In an article from 1846, entitled “Why is sculpture boring?”, Charles Baudelaire, always provocative, called this genre “inferior art, condemned to never be able to equal painting and to remain in the category of simple decorative art.” , due to its impotence to represent the atmospheric environment, the movement, the light and the life of the figures.” At that time the expression “hold the vat for me” did not yet exist, but decades later, in any case, an Italian sculptor picked up the gauntlet, after carefully reading these words of the enfant terrible of French literature.
Medardo Rosso (Turin, 1858-Milan, 1928) dedicated his career to making sculpture a means to capture the atmosphere, the fleeting impression, the effect of light on the perception of a changing and perishable matter. For him, a figure could not and should not be dissociated from its context. His ambitious efforts to sculpt the immaterial turned the Turin artist into a rare bird, a misunderstood character in a Paris that rewarded academics and idolized Auguste Rodin.
The rivalry between the two, imperceptible to the general public, but followed with great interest by critics, led him to exhibit his works alongside photographs of Rodin's sculptures, so that visitors could compare their different approaches. In the end, both masters would end up exchanging ideas, throughout a fruitful friendship that would end, however, with a bitter dispute, since Rodin never recognized the obvious influence of Rosso in his sculpture Homage to Balzac.
Now, until January 7, 2024, Fundación MAPFRE dedicates its space in Madrid's Sala Recoletos to the exhibition "Medardo Rosso. Pioneer of modern sculpture." Through a large selection of sculptures, drawings and photographs, the work of a man truly ahead of his time is revealed to us.
Rosso abhorred neoclassical monuments with their pedestals and renounced any recreation of the Renaissance. Like other avant-garde artists, he considered that nineteenth-century art had so abused conventions that everyone, artists, spectators and critics, had lost the true ability to look.
He mockingly called the busts of illustrious people, so popular in the 19th century, “paperweights.” A great reader of Émile Zola, with whom he became friends in Paris, he was not inspired by great men, but rather by humble, everyday, even helpless characters: the anonymous travelers on a bus, the concierge of a nearby block, a sick man. in a hospital, a child receiving charity in a soup kitchen.
These are the busts and statues that he models, without the need for ornamental bases, without resorting to commemorative plaques. When she displays them, she places them on simple stools, carefully calculating the height at which each piece should be viewed.
Even when he accepts a commission or portrays a friend, the sitter's features are diluted in the fragility of time and memory. Far from reaffirming his importance with solid and clear volumes, Medardo Rosso's figures show us his very human vulnerability. Therefore, instead of sanding or retouching the accidental imperfections that arise when working with bronze or plaster, the Italian incorporates them into the work. The real interests him much more than the ideal.
It is light, more than matter, that obsesses this atypical nineteenth-century sculptor. Light understood as a changing element, inaccessible to touch, that modifies our perception of the figures by influencing them. Think of Monet painting, over and over again, the Rouen Cathedral at different times of the day, capturing the various shades of sun and shadows. In his stage of maturity, Medardo Rosso pursues the same luminous ghost.
In this way, he versions again and again the same sculptural motifs in wax, plaster and bronze with subtle variations, changing patinas, incorporating alloys, using rust or alternating smooth and rough surfaces to experiment with the effects of light on faces and bodies. . He attempts to capture, thus, what happens “when spontaneously looking at any object in nature,” since, by doing so, “we experience a change in tonality.”
Rosso does not believe in the existence of the immutable, but rather, for him, each person and each object constantly changes, both by their own movement and by subtle alterations in the atmosphere that surrounds them. For this reason, he considers that, in art, it is only possible to capture an impression. He almost always does it from memory, evoking the sensations of a scene seen on the street or already worked on countless times in the studio.
To do this, he uses a new technology, photography, a passion he shares with his friend Edgar Degas. What is more evanescent than photography, especially for an artist obsessed with capturing the transience of an instant?
In addition to time, he is concerned with space, in a profoundly innovative way for his time. Classical sculptures seem to exist in a vacuum; those of Medardo Rosso, on the other hand, emerge from their environment or disintegrate in it, merging with the air and the matter that surrounds them.
We don't always observe things precisely; In fact, we often see them out of the corner of our eye, passing quickly before our sight, or we remember them with blurred edges, stripped of their accessory details. However, it is not the optical effects themselves that fascinate Rosso, but the emotions that these effects provoke.
Perhaps for this reason, Medardo Rosso never allowed his name to be associated with Impressionism. He denied time and again that he belonged to this movement, despite his friendship with Degas and his repeated participation in the Salon des Indépendants, an event that counted neo-impressionists such as Seurat or Signac among its founders. Rosso's impressions are not mere optical illusions. They are, rather, attempts to capture the subjective emotion that accompanies our ephemeral perception of reality.
After living his golden years in a Paris that half understood him, away from an unhappy marriage and a son with whom he could barely keep in touch, Medardo returned to Milan in 1920. There, his creative radicalism would finally find unconditional admirers. . A new generation of artists, led by the then deceased Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Ardengo Soffici, among others, had picked up some of his postulates in Italian Futurism.
His relationship with this group, linked to fascism, was ambiguous. In 1926, an entire room was reserved for him in the first major exhibition dedicated to the novecento. But Rosso's work was too personal to fit into programmatic manifestos. The artist had already expressed reservations about it in 1912, upon receiving a copy of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, although he collaborated with the Futurists occasionally.
In any case, the absence of unconditional disciples never prevented Medardo Rosso from being aware of his own worth. “I was young when I understood that nothing is material in space, because everything is space and, therefore, everything is relative,” he stated in one of his late interviews. “I didn't need Professor Einstein's philosophy.”
