Impressionist painting in its consciousness of the medium and the technique — paint, canvas, and individual brush strokes that have a meaning and visually pleasing effect aside from any representational quality.
In 1883 a disagreement and scuffle with a fellow student brought about his expulsion from the academy. The exhibition of four sculptures at the Exposizione di Belle Arti in Rome less than a month later must have given Rosso encouragement. Indicative of this was his productiveness and the emergence of a personal style.
The Flesh of Others (wax over plaster, 1883) is an early instance of Rosso's unprecedented use of these materials. He normally worked initially in clay without the benefit of preparatory sketches. The clay was used as a model for a copy in plaster. From this a mold was made with duplicates being produced in bronze or plaster. Possibly when coating his plaster with wax in preparation for making the mold, Rosso was fascinated by the intermediary effects. He had created an image with subtle transitions of value as light reflects off its surfaces. There is a fluidity as forms lose distinctness and flow together. Instead of the solidity and opacity of traditional sculptural materials — stone, wood, and clay — Rosso created a translucent white surface that variedly reflected the light around it.
The "unfinished" quality of his bronze and wax over plaster figures can be thought of as following the esthetic of a sketch-like effect in which the figure is caught in the process of evolution. This is related to the "non finito" of many of Michelangelo's sculptures. One has the awareness of an image coalescing out of Rosso's manipulatable, translucent wax. Euge‧ne Carrie‧re's (1849-1906) monochromatic brown paintings, in which his figures emerge out of a dense atmospheric fog as if they are visions produced in a trance, come to mind. This striving for the essence of a spiritual or emotional reality would ally Rosso to the Symbolist movement emerging in the mid-1880s. In cases where more than one duplicate was made, in each wax-over-plaster he varied the details by allowing the working of the wax to direct the creative process rather than simply replicating earlier versions of the same sculpture.
In 1884 Rosso went to Paris and worked in the studio of the sculptor Jules Dalou, where he met Rodin, whom Rosso would come to view as his major competitor for fame. The death of his beloved mother forced his return to Milan before the end of the year.
This next period in Milan proved to be personally and artistically beneficial. From 1886 to 1889 he received several commissions and had sculptures shown at both the official and "independents salons" in Paris. He also participated in a major show in Venice in 1887. In 1889 he returned to Paris for the honor of exhibiting his sculptures in the Universal Exhibition, but certainly also with the intention of staying there to secure his place in the art world. Emile Zola's purchase of his Concierge (1883) must have given hope to the near-penniless Rosso.
His Sick Boy (1893) — which was done in both waxoverplaster and bronze versions — with its indistinct or veiled features captures the mood of the Symbolist poetic trance found in his earlier work. Paris broadened his subject matter, as is evident in his Conversation in the Garden (1893, wax-over-plaster). This work consists of three forms which share a common base. Two of these forms appear to be seated, behatted ladies who have been talking; the third, upright, form presumably represents Rosso addressing one of the two ladies. What is obviously globs of wax equally appears to be three figures. There is a charge of mental communication between the standing figure and the central form. Like most of his sculptures this is small — only 17 inches high. It has been observed in this instance and others that if a work is viewed from an elevated position with the light coming from above the mood and effect of the sculpture is much clearer. That Rosso often conceived his pieces to be viewed from a particular position and with specific lighting is also apparent in the duplication of this effect in photographs of his sculptures which he took himself or directed.
The importance given to visual perception as a factor of conception had appeared earlier, as in Rosso's Impression in an Omnibus (1883-1884). This consists of five seated, closely spaced figures whose clothing merges while their heads are silhouetted by what would be the light from the windows behind them. The two end figures are much less distinctly executed and suggest that he may have been thinking of a softening of focus in peripheral vision. While the theme recalls the realism of Honoré Daumier (1810-1879), the effect of a recollected glimpse is distinctly Rosso.
Starting in 1898 his productivity diminished to the point that Rosso rarely produced new works; he merely created copies and variations on older pieces. Conversely, it was in this period that he exhibited most extensively. In 1896 he was included in a Pre-Raphaelite show in London. An exhibition of his sculptures travelled through Germany in 1901, and in 1903 he showed at the Vienna Secession. In the same year he visited Leipzig, Berlin, and Brussels and returned to Paris, where he was one of the founding members of the Salon d'Automne, which had a one-man show of his work in 1904. Thereafter there were frequent exhibitions of his work in salons and galleries, particularly in Italy, where he was in effect discovered at last by his countrymen.
Despite never achieving widespread recognition, Medardo Rosso's oeuvre is admired by numerous contemporary sculptors, including leading British exponent Tony Cragg.
His work has been much studied since World War II by sculptors interested in its free, delicate modeling and subtle, evocative forms. It was also sought to establish a new relationship between the figure and its environment, endowing 'empty' space with tangible form.
Medardo Rosso has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Uffizi Galleries, The Uffizi and at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London. Many works by the artist have been sold at auction, including 'Enfant Juif' sold at Sotheby's London 'The Italian Sale' in 2015 for $527,597.
Quotations:
"When I make a portrait, I cannot limit it tothe lines of the head, for that head belongs toa body, it exists ina setting which influences it, it is part of a totality that I cannot suppress. The impression you produce upon me is not thesame if I catchsight of youalone ina gardenor if Isee you in the midst of a group of other people, in a living room or on the street. "
"What I strive most to achieve in art is to make you forget the material. The sculptor must. .. communicate whatever struck his sensibility, so that a person beholding his work may experience in its entirety the emotion felt by the artist while he observed nature. "
Rosso’s friend, Ardengo Soffici, wrote of the artist’s personality: "I had never, in fact, seen anyone with a more tenacious willpower, with equal audacity and inflexible determination who had known how to assert his rights, whatever they were, artistic or material, but always indisputable and inviolable."
Quotes from others about the person
Rosso eschewed heroic beauty. Although he cast in bronze and plaster, his signature medium was wax.
In 1885 Medardo Rosso married Giuditta Pozzi. They had a son, Francesco.
