Moment's Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture 9780520356139

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A MOMENT’S MONUMENT

publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the millard meiss publication fund of the college art association.

A MOMENT’S MONUMENT Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture Sharon Hecker

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by Sharon Hecker Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hecker, Sharon, author. Title: A moment's monument : Medardo Rosso and the international origins of modern sculpture / Sharon Hecker. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016059315 (print) | lccn 2017003611 (ebook) | isbn 9780520294486 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520294493 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520967564 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Rosso, Medardo, 1858-1928—Criticism and interpretation. | Sculpture, Italian—19th century. | Sculpture, Italian—20th century. Classification: lcc nb623.r8 h43 2017 (print) | lcc nb623.r8 (ebook) | ddc 730.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059315 Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I dedicate this book to my family, Giuseppe, Davide, Cecilia, and Ariel, to my parents, Ronald and Judith, and to my sister, Tamar

Not all who wander are lost. —J. R. R. TOLKIEN

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 Laying the Foundations for an Antiheroic Approach to Modern Sculpture 7 Monuments without Idols 31 “Impressionist Sculptor”? The Impossibility of Categorizing Rosso 61 Internationalism and Experimentation 87 The Artist’s Experience of Migration 107 The Shifting Viewpoint of the Outsider 123 Seeing and Being Seen: Reimagining the Encounter Among Artist, Artwork, and the Public 145 On the Move: The Quest for International Recognition 179 •

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Afterword 217 Notes 219 Bibliography 303 Index 323 •

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PLATE SECTION FOLLOWS PAGE 86

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Author’s note: Rosso frequently changed titles--in Italian and French--for his sculptures, and he also gave different dates for the same work. In addition, his son Francesco retitled many of his father’s works posthumously. In this book, for Rosso’s sculptural subjects I have indicated the most commonly used titles and the dates that are most plausible based on my archival research. Detailed discussions of each sculpture’s titles and dates can be found in the chapters and footnotes. Some dates are a range of inclusive years that the work was begun and finished, others are a range of dates that Rosso himself provided for the same work during his lifetime, while still others are approximate dates when the precise date of creation cannot be ascertained. Neither historical nor technical research allows us to know exactly when each cast was made. Therefore, casting dates are not given in this book. I have also not specified mediums or dimensions, nor have I given specific locations, since many casts of each subject exist in different materials and it is not always possible to discern the specific cast from black-and-white photographs. I have indicated the name of the photographer only when known. Wherever possible, I have utilized Rosso’s own photographs of his sculptures, as he would have preferred. These photographs are difficult to date with precision and therefore the dates of most of the photographs have not been included unless there is compelling evidence otherwise.

FIGURES

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Medardo Rosso’s studio, 1883

2.

Virgilio Ripari, Gli amanti, 1882

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Mosè Bianchi, Amore allo studio. Una buona fumata, 1870

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Gustave Courbet, Portrait de l’auteur, dit L’homme à la pipe, 1846

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Medardo Rosso, self-portrait, n.d. but probably ca. 1882

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Medardo Rosso, Il Birichino [Gavroche, Dopo una scappata], 1882

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Émile Bayard, Gavroche, illustration from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

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Egidio Pozzi, Monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1882

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Vincenzo Vela, Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon I, 1866

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Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino et ses fils, 1865–67

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Victor Pannelier, Dante (The Thinker) in Auguste Rodin’s studio, 1880–81

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Medardo Rosso, Fine [La Ruffiana], 1883

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Medardo Rosso, Il Vecchio, 1883

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Medardo Rosso, Cantante a spasso, ca. 1882–83

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Édouard Manet, Le Chiffonnier, ca. 1865–70

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Medardo Rosso, La Riconoscenza (bronze), 1883

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Medardo Rosso, La Riconoscenza (plaster maquette), 1883

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Giovanni Segantini, Pei nostri morti, 1881–82

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Jules Dalou, Funerary Monument of Victor Noir, 1870–91

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Auguste Préault, Désespoir, 1835

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Edgar Degas, Le Tub, 1889

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Antonio Canova, Funerary Monument to Archduchess Maria Cristina of Austria, 1798–1805 • 51

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Antoine Étex, Funerary Monument to François-Vincent Raspail, 1854

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Gustave Courbet, Un Enterrement à Ornans, 1849–50

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Medardo Rosso, Amor materno, 1882

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Ettore Ximenes, Monumento a Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1889–94

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Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982

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Honoré Daumier, Intérieur d’omnibus. Entre un homme ivre et un Charcutier, 1841 • 69

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Medardo Rosso, Carne altrui next to Rosso’s reproduction of Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna • 74

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Auguste Rodin, Les Bourgeois de Calais, 1884–89

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George Segal, Bus Riders, 1962

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Honoré Daumier, Intérieur d’un omnibus, 1864

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Honoré Daumier, “Le travail et la vie d’une gardienne d’immeuble,” 1841 • 77

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Medardo Rosso, Fine [La Ruffiana], 1883

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Medardo Rosso, Aetas aurea, late 1885–86

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Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis (detail of urn), 1888–89 • 96

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Ernesto Mancastroppa, portrait of Filippo Filippi, 1887

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Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi (detail of “PERCHE”), 1889 • 100

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Primo Giudici, Funerary Monument to Domenico Vismara, 1887

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Auguste Rodin, Iris, messagère des dieux, ca. 1895

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Henry Moore, Suckling Child, 1927

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Henry Moore, Suckling Child (side view), 1927

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Henry Moore, Suckling Child, 1930

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Medardo Rosso, Après la visite [Malato all’ospedale], 1889

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Medardo Rosso, Après la visite [Malato all’ospedale], 1889

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Gustave Courbet, L’Homme blessé, ca. 1844–54

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Medardo Rosso, Bambina che ride, 1889

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Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo, ca. 1892–94

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Medardo Rosso, Enfant malade, 1893–95

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Fernand Pelez, Un martyr—Le Marchand de violettes, 1885

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Medardo Rosso, Enfant à la bouchée de pain, ca. 1892–97

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Medardo Rosso, Rieuse (known as Petite rieuse), early 1890s

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Postcard of “Toledo,” Casino de Paris, n.d.

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Édouard Manet, Portrait de Berthe Morisot à la Voilette, 1872

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Medardo Rosso, Madame Noblet, ca. 1897–98

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Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, ca. 1896–99

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Georges Seurat, Night Stroll, 1887–88

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Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, 1877

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Medardo Rosso, Bookmaker, ca. 1893–95

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Honoré Daumier, Ratapoil, 1851

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Edgar Degas, Ludovic Halévy et Albert Boulanger-Cavé dans les coulisses de l’Opera, 1879 • 164

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Medardo Rosso, Untitled, n.d.

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Alberto Giacometti, La Place, 1947–48

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George Segal, Street Crossing, 1992

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Honoré Daumier, Les emigrants, ca. late 1840s–1850s

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Medardo Rosso, self-portrait, ca. 1899

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Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, ca. 1896–99

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Medardo Rosso, self-portrait with Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, ca. 1896–99 • 174

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Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde, 1875

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Medardo Rosso, Une conversation, ca. 1892–99

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Medardo Rosso’s works in Etha Fles’s home, possibly 1913

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Medardo Rosso, Head of Vitellius, ca. 1894

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Medardo Rosso, installation at Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904

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Medardo Rosso, installation at Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904

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Medardo Rosso, installation at Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904

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Medardo Rosso, Enfant à la bouchée de pain installed in the Salle Cézanne, Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904 • 202

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Medardo Rosso, Memnon, ca. 1902

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Constantin Brancusi, Le Sommeil, 1908

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Constantin Brancusi, Le Supplice, 1906–7

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Medardo Rosso, photomontage of the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904

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Medardo Rosso, Ecce puer, 1906

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P L AT E S ( F O L L O W P A G E 8 6 )

1. Medardo Rosso, El Locch, 1882, with Il Birichino [Gavroche], 1882. 2. Medardo Rosso, Bersagliere [In esplorazione], ca. 1882. 3. Medardo Rosso, Se la fusse grappa! [Lo Scaccino], 1883. 4. Medardo Rosso, Carne altrui, 1883–84. 5. Medardo Rosso, La Portinaia, 1883–84. 6. Medardo Rosso, Impression d’omnibus, 1884–87. 7. Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis, 1888–89. 8. Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi, 1889. 9. Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis (detail of Marianne), 1888–89. 10. Medardo Rosso, model for Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi, 1888. 11. Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi (detail of Filippi’s name), 1888.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

12. Medardo Rosso, Enfant au sein, late 1889–90. 13. Medardo Rosso, Enfant au sein, late 1889–90. 14. Medardo Rosso, Enfant au sein, late 1889–90. 15. Medardo Rosso, Grande rieuse, 1891–92. 16. Medardo Rosso, Yvette Guilbert, 1895. 17. Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette, ca. 1892–97. 18. Medardo Rosso, Madame X, ca. 1896. 19. Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, ca. 1896–99. 20. Medardo Rosso, Uomo che legge, ca. 1894–95.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was first introduced to Medardo Rosso’s works on a summer day in 1992, when the artist Luciano Fabro, his daughter Silvia, and his biographer Jole De Sanna drove me up to the Museo Medardo Rosso in Barzio to see Rosso’s works. Fabro claimed that Rosso had been one of the artists of the past who had most inspired him, and that in order to understand his art, I had to first understand Rosso. That fortuitous encounter opened the door for me to a twenty-two-year engagement with Rosso’s art that forms the basis of this book. I shall always be grateful to Luciano, Silvia, and Jole for that seminal moment. There are many people to thank. My professors, now colleagues, have shaped my thinking and writing on Rosso for many years. I would like to thank Jacques de Caso, my mentor, whose unstinting support, intellectual acumen, warmth, and friendship have meant so much to me. From the start, he believed in the potential of Rosso as a subject of study, and he has been an integral part of every stage of this book’s unfolding. He instilled in me a lifelong passion for nineteenth-century sculpture that has been part of my work at every step. Over the years, Svetlana Alpers has provided insightful and clearminded guidance. Her emotional depth, intelligence, and especially her ability to understand my vision and help me to realize it at countless stages in my career have all been invaluable. While I was an undergraduate at Yale many decades ago, Barbara Spackman taught me the Italian language and encouraged me to spend my junior year abroad in Italy. Her intellectual investment in nineteenth-century Italian literature later found a place in my book. The ideas and teaching of Michael Baxandall have formed a methodological basis for the approach I have taken toward Rosso. I am also grateful to Alex Potts,

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not only for his encouragement and enthusiasm but also for his innovative ideas on the development of modern sculpture from a contemporary perspective. Anne M. Wagner commented on my research in its early form and posed pointed questions that I continued to ask about Rosso for two more decades. Her work on Henry Moore’s sculpture has also been instrumental to my thinking in this book. I would like to thank Danila Marsure, great-great granddaughter of Medardo Rosso, who kindly opened the family archives for me on countless occasions since I first came to Barzio as a young graduate student in 1992. We ended up living on the same block in Milan, and we have since collaborated fruitfully on numerous exhibitions and endeavors to promote Rosso around the world. The offspring of people who had been close to Rosso have been enormously helpful in providing documentation, especially Marco Vianello Chiodo and Giuliano Prezzolini. Paolo Thea repeatedly smoothed my access to the labyrinthine Brera Academy archives and located hard-to-find documents for me. My gratitude also extends to Alessandro de Stefani, whose depth of knowledge on Rosso has been of incalculable help, as has his encouragement from the beginning of research until the final draft. Adriana Faggi has been a most insightful commenter on significant portions of this monograph. I wish to thank her deeply for refining my understanding of Italian art, politics, and history. I also thank Giovanna Ginex, expert on the Milanese ottocento, who has provided extensive information, guidance, and advice on the art and cultural scene of the period. Giovanna is an enduring model for me in her exemplary ottocento scholarship, as is Vivien Greene through the sophisticated exhibitions she has curated in our field. Arianna Arisi Rota has answered my endless questions about nineteenth-century Italy’s troubled times postunification and its complex relationship to France. Her invitation to present parts of this book at the Università di Pavia’s Department of Political and Social Science provided me with much food for thought. Fred Licht has also been a supportive presence from the start of my academic career, and his encouragement has meant a great deal to me. In Paris, Anne Pingeot assisted with the early Paris leg of my research and has generously and enthusiastically commented on my articles. François Blanchetière, curator of the Musée Rodin, and most especially Elisabeth Lebon have been wonderfully helpful in tracking down difficult-to-find French sources. In Milan and around the world, Vita Lerner, Samantha Gainsborough, Angelica Litta, Eleni Tsopotou, Torsten Edstam, Natalia Voynova, Alexandra Skliris, Margo Acker, Cecilia Merli, and Andrea Pozzetta have all tirelessly and continuously helped me unravel difficult research and editorial issues, as did Catherine Bindman and Felice Maranz. I extend special thanks to Annette Ehrlich for her editorial expertise, and to Judith Hecker, who read the manuscript from start to finish with the critical eye of a scholar and was instrumental in bringing it to light. Thanks also go to Austin Nevin, Francesca Bewer, Henry Lie, Lluisa Sarries i Zgonc, Federico Carò, Ronald Street, Derek Pullen, the late Sergio Angelucci, and Harry Cooper for sharing my interest in Rosso’s experimentation and by participating in research and

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

exhibitions about his technique. Our collaborative study days on Rosso were among the most exciting aspects of this study and continue to inspire me. Warm thanks to the many Rosso lovers, collectors, and scholars—Emily Pulitzer, Peter Freeman, Luciano Caramel, Pieter Coray, Doug Walla, Dieter Schwarz, Amedeo Porro, Laura Mattioli, Heather Ewing, Sarah Alexander, Paola Mola, and Fabio Vittucci, as well as collectors who wish to remain anonymous—for sharing their passion for this artist and helping to make him known to the world. At the University of California Press, first Karen Levine and then Nadine Little, Jack Young, and Francisco Reinking have been wonderful advisors and editors. I would also like to thank the institutions and organizations that have allowed me to present portions of this book. The feedback I received from audiences and colleagues has enriched my understanding immensely: New York University’s Villa La Pietra, the American University of Rome, ESNA’s Conference at the Rijksmuseum, the Association of Art Historians (UK), the University of Ghent, the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, the Midwest Art History Society, Radboud University at Nijmegen, Tate Britain (ICE Network), Oxford University, the Getty Research Institute, Harvard Art Museums, and the College Art Association. I am particularly grateful to the institutions that funded my research for this book. Preliminary research was conducted thanks to a Letters and Sciences Provost’s Fund Travel Grant, a Dean’s Research Assistant Fellowship, a Humanities Graduate Research Grant, and a Mellon Fellowship, all through the University of California at Berkeley. Extended research was concluded on a Fulbright Scholarship to Italy, graciously extended, a Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship and Regents Fellowship in France, as well as a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. Finally, my greatest thanks go to my family for understanding the importance of achieving this personal and professional milestone: my children, Davide, Cecilia, and Ariel; my parents; my sister, Tamar; and my sister-in-law, Clotilde Calabi, partner in intellectual spelunking. They have all lived through the ups and downs of the book and deserve special thanks for their moral support. Most especially, to my husband Giuseppe Calabi, who has provided unstinting encouragement for this endeavor. My love and gratitude go to him for his daily patience, attention, warmth, and levelheadedness, even in the most difficult and frustrating moments of the book’s gestation.

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Introduction

INTRODUCTION Medardo Rosso: An Origin Story

The homeless alien, bound by no conscious sympathy to his native land, and knowing only the most repellent aspects of Paris, was hardened against all vague compromise. JULIUS MEIER-GRAEFE1

Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) is one of the most original, innovative figures in the history of modern sculpture. In his time, he was hailed as both the founder of Impressionist sculpture and the forefather of Futurism. Auguste Rodin, Umberto Boccioni, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore admired his revolutionary ideas. Rosso continues to inspire contemporary artists, and his sculptures reside in more than one hundred museums and collections around the world. Yet to date, there has been no historically substantiated, critical account of Rosso’s groundbreaking contribution to modern and contemporary sculpture. Rosso aimed to do nothing less than single-handedly modernize the medium of sculpture. He boldly defied existing traditions of iconography, style, and meaning in monumental sculpture, rejecting the medium’s isolated, hierarchical, and atemporal status. Instead, he made antiheroic heads and small figures that captured fleeting glimpses of figures from la vie moderne caught in transitory states. Through his impressionistic handling and casting techniques—and in an even more extreme manner than Auguste Rodin—Rosso refused the smooth, finished surfaces of nineteenth-century sculpture. His tired, sick, meditative, laughing, or melancholy subjects, especially in wax, his signature medium, seem to be barely emerging or about to disappear. In his unusual experiments with photography and drawing, he further attempted to dematerialize the sculptural object in unprecedented ways. Rosso’s internationalist stance was equally revolutionary. At a time when art was defined by national confines, he left Italy for France in 1889 and refused allegiance to a

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single culture or artistic heritage. He declared himself a citizen of the world and maker of art without national limits, privileging the personal and emotional over state and sovereign. He also rendered his techniques itinerant. Working on a small scale and using relatively inexpensive materials, he emancipated his sculptural practice from the costs associated with large-scale national commissions, but without sacrificing big ideas. He even cast his own works, endeavoring to liberate the complex process of making sculpture from dependence on commercial foundries. Rosso thereby rendered important sculpture—the heaviest, most static medium—conveniently portable. In his art, he experimented with forms of mobility hitherto reserved for modern painting. Further, he fashioned himself as one of the rare founder-craftspeople working at the height of a new period of industrialization and increased mechanical reproduction of sculpture, at once relying upon and refusing modern techniques. This book is the first scholarly monograph to consider the contemporary and international significance of this important, yet neglected, artist. In it, I apply to the subject concepts of “imagined communities,” cultural migration, and transnationalism drawn from the disciplines of history, philosophy, economics, and the social sciences. I show that nineteenth-century art, defined by the birth of the nation-state and nationalism, was teeming with transnational forms of circulation. Rosso took advantage of new international networks being created by so-called “cultural mediators” (middlemen—art dealers, critics and literary figures—who regularly traveled abroad), including exhibition opportunities and art markets throughout Europe. In doing so, he presaged the nomadic, itinerant status of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture. In this book, I offer a methodological challenge to the grand narrative of the nineteenth century. I reframe a single artist within a cultural context characterized by transnational exchange and new forms of mobility. The book transports nineteenth-century art history beyond the limited frameworks of a single national style and school or national artistic movement, as well as nationally circumscribed social, cultural, political, and historical circumstances. It provides an original, transnational way to comprehend Rosso and is intended as a model for future studies of pan-European modern art. The book is divided into eight chapters, which are roughly chronological. In chapter 1, I contextualize 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. I utilize historical information and original records to shed light on unexplored aspects of Rosso’s early political experience, his relationship with the Italian culture of

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his time, and his desire to come into contact with less traditional modes of making sculpture by looking abroad. In examining his first works, such as L’Allucinato (The Hallucinator, 1881), I suggest connections with ideas about modernity that were emerging in France, especially in the writings of Charles Baudelaire, whose transnational reputation is rarely examined in connection with the birth of modern European art. Rosso’s capacity to gain inspiration from outside national confines by skillfully appropriating foreign ideas helped him to fuse distinctive idioms and ideas creatively and fashion them into original artworks. In chapter 2, I trace four significant rejections that marked 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 (Gratitude, 1883), was removed from the local cemetery for its frank and emotionally explicit portrayal of mourning and death. I contend that Rosso adopted an artistic language of protest to experiment with new forms of expression that rejected the heroic idioms of traditional sculpture. He drew ideas from avant-garde Italian and French painters and sculptors. His original antiheroic monument proposals—most notably one that eliminated the figure of Garibaldi in favor of the people who fought for the country’s unification—expressed far-reaching ideas that aimed to revolutionize the concept of the monument in modern times. Such radical concepts would only become fully evident in the works of twentieth-century artists. In chapter 3, I assess the shift that emerged in 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. At least by 1887, it was being explicitly associated with French Impressionism. I argue for a more nuanced understanding of the categories that have been used to define Rosso. I begin by examining what might have been known in Italy about French Impressionism in the 1880s and assess its reception in the art and literature of the time. I follow with a close analysis of Rosso’s 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. Rosso developed a more robust international orientation and broader anti-academic aims by reconfiguring into sculpture subjects from the Realist legacy of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and especially Honoré Daumier. The transnational legacy of these artists has remained unstudied until now. In the late 1870s and 1880s, French Realist painting experienced a process of aestheticization and depoliticization while remaining essentially French. Rosso’s sculpture underwent a similar process but moved toward an international orientation. Rosso applied ideas from two-dimensional painting to three-dimensional sculpture. He radically dismantled the traditional language of the medium, most notably in Impression

Introduction

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d’omnibus (Impression of an Omnibus, 1884–87), a revolutionary work by which he transformed a lithograph by Daumier into a life-size sculpture to create a “monument” to modern daily life. Chapter 4 examines 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. The bulk of Rosso’s exhibition strategies became oriented outside of Italy. In addition to sending works to the traditional Parisian Salons, Rosso was one of the few Italian sculptors to participate in the nascent Société des Artistes Indépendants exhibitions in Paris. The closing of commercial trade between Italy and France led Rosso, along with other Italian artists, to seek opportunities in other countries by exhibiting at the 1888 Italian Art Exhibition in London, where he first exhibited Aetas aurea (Golden Age, late 1885–86), a sculpture that contained a concentrated emotional component that was foreign to the detached accounts of Realism and canonical Impressionism’s emphasis on optics and color separation. As Rosso broadened his international outlook, he found that his revolutionary experiments were still not acceptable to the Italian public. His two final funerary monuments created in Milan in 1888 and 1889 reflect his friendships with important Italian political and cultural personalities of the time who professed internationalist attitudes. His unorthodox mixture of sculptural and pictorial languages, his formal gestures and political overtures to France, and his introduction of intimate emotional elements into his tributes to these public figures struck many as confusing and problematic. Fierce criticism in Italy led Rosso to relocate in 1889 to Paris, where he felt his work and ideas would receive a more sympathetic hearing. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 critically appraise, from different viewpoints, Rosso’s first decade in Paris as an artist-émigré. In chapter 5, I register the shift in his 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, I examine his hopeful but obstacle-ridden expatriation and his struggle to make avantgarde sculpture in the epoch and city dominated by Rodin. Paris at the fin de siècle offered Rosso new opportunities, such as a vibrant art scene, a burgeoning market for

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serial sculpture, and a network of sophisticated artists, collectors, and critics. At the same time, Rosso’s case reflects his difficult integration into the lively Parisian scene and the foreigner’s unstable position in Boulanger’s France during the Dreyfus years. He had no access to public commissions: a national monument in France made by a foreigner was unimaginable. As a sculptor, Rosso’s long-term ambitions in France were unusual. Unlike painters, sculptors tended to study, work, or exhibit abroad, but their reliance on state patronage discouraged permanent relocation. Rosso found himself caught between French expectations of a performance of Italian national identity (and exhibition of clear signs of a national school) in his art and the beginnings of a pan-European view of modernism. Many foreign painters adapted to the French avant-garde scene by abandoning their national roots, while others cultivated the role of exotic outsiders. Rosso’s cosmopolitanism once again cast him in a unique position. Although he did not fully embrace Paris, neither did he assume Italian stereotypes. In chapter 6, I focus on the sculptures Rosso made during his Parisian years. Rosso created such extraordinarily advanced work as Après la visite (After the Visit, or Malato all’ospedale [Sick Man in the Hospital], 1889), Impression de Boulevard. Femme à la voilette (Impression of a Boulevard, Woman with a Veil, ca. 1892–97), and Madame X (ca. 1896). I contend that he 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. Chapter 7 introduces the modern strategies that 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 (the technique had fallen into disuse in France). Rosso exploited his private studio for sales and held dramatic public performances of himself in the act of casting. He 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. Rosso’s sculptures excited both interest and controversy in erudite French circles. He was not Italian enough to be written off as an outsider, yet not French enough to be considered an insider. The mixed reception from sophisticated Symbolist critics in Paris, such as Camille Mauclair and Charles Morice, suggests a struggle to subsume him under broader French movements or to exclude him by highlighting national differences.

Introduction

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The chapter concludes with an analysis of Rosso’s only life-size sculpture of his Parisian period, entitled Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit (Impression of a Boulevard, Paris at Night, ca. 1896–99). He made this work in the same period that witnessed the unveiling of Rodin’s controversial tribute to Honoré de Balzac (1898). Rodin’s highly abstracted sculpture did not depict the celebrated French writer in a heroic light and was thus rejected in its time, but it later became known as the first modern monument. Although it is impossible to determine which came first, Rosso’s work goes further than Rodin’s by representing three anonymous figures glimpsed from behind as they scurry across a Parisian boulevard at night. The subject Rosso chose was utterly unheroic. In depicting the figures engaged in a hurried walk, he set the traditional static monument in motion. Finally, he introduced a new kind of separation for the viewer, relegated to a space behind the scene. His vision of the mobility of life became a symbol of the modern condition. Chapter 8 follows 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, his 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. The work was described by a critic, following a sonnet by the British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as “a moment’s monument.” This chapter shows how Rosso’s efforts to internationalize his career after 1900 were riddled with tension and ambivalence. The widening of worldwide opportunities for modern sculpture was fraught with challenges and national allegiances. While Rosso’s sculptures fascinated some, they puzzled others. This situation was exacerbated by Rosso’s idiosyncratic personality. Although he wanted to feel welcome everywhere he went, he maintained the same intransigent attitude he had formed early in his career. Refusing to identify with a nationality or as a follower of artistic movements, he complicated the interaction, exchange, compromise, and diplomacy necessary to an artistic career. Even the most enlightened of his cosmopolitan-minded contemporaries found it difficult to integrate Rosso within the nascent pan-European history of modern art. Nonetheless, the radical ways in which he promoted his work abroad, by using the newest advances in photography and unorthodox exhibition strategies, prefigured countless practices that became part of the language of modern art.

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Antiheroic Approach to Modern Sculpture

1 LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR AN ANTIHEROIC APPROACH TO MODERN SCULPTURE

There are no reliable accounts of Medardo Rosso’s early years. Not only did most of his contemporaries ignore or undervalue him, but he also spoke and wrote little and often said contradictory things about himself. This lack of information has given rise to diverse interpretations, even among the numerous experts who have written about his life and work. In this chapter, I utilize historical information and, where possible, original documents to shed light on unexplored aspects of Rosso’s political experience, his relationship with the Italian culture of his time, and his desire to encounter less traditional modes of making sculpture, which he pursued by looking abroad. I contend that Rosso’s wish to expose himself to other cultures became an important catalyst for change and allowed him to discover new artistic territories and interpret them on his own terms. Rosso’s case demonstrates a need and capacity to gain inspiration beyond national confines by skillfully appropriating foreign ideas and creatively transforming them into original artworks, at a fraught moment in Italian history. Rosso grew up in the aftermath of the Risorgimento, the political movement to unify Italy. No scholarly attention appears to have been given to the important influence of this historical context on Rosso’s early years in relation to his later formation as a contentious artist. Although he was too young to have participated in the Risorgimento, he grew up in its aftermath. The decades that followed Italian unification in 1861 were a fragile period, as Italy struggled to define a new identity after centuries of regional divisions and domination by foreign forces. Unfortunately, the long-awaited unification gave way to chaos and disorientation. Like many Italians of his generation, Rosso was dissatisfied by

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the unfulfilled promises of national unity, and he sought to express this dissatisfaction in his early art. In particular, Rosso’s rejection of the tradition of heroic mythmaking in sculpture captured the hopes and disillusionments of the decades after the Risorgimento. Early on he developed solutions that were unique when compared with those of his compatriots.

E A R LY Y E A R S

A problem with respect to writing about Rosso’s early years is that existing biographies provide slim, unsubstantiated, or erroneous information. Municipal records, previously unconsulted, confirm Rosso’s birth in Turin on June 21, 1858, on the eve of unification. He was the second son of thirty-one-year-old Domenico Rosso of Nizza Monferrato, whose occupation was listed only as “R.o.” (meaning “Regio operaio,” an employee for the thenKingdom of Sardinia), and twenty-seven-year-old Luigia Bono (née Notta) of Turin.1 Baptismal records indicate that on June 23, 1858, Father Pietro Milone baptized “Medardo Giovanni Vittorio” in the Turinese parish of San Salvatore (also called San Salvario), with the stationmaster, Giovanni Dellavalle, as godfather, and Luigia, the child’s mother, as godmother.2 Medardo’s older brother, Michele Luigi, had been born six years earlier in Castello d’Annone. Contrary to existing biographies, no records substantiate a third brother in the family.3 In 1861, when Rosso was three years old, Italy achieved unification.4 Turin became the new birthplace of the Regno d’Italia (Kingdom of Italy), and parliament crowned Vittorio Emanuele II the first king of Italy.5 Throughout the 1860s, Turin would be Italy’s first capital and so it and Piedmont—the places of Rosso’s childhood—would be the springboard for the political events that shaped the country’s new national identity.6 Rosso was among the so-called nati troppo tardi (those born too late), a term taken by the historian Roberto Balzani from the novel Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca (The Little Diary of Gian Burrasca, 1908) written by Rosso’s contemporary, Vamba; the term referred to the first generation to grow up after unification who had not lived through the Risorgimento and thus had no memory of the heroes who had fought for the cause.7 Ironically, as it turned out, Rosso’s generation was also born too early for a solution to emerge. As this generation reached adulthood, it became disoriented, for it could not draw direct inspiration from the heroic labors of the preceding one in its struggle to forge a national identity. Rosso’s knowledge of his country’s past would therefore be constructed and filtered through later interpretations of ideas about Italian national identity. This lack of direct experience would influence his artistic outlook as an adult. Biographies note that Rosso’s father, Domenico, worked in the Turin train station, but they miss the significance of this fact. Railroad employees represented one of the most politicized labor categories in post-unification Italy.8 Turin was among the key cities engaged in the difficult creation of the first national railroad system. The railroad itself was the leading industry in the precarious new Italian economy and, as its most consistently productive entity, essential to the country’s progress and modernization.9

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Domenico’s job, first as head railroad inspector in Castello d’Annone (capostazione of the Turin–Genoa line in 1852), and then in 1860 as inspector of accounting for the Turin–Cuneo line, indicates that the artist was raised in a working-class family but not necessarily a poor one, as some biographers claim.10 Until 1865, train employees’ pay and conditions were decent, since this category of workers received special recognition from the government. However, when the many private pre-unification companies were organized into three larger, more powerful entities, railway employee conditions deteriorated. Trainworkers created informal associations like the Società di mutuo soccorso (Mutual Aid Society) that pressed for unionization.11 Violent clashes between the private companies and the workers resulted in severe, quasi-militaristic treatment of railroad employees; this in turn led to strikes, a situation that might have influenced Rosso’s home environment and later his political opinions.12 Rosso’s family must have been affected by the laws proposed in early 1876 by the right-wing government of Marco Minghetti for the nationalization of the railways. Civil protests on both the right and the moderate left toppled the proposed railway nationalization project, as well as the government, ushering in a new left-wing government, which expanded the railway network during a period that also witnessed the growth of unions and workers’ organizations. We do not know whether Rosso’s father was among these unionized workers, but he certainly knew of the difficulties and demands of this category of labor, a fact that could have contributed to Medardo’s later critiques of authority. His feelings about Domenico are encapsulated in a bitter epigragh he composed for his father’s tomb: Domenico Rosso, Mauritian Cavalier, Official of the Crown of Italy, Inspector General of the Mediterranean Railways, Functionary distinguished by intelligence and honesty in the governing Administrations of Northern Italy and Mediterranean, 1849–1887; [he] opposed his unjust superiors and then his career was ruined by them. Time would vindicate him, which with almost as much injustice led the victim to survive the makers of his ruin, 1827–1901.13

Scholars have likewise not considered the influence upon Rosso’s artistic viewpoints of the new Italian educational model that was constructing myths of national unity.14 To increase literacy, elementary schools offered free primary education, as well as socialization into a specific sense of national identity.15 By 1861 Italian was the official language of schools throughout Italy.16 Rosso’s generation was inducted into the mythology of the Risorgimento through a vast range of books and images. Public monuments and new nationalistic rituals and celebrations contributed to this mythology.17 Rosso’s early pedagogical model was the one that would later inspire Edmondo De Amicis’s popular 1886 novel Cuore (Heart), set in Turin and written in the form of a child’s personal diary.18 The book reflected the values and principles by which the new generation was becoming educated, providing a glimpse into the “emotional universe”

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of children like Rosso in the post-Risorgimento decades.19 As the historian Gilles Pécout has noted, from this work a generation of Italian children “gleaned the love of the fatherland, learning all of the new nation’s values: friendship, piety, honesty, passion for one’s work, love for one’s family that naturally translated into love for the home country, which had as its focus the veneration of united Italy’s founding fathers.” 20 Rosso’s earliest projects for national monuments would consitute a rejection of these myths and the rituals connected with them.

CORIO AND MILAN

All biographies of Rosso note that the artist moved to Milan in 1870, but my examination of municipal records reveals that he actually moved there in 1877. This erroneous claim has led scholars to overlook the significance of the Rosso family’s earlier move to Corio, a small town outside Turin. My consultation of the school registers shows that in 1869 Rosso’s family’s was living in Corio, a town in which the Franco-Provençal dialect was spoken. Medardo would have known French from his schooling and through his years growing up in Piedmont; this foreign language would be critical to his later artistic orientation. Nor have biographers adequately described his schooling in the nearby town of Cirié. After elementary school, children were divided into classical higher education (leading to university) and technical schooling; in 1869, at the age of eleven, Rosso took the technical path in a new religious school, the Collegio San Carlo Canavese, attached to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Cirié. Since secondary education was no longer free, Rosso’s enrollment at this school, as confirmed by the school registers, indicates that the family could afford to have him privately educated and that, contrary to accepted opinion, he had an above-average level of education.21 According to a history of the Collegio San Carlo Canavese, students studied French, gymnastics, calligraphy, and music (singing became one of Rosso’s lifelong passions).22 We do not know, however, when Rosso became interested in art or whether he knew the chaplain of the school, Don Giuseppe Latini, a sculptor who made statues of saints. Despite the fact that he did not come from a family of artists or artisans, Rosso’s manual skills were evident early on; in 1873, at the age of fifteen, he received a first-degree honorable mention prize in calligraphy and a first-degree honorable mention in technical drawing.23 On June 5, 1877, Rosso, who was now nineteen, and his family were registered as living on Via Montebello 14 in Milan.24 By December 13, 1877, they had moved again, this time to Corso di Porta Nuova 9, and by September 29, 1880, to Via Montebello 3.25 Milan, at this time, was the center of most of the intellectual and cultural advances being made in Italy. Therefore, although no information has emerged about Rosso’s life in this period, there is reason to believe that his experiences during his first year and a half in Milan would have led him to choose this city as the future site of his beginnings as an artist. However, on November 15, 1878, at the age of twenty, his life there was interrupted

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when he was ordered to register for compulsory military service, another new form of national identity formation.26 Rosso was inducted into the army on January 21, 1879, and on February 5 he entered the Primo genio Compagnia Zappatori (First Corps of Engineers, Sappers Unit).27 Upon induction, Rosso registered his profession as “student”; however, on his personal libretto (registration card) he wrote “sculptor.” 28 Whether or not this choice of career was actually made in the period between call-up and enrollment, the note confirms that he had learned to sculpt somewhere before his military service. Rosso’s later negative recollections of the Italian army, expressed in interviews, suggest that the experience led him to question what he perceived as Italy’s further attempts to impose a false sense of patriotism in its citizens.29 Rosso’s transition to adulthood occurred during the chaos that characterized Italy throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Political parties became ever more fractured, as old and young members could not reach agreement on the direction in which the country should go. The “extreme left” party, founded in 1877 by Felice Cavallotti and Agostino Bertani, stood for radical and popular democracy, while the Partito Operaio Italiano (Italian Workers’ Party), founded in 1882 by Costantino Lazzari and Giuseppe Croce, advocated social justice and promoted collaboration among national associations and workers’ groups. Where the groups agreed was in their opposition to the government. Interestingly, the leaders of both groups claimed to be the heirs of Giuseppe Garibaldi, as did politicians such as Francesco Crispi, who cited his link to the Garibaldean tradition as a means of support for the government. Despite being stationed in the nearby Lombardian town of Pavia, Rosso would have remained in contact with the cultural ferment of Milan, the country’s new “moral capital” and Italy’s most modern city. In spite of the national crisis, the citizens of the Lombard capital generally expressed unprecedented optimism and faith in economic and industrial progress. Indeed, even in times of political chaos, the industrial economy of Milan would be the source of its cultural regeneration throughout the twentieth century. In the early part of the century, it would become the birthplace of Futurism, the movement that glorified speed, progress, and machines. Milan’s progress, however, could not obliterate Italy’s unstable political situation. Torn between an economically advanced north and a backward, underdeveloped, agricultural south, the country remained linguistically and culturally fragmented. There was further division between the nostalgic revolutionaries and the anti-revolutionaries, the patriots and the anti-patriots, the nationalists and the internationalists, the pacifists and the anarchists. Combined with social unrest in Milan that reflected the human costs of modernization, this political ferment would open the door to the nationalist and imperialist doctrines that ultimately drew Italy into World War I. A major cultural consequence of Milan’s technological advances was the rising use of the printing press during the 1880s. The new mechanical methods, as well as a new freedom of the press after years of foreign domination and censorship, propelled a boom

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in journalism.30 The concept followed the French precedent of liberté espoused by such diverse Risorgimento heroes as Giuseppe Mazzini, Garibaldi, Carlo Cattaneo, and even moderate liberals such as Camillo Benso di Cavour.31 New newspapers also promoted Milan’s commercial and industrial strength. As in other European cities, journalists professionalized and diversified through specialized and widely affordable publications. At the same time, obligatory schooling and growing levels of literacy in urban centers raised readership to unprecedented levels among an increasingly educated bourgeoisie. The rapid growth of the press intensified the circulation of ideas. Local newspapers included cultural sections filled with artistic and literary novelties from around Italy, as well as from abroad. The Milanese publishers Emilio Treves and Riccardo Sonzogno attracted writers from across Italy who also translated literature into Italian. New publications were generated, including art books and illustrated guides to foreign exhibitions. Although the results would not be felt until the arrival of the Futurists, the expansion of bourgeois education and readership, as well as cultural coverage in a free press, were among the preconditions for the emergence of a modern audience for art. That Rosso was well aware of the role of journalism in promoting art on a national and international level is shown by the fact that he had a large collection of press clippings from Italy and abroad, and courted friendships with Milanese journalists and foreign correspondents for local newspapers. As suggested by his creative use of typography in the texts, photographs, and photomontages that he used to promote his art, Rosso evinced an artistic interest in journalistic printing. This interest is evident in his early experimental photographic self-portraits and studio photographs, which he would later shoot and develop himself. In some of his early photographs of his works, for example, we can see the names of such Milanese printing presses as the Tipografia Lombardi, the Stabilimento Artistico Vittorio Turati, and Pagliano e Ricordi.32 Indeed, scholars have not noted the fact that his very first known studio photograph, dated 1883, includes his works playfully interspersed with paper marionettes from the teatri di carta (paper theaters) of the Tipografia Lebrun-Boldetti in Milan (fig. 1).33

FIRST EXHIBITIONS

Rosso’s first exhibition in Milan was in an unusual satirical show ironically titled Indisposizione di Belle Arti, mounted in 1881 in response to the massive Esposizione Nazionale dell’Industria e delle Belle Arti that had opened earlier that year.34 The latter was modeled on the universal exhibitions of manufactured and artistic wares that had become popular in European and American capitals since the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. It declared Milan’s position, twenty years after unification, as the country’s economic and artistic center.35 Privately funded due to the national economic crisis, it was an undeniable success. National pride was predicated on the promotion of Italy’s new productivity. At that point, the development of large-scale industrial ventures was still hampered by the lack of electricity (the first electrical power plant was only built in 1883); nonetheless,

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FIG. 1 Medardo Rosso’s studio, 1883. Whereabouts of original photograph unknown.

newspapers espoused nationalistic rhetoric, declaring that it was time for Italy to “become free from foreign countries,” especially in silk and textile production.36 Its organizers envisioned the exhibition as an international promotional opportunity in the context of a pending commercial treaty with France, and the increased efficiency of the national railways.37 While the event showcased primarily Lombardian initiatives, it was intended to project a strong image of modern Italy’s productivity to the world. The Esposizione Nazionale included a national art exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and drawings at the Palazzo del Senato, a scheme designed to link art and industry in the popular mind. The selection committee was composed of professors from the Accademia di Brera, including the sculptors Francesco Barzaghi and Vincenzo Vela, who represented the establishment in Italian sculpture. Many artists exhibited there, but Rosso did not yet have any formal credentials for participating in the official exhibition.38 However, through his connections in the artistic community of Milan, Rosso sent a single small work from Pavia, titled L’Allucinato (The Hallucinator, 1881), to the satirical show that was intended to make fun of the Esposizione Nazionale.39 This was Rosso’s first known exhibited sculpture.40 Sponsored by the anti-academic Milanese avant-garde group La Famiglia Artistica, the Indisposizione mocked the Esposizione Nazionale, with art serving as the vehicle of its

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subversive, carnivalesque antics.41 Since its creation in 1873 by the painter, poet, caricaturist, and journalist Vespasiano Bignami, the Famiglia Artistica had become the sponsor of annual art exhibitions as well as one of the most important associations for avantgarde artists, writers, musicians, and other major intellectual and cultural figures.42 Umberto Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti were known to have frequented the association in 1909–10, and Boccioni’s now-celebrated painting Rissa in Galleria (Brawl in the Gallery, 1910) was first shown at an exhibition held by the Famiglia Artistica. Rosso’s artistic debut at the Indisposizione established his place—by choice or default— at the margins of official art, although, as was customary at the time, he would also later exhibit in academic and regionally sponsored shows. The group’s sophisticated sense of play and irony, conceptually subversive stance, and often whimsical, irreverent gestures would characterize several of his works of the following years. For example, in 1887 he exhibited Se la fusse grappa! (If Only It Were Grappa!, erroneously known as Lo Scaccino [The Sacristan], 1883, plate 3) a drunken man (originally mounted on a real baptismal font—thereby mistaken in the posthumous literature for a portrait of a priest), and Fine (End, also known as La Ruffiana, 1883, see figs. 12, 34), a bust of a laughing old woman attached to a broken piece of door. Such incorporation of found objects was typical of the humorous tactics of the Indisposizione (for example, The Sack of Rome was represented as a sack of coal). Finally, the Famiglia Artistica shaped Rosso’s professional network. One member, the industrialist Pietro Curletti, would commission from Rosso his first funerary sculpture, La Riconoscenza (Gratitude, 1883, see figs. 16, 17).43 In 1888–89 Rosso would sculpt the tomb of another regular, Filippo Filippi, the music critic of the popular moderate daily newspaper La Perseveranza. The catalogue of the Indisposizione describes Rosso’s submission as a “light little head in unbaked clay.” 44 An explanatory text reads: “This unhappy man, after having spit out his lungs and clavicles, stubbornly tries to get some smoke out of a State cigar. O passerby, have pity. The imbecile doesn’t know what he is doing!” 45 Although no image of this work survives, the description suggests a sculptural rendition of a social outcast—a motif familiar in literary works of the time that criticized the myth of Milanese prosperity (promoted by the Esposizione Nazionale) by exposing the dark side of modern industrialization.46 Paolo Valera’s Milano sconosciuta (Unknown Milan, 1880) and the multiauthored Milano e i suoi dintorni (Milan and Its Environs, 1881), were among the best known of these publications.47 Rosso did not present L’Allucinato in a heroic light, nor does the description of the work indicate that the artist incorporated realistic elements suggesting poverty, hunger, begging, or vagrancy, in either a sentimental or a naturalistic vein. Since neither illness nor disease are mentioned in the caption for the sculpture, it is questionable whether, as some scholars claim, Rosso’s figure of L’Allucinato, described as having vomited, was in fact “emaciated” from “lung disease.” 48 This would not make sense in the context of the humorous words in the caption advising passersby to “have pity” but ignore this “imbecile.”

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The title L’Allucinato, in fact, refers to the theme of hallucinations, a subject that cannot be found in Italian ottocento art. For his work, Rosso likely drew inspiration from outside the traditional canon of Italian painting and sculpture, gleaning his idea from Italian literature, specifically the Milanese author Luigi Gualdo’s 1868 novella Allucinazione (Hallucination). Gualdo describes a starving, poverty-stricken musician who, blinded by hallucinations, believes he is creating true art; at the end of the story Gualdo states that the man is “tranquil and serene, although always hallucinating.” 49 Reading Rosso’s work through the lens of Gualdo’s novella about a hallucinator explains Bignami’s humorous description of the work in the catalogue. Indeed, Bignami created a triple entendre, calling the sculpture a “testina leggiera” (light little head); an object made of a light material (clay); and a crazy, light-headed subject with no grounding in reality (allucinato). He was also making a pun on Valera’s Milanese lowlifes, the legera (spelled variously leggera, liggera, and lingera).50 The entertaining catalogue explanation of Rosso’s figure might thus allude to vomiting after the “unhappy” effects of a night of drinking or drugs. Gualdo’s hallucinator was an artist, and the zigaro (cigar) Rosso’s L’Allucinato puffs was considered a defining emblem of Scapigliati artists and writers (literally “disheveled” or “unkempt” ones, a group of anti-conformist artists, writers, and composers dedicated to the rejuvenation of Italian culture through the introduction of foreign influences), described by the politician Cesare Cantù as “dishenchanted twenty-year-olds . . . elegant loafers whose mouths are perfumed with cigars and absinthe.” 51 Thus, Rosso’s L’Allucinato playfully alludes not only to a marginal member of society but also to a bohemian whose artistic predilections are associated with indigence, intoxication, and self-delusion.52 Rather than representing a sad commentary on unemployment or illness, then, Rosso’s figure saw himself as joyfully removed from the realms of work and social interaction. Embodying Rosso’s own artistic persona to some degree, L’Allucinato presented a character endowed with the capacity for visionary artistic experiences; as a subject this “imbecile” is playfully marked by mental, physical, and moral dissolution. Italian authors like Gualdo drew their inspiration from a new language of modernity that was emerging abroad. The literary historian Giovanna Rosa points out that, finding no adequate models in Italy by which to describe the tensions of modern life, writers felt they had to “open themselves up to Europe, look to the authors who were the first to try to react, perhaps by crossing the threshhold of the Unknown and the Arcane, to the contradictions and conflicts of modernity.” 53 Out of this experimental anxiety, which mixed motifs of authentic disheartenment and unrealistic points of revolt, was born the cult that the Scapigliatura writers professed for Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Henri Murger, Alfred de Musset, Jean Paul Richter, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe. Italian authors especially admired unheroic literary characters depicted in such works as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine

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(1829–50), and Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93). These works were avidly read in Italy in the original French, although most were immediately translated into Italian. The case of Gualdo exemplifies this Italian openness to foreign literature. Aristocratic, romantic, and a self-declared anti-realist, Gualdo was the most Francophile author of the 1870s and 1880s, a friend of French writers such as François Coppée, José-Maria de Heredia, Henri Cazalis, Zola, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, and Zacharie Astruc.54 Gualdo also befriended such French artists as the painter and sculptor Ernest Meissonier, Constantin Guys (the Dutch-born artist who was the protagonist of Charles Baudelaire’s essay Le peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life, 1863]), and the female sculptor known as Marcello (Adèle d’Affry, the Duchess Castiglione Colonna), whose obituary Gualdo published in Italy in 1880.55 Gualdo divided his time between Milan and Paris, writing and publishing his novels in French.56 Documents confirm that Rosso knew Gualdo, whom he contacted when he moved to Paris in 1889.57 Gualdo’s book L’Allucinato was chiefly inspired by Baudelaire’s idea of the special kind of hallucinatory reveries brought on by hashish, opium, and wine, as described in his book Les Paradis artificiels (Artificial Paradises, 1860). As the literary historian Daniela Sannino has shown, Gualdo modeled his entire oeuvre on the works of Baudelaire.58 And as the literary historians Paolo Tortonese and Donata Pesenti Campagnoni contend, hallucination as related to artistic creativity was of special interest to French writers such as Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Arthur Rimbaud.59 This creative reworking of French ideas in Italian literature did not occur in Italian art. Rosso thus had to rely on the importation of foreign models to find a modern language for sculpture. Indeed, later in his life he claimed that Baudelaire had been fundamental for the development of his artistic ideas. The art historian Paola Mola rightly intuits that Rosso “hides his vast response to Baudelaire’s work in his art.” 60 However, other scholars have questioned the likelihood that, while in Milan, Rosso knew of Baudelaire’s writings. Giovanni Lista asserts that it was unlikely that the sculptor had read or would even have been interested in Baudelaire’s work. He claims Rosso feigned knowledge of Baudelaire’s work to appear more sophisticated after he moved to Paris in 1889. Lista asserts that no one in the critical and intellectual circles of the Milanese Scapigliatura movement admired the French poet, least of all Rosso’s intellectual “guide,” the naturalist critic Felice Cameroni. Noting that Baudelaire’s seminal book of poetry, Les Fleurs du mal, first published in France in 1857, was not translated into Italian until 1893, Lista contends that Baudelaire’s work was of little interest in Italy. Yet elsewhere in his monograph, Lista writes that “Rosso . . . incarnated the new values of modernity celebrated by Baudelaire and the impressionists.” 61 Studies of the relationship between Italian and French literature demonstrate the falsity of this claim. In fact, Baudelaire was widely read by enlightened Italians in the original French (most cultured Italians, including Rosso, read and spoke French), especially in Milanese circles from 1860 onward. The literary historian Giuseppe Bernardelli asserts that “[Baudelaire’s] critical fortune in Italy [was] immediate, but circumscribed

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geographically to the Lombard area and more specifically Milanese . . . and literarily to the milieu of the Scapigliatura. . . . By 1880 Baudelaire [was] already widely assimilated [in Italy]. . . . Four years later he [was] inserted into the popular series ‘Biblioteca Universale’ published by Sonzogno, a series of widely circulating publications that [were] sent out as postal dossiers for the price of 25 cents each.” 62 Gerolamo Ragusa Moleti’s Italian monograph on the poet appeared in Palermo in 1878, and Baudelaire’s writings were published in translation in Milanese literary journals throughout the 1880s. Baudelaire was widely praised and imitated by Scapigliati writers, especially Emilio Praga and the Turinese Giovanni Camerana. In 1861 the Scapigliatura composer and librettist Arrigo Boito had met Baudelaire in Paris and returned with enthusiastic news of his work. Although, according to the literary historian Pia Falciola, Baudelaire’s work was often read or imitated superficially in Italy, he was regularly cited in the Italian press throughout the 1870s and 1880s as the champion of the bohème and even as the precursor of Realism.63 Given Rosso’s friendship with Milanese intellectuals, he was likely aware of Baudelaire. And although Rosso’s understanding may have been cursory and filtered, his attempt to engage with the French poet’s ideas in his sculpture was entirely original. As an Italian sculptor with serious aspirations to revitalize the medium by devising a formal modern language, Rosso would likely have known of Baudelaire’s criticism of the moribund status of modern sculpture. While Italian sculptors such as Giuseppe Grandi had employed innovative, rough forms of modeling, the broader intellectual debates surrounding the crisis of sculpture and its inability to capture the modern spirit, especially ideas emerging abroad, cannot be found in Italy in this period. The concept that sculpture was incompatible with modernity was central to French avant-garde debates throughout the second half of the century. The philosopher Jacqueline Lichtenstein has shown that sculpture’s death had been proclaimed by such influential figures as Théophile Gautier in Les beaux-Arts en Europe of 1855, Zola in Mon Salon in 1868, and Huysmans in Le Salon de 1879.64 By the 1880s, Baudelaire’s essay on sculpture, “Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse” (Why Sculpture Is Boring), was established among enlightened French artists and critics as a key theoretical work. The essay, published as part of Baudelaire’s series of nineteen essays under the heading Salon of 1846, was originally distributed as a pamphlet but reprinted posthumously in an 1868 volume of his critical essays on art titled Curiosités esthétiques. The Salon of 1846 was considered vital for the development of modern art. It united discussions of the work of French artists with Baudelaire’s ideas about Romanticism, modernity, the role of color, imagination in art, and the relationship between art and politics. Although Baudelaire’s volume was not translated into Italian until 1923, it was available in French and could hardly have been considered by serious artists like Rosso as only an insignificant “paginetta” (small page), as Lista claims.65 All scholars note that by 1883 Rosso would develop a style of flattened, pictorial sculpture and what he termed a “unique point of view” in his works as a challenge to Baudelaire’s regret that sculpture,

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unlike painting, could not control the position of the viewer, thereby diminishing its impact.66 Had Rosso read Baudelaire early on, then he might have gathered ideas about modernity from Baudelaire’s other writings as well, especially the Salon of 1859 essays, republished in the Curiosités esthétiques; these included a piece on photography titled “Le publique moderne et la photographie” (The Modern Public and Photography) and one called “De l’essence du rire” (On the Essence of Laughter), as well as a section praising caricature titled “Quelques caricaturistes français” (Some French Caricaturists) in which Baudelaire singled out Honoré Daumier, who he felt had made of caricature “un art sérieux” (a serious art).67 Rosso might have especially appreciated Baudelaire’s championing of Daumier and caricature, which deeply preoccupied the French avant-garde discourse on art in the 1870s and 1880s. In the catalogue of the Indisposizione, Rosso is humorously described as “Caporale litografico del Genio” (Lithographic Corporal of the Military Engineers). Since the military position of “lithographic corporal” is unknown, the title suggests a Bignami-esque play on Rosso’s military status and an allusion to his interest in lithography. While Rosso did not make lithographs himself as far as we know, we might hypothesize that Bignami had picked up on Rosso’s attention to Daumier’s celebrated lithographic caricatures, a fact that is documented in several sculptures by Rosso of the 1880s (see chapter 3).68 Bignami, a noted caricaturist for such satirical journals as Lo Spirito Folletto, may have shared Rosso’s love for the lithographs of Daumier (and by coincidence or not, a year after the Indisposizione Rosso would open his first atelier at Via Solferino 12, across the street from Bignami’s studio at number 11). Although there seems to be no evidence of interest in Daumier in late-ottocento Italian painting and sculpture, my examination of the local press indicates that Daumier’s name was known in Italy. Rosso could have read reviews in Italian newspapers of the 1878 retrospective of Daumier’s drawings and paintings at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris during the Exposition Universelle, in which Daumier’s sculptures were exhibited for the first time.69 While the catalogue did not include illustrations, Rosso could also have seen Daumier’s caricatures in the French journals to which Milanese Francophiles subscribed or through cheap offprints and reprints of his lithographs in Le Charivari, the controversial illustrated Parisian magazine that published political caricatures and cartoons, and circulated widely in the 1880s. That these journals circulated in Italy in Rosso’s time is confirmed by a painting entitled Gli amanti (The Lovers, 1882, fig. 2) by Virgilio Ripari, an artist who worked in Milan, which shows a young Italian couple reading Le Journal amusant, a French satirical magazine that regularly featured Daumier’s lithographs. Like their fellow writers and poets, Italian sculptors and painters were in no way ignorant of foreign advances in French art and literature.70 Some members of the Milanese intelligentsia were Francophiles. Many educated citizens of the Lombard capital were open to Parisian innovations. In the defining novel of the Scapigliatura, the author Cletto Arrighi described Milan as the “microscopic Paris of Lombardy.” 71 The ideas were

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FIG. 2 Virgilio Ripari, Gli amanti, 1882. Oil on canvas, 96 × 74.5 cm. Private collection.

being imported by different authors in different ways, however, and as literary historians have pointed out, foreign ideas underwent a process of reshaping when they crossed national borders.72 A large part of the Milanese intellectual society with which Rosso had contact followed French literary discourses. Printed materials of all kinds in French circulated widely, and Milanese newspapers with French names like Figaro regularly reviewed French literary publications, among them not only the works of Baudelaire but also Gautier, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Hugo, Hippolyte Taine, and Zola. Along with the previously mentioned author Luigi Gualdo, one of the most notable Francophiles was the journalist Felice Cameroni, who would become Rosso’s close friend, supporter, and mentor. He was known as the most fervent proponent of French culture in Italy, the first Italian translator of Zola, and an admirer of French literary naturalism.73 Cameroni, who worked as a bank functionary, was from a different class than the aristocratic Gualdo and opposed his Romantic outlook. He idolized Paris as the “brain of the world, spine of civilization, aorta

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of modern life.” 74 He had a long-standing friendship with Edmond de Goncourt and a thirty-five-year correspondence with Zola, and he scrupulously read French publications.75 He likely fueled Rosso’s curiosity and fantasies about France as the center of modern art.76 Although scholars have posited Cameroni’s paternal influence, he did not indoctrinate Rosso; the latter drew from a variety of sources for his ideas.77 A more nuanced understanding of Rosso’s theoretical background indicates that, despite a brief period between 1881 and 1883 in which he attempted to sculpt human physiognomy realistically, he would abruptly reorient his style to showcase human emotion and experience in a less realistic style. He maintained a respectful distance from Cameroni’s disdain for the emotional and his Zola-esque attachment to scientific detail, and would articulate this distinction in a letter to Cameroni of 1891, written after he moved to Paris in 1889. He certainly did not share Cameroni’s ambivalence about Baudelaire’s Romanticism.78 Italian visual artists did not demonstrate the same openness as writers with respect to French ideas. Advanced Milanese artists of the time were caught up in naturalismo lombardo (Lombard Naturalism), a movement that traced its roots back to Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio. Even the most enlightened of Rosso’s fellow Scapigliati painters and sculptors rejected French modern artists’ use of art to express political protest against tradition or to celebrate or criticize aspects of modernity. Thus, while Scapigliatiura authors embraced foreign literature (and not only French—this included Charles Dickens, Heinrich Heine, and Edgar Allan Poe as translated by Baudelaire) in a rejection of the kind of native Romanticism found in Alessandro Manzoni’s 1827 epic I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), visual artists remained suspicious of foreign advances in their field. One must differentiate, then, between the literature and the visual art of the period. This aversion to French modern art deeply affected the work being produced by the Scapigliati in the decades from 1860 to 1880. Whereas they adopted innovative, antiacademic techniques using a unique style of chromatic painting to achieve frayed contours and hazy atmospheric effects (while sculptors such as Giuseppe Grandi used a rough modeling style to achieve a similar surface effect), their works remained based on traditional compositions and rarely incorporated modernity’s urban iconography or its tensions. They also maintained a celebratory nationalistic tone long after the festivities had died down. Although Italian writers expressed widespread disillusionment and pessimism about the social and political failures of the Risorgimento, visual artists still tended to promote its battles, triumphs, and heroes. The literary and art historian Kate Flint writes, “Since the country’s unification . . . the rhetoric of successive governments had emphasized the importance of developing identifiable Italian (as opposed to regional) styles within specific cultural practices. . . . The larger art schools taught little other than a tired academicism, and . . . the most popular pictures in exhibitions continued to be idealized genre scenes, portraits and traditionally treated historical and religious subjects.” 79 The phenomenon was not unique to visual artists in Milan. In Tuscany, the Macchiaioli were an established group of painters who elaborated in new ways the French realist

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painters’ habit of painting en plein air; most significantly, they painted in macchie (spots or patches) that anticipated a key aspect of French Impressionism. Many of the Macchiaioli had fought in the Risorgimento and continued to draw on its themes. And while the Macchiaioli artists Egisto Ferroni and Telemaco Signorini admired the French Barbizon School, they were doubtful about extending their ambitions to Gustave Courbet’s brand of realism. Tuscan critics roundly derided Courbet’s ideas as pretentious attempts to make art philosophical or put it in the service of humanitarian, socialist, and democratic ideologies.80 There were numerous reasons for the reluctance of Italian sculptors and painters to import modern ideas from France. One major factor was the conservative nature of the bourgeois audience for art in Italy during this period. While many clients had financial resources, they were unwilling to commit to avant-garde art of any kind. Since the outlook was slim for a local market for such works, Italian artists were generally averse to risk-taking and remained attached to accepted styles and themes. The Accademia di Brera in Milan defined this prevailing conservative taste for art in Lombardy by continuing to train artists in a traditional manner. The academy also presided over the choices made by the juries of its annual salons, and its views influenced the local press. Typically, the academy condemned art that seemed to depart from the traditional Italian qualities of disegno (literally meaning “design” but also implying the use of academic draftsmanship as the essential basis for creating a work of art) and il bello (beauty). The members of the academy and most critics believed that only beauty could “elevate [the viewer] to the sublime” 81 and refused to engage with the iconography of realism that had emerged in France two decades earlier. This approach led artists, as well as critics, to call for a return to Italy’s glorious artistic past, arguing that originality must be rooted in tradition. Continuing foreign demand for originals and copies of ancient and Renaissance Italian artworks reinforced Italy’s lagging acceptance of a modern position. Any Italian artist who wished to make more modern, experimental work would have found no place to exhibit in Italy besides juried regional salons.82 In Milan, for example, until 1891 there was no official exhibition for dissenters comparable to the Salon des Refusés held in Paris in 1863. At that time, the Brera academy inaugurated its first Triennale exhibition that included an Esposizione libera di Belle Arti (Free Exhibition of Art) for works excluded from the academy’s main exhibition (including art with social realist themes by Divisionist painters). All of the factors just described, then, contributed to the conservatism of Italian artists during the 1870s and 1880s.83 Indeed, it is worth noting that such modern Italian painters as Giuseppe De Nittis, Giovanni Boldini, and Federico Zandomeneghi made their careers in Paris rather than in Italy. Furthermore, there was little, if any, modern international painting or sculpture exhibited in Italy in the 1870s and 1880s. Artists and the public would have had no way to encounter modern French artworks directly unless they traveled abroad.84 Foreign modern art was not presented in illustrated Italian books about the history of art. Even

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Luigi Chirtani, the Milanese patriot, painter, and art critic who had studied in Paris with the history painter Thomas Couture—the teacher of Édouard Manet—omitted the section on modern foreign art from his “liberal translation” of André Lefèvre and Louis (Luigi) Viardot’s L’arte attraverso i secoli (Art through the Centuries, 1878) and Le meraviglie delle arti (The Marvels of Art, 1881).85 A final factor that could have contributed to Italian artists’ antipathy toward French art was the troubled political and cultural relationship between Italy and France that reached its peak in the 1880s. The historian Federico Chabod has addressed the Francophobia that prevailed among such venerated radicals of the Risorgimento as Giuseppe Mazzini and influential politicians like Vincenzo Gioberti. In 1859 and into the 1860s, anti-French sentiment was focused on Napoléon III, due to the Armistice of Villafranca. It was strengthened by the “betrayals” of the battle of Mentana, signed by Napoléon behind the backs of his Sardinian allies. Anti-French bias increased in the 1870s and only temporarily abated during the French Commune of 1871.86 In 1882, Italian Prime Minister Agostino Depretis signed the Triple Alliance with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against France. Left-wing politicians favored economic protectionism. In 1887 the authoritarian government of Francesco Crispi levied import taxes on French goods, initiating a bitter commercial war between France and Italy.87 The hesitancy on the part of Italian visual artists to engage with foreign ideas suggests that the country was not ready for modern art in the 1880s. There might be some truth to claims that the absence of an avant-garde in post-Risorgimento Italy was due to the fact that the extraordinary efforts entailed by unification left no intellectual resources or energy for its development. For example, the art historian Anne Pingeot quotes the words of Milanese art critic Mario Mariani, who declared to French art critics in 1935 that “ottocento Italy, occupied with creating its political unity, had other things to do than promote its artists, who, without having the stature of the giants who preceded them, still existed, worked, studied, and fought to make shine in their century some sparks of that which had been the light of the sun.” 88 Yet this still does not explain why Italian authors and poets were actively drawn to foreign innovations while visual artists were not. In small pockets of the artistic community, however, there was evidence of a broader perspective. There were some internationally minded individuals, such as Diego Martelli, the Tuscan art critic who promoted the Impressionists in Italy,89 and the brothers Vittore and Alberto Grubicy de Dragon, Milan-based art dealers who acquired works for sale all over Europe and who single-handedly supported the international career of another outsider, the painter Giovanni Segantini. The latter became deeply interested in the works of Jean-François Millet, moved to Switzerland in the 1880s, and achieved enormous success in Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Finally, there was Medardo Rosso himself. All of these people intuited the possibility of Italian artistic revitalization through engagement with the ideas of art coming from abroad. But their views had little impact on the overall sluggish art scene of the 1880s.90 As Flint notes, only in the 1890s, while artists were still being encouraged to develop a national style,

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did they begin to “simultaneously [look] outside national boundaries to see what could be imported into their own methods of working in order to revive [Italian] painting.” 91 The aforementioned lack of interest in foreign innovations on the part of most Italians is what makes Rosso’s early attention to France unusual and extraordinary for a young avant-garde artist of his time in Italy. It also explains the difficulties he would face at home. He could not rely on support there, due to the lack of progressive artistic educational institutions, alternative exhibition opportunities, or liberal art criticism, despite the noteworthy expansion of art journalism during this period. Nor did he find a substantial network of art dealers and collectors to lend economic sustenance to his work. Rosso’s release from the army came on August 30, 1881, a few months after the Indisposizione, the satirical show at which Rosso exhibited his first (and now lost) sculpture, L’Allucinato. Rosso moved back to Milan and, in 1882, enrolled at the Accademia di Brera. While institutional training was still considered the essential foundation of a sculptor’s career, Rosso’s chosen curriculum suggests that he showed little interest in traditional academic training. He matriculated at the end of the academic year, not as a regular student but rather as an uditore (auditor) or libero frequentatore (free attender). He took only basic drawing courses and, contrary to the belief of previous biographers, no sculpture classes at all.92 He therefore shunned the standard six years of insegnamento artistico (artistic training) that included one of insegnamento preparatorio (preparatory training), three of insegnamento comune (basic training), and two of insegnamento speciale (special training).93 Rosso’s posture prefigured the increasing irrelevance of academic training to an artist’s success that later emerged in the Italy of the 1890s but was already evident in other countries. Rosso may have enrolled primarily in order to participate in the annual Salone in August 1882, which was the only official exhibition arena in Milan. At the exhibition, Rosso showed three well-modeled heads, two in bronzed terra-cotta and one in bronze. A zonzo (Wandering Around) and Dopo una scappata (After a Prank) were popular monello (streetwise adolescent) types. The third was titled In esplorazione (Exploring) and showed a Garibaldian soldier in uniform.94 His sculptures, it should be noted, appear to have received no attention in the Italian press. All three of Rosso’s sculptures depicted humorously anti-conformist figures, perhaps reflecting his distaste for military service. Like L’Allucinato, his subjects were social outcasts. A zonzo, later known as El Locch95 (The Hooligan, plate 1), might have been a subsequent version of L’Allucinato;96 it shows a similarly disheveled young man in contemporary dress with an aloof posture and droopy eyelids, dressed in a loose necktie and wrinkled jacket with a hat shading his brow and a removable pipe hanging from his lip (either a real pipe or the cast of one inserted into the mouth of the sculpture).97 Like L’Allucinato, El Locch emerged from the social commentary of the Scapigliatura, conforming to descriptions of the lôcch, a figure codified by Ludovico Corio in 1878 as belonging to the dregs of Milanese society, a delinquent who had immigrated to Milan from the Lombard countryside.98 Homeless, jobless, without family or religious faith, he was recognizable by his odd, “uncivilized” manner of dress; he became a document of observed

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FIG. 3 Mosè Bianchi, Amore allo studio. Una buona fumata, 1870. Oil on canvas, 203.2 × 152.4 cm. Giovanni Treccani degli Alfieri Collection.

reality and an established social and literary trope. As he had done in L’Allucinato, however, in El Locch Rosso carefully avoided the dramatic overtones or sentimentality characteristic of contemporary Italian literary denouncements of the living conditions of the working classes. The subject of street figures smoking cigars and pipes was entirely unusual in Italian painting and sculpture of the time. In general, as the art historians Alessandra Pino and Paola Martinelli note, until the 1890s, Italian critics disdained subjects that were considered ugly or addressed the social realities of working-class life, noting their hatred of i cenci e la sporcizia (rags and dirtiness).99 Rosso’s streetwise smoker is in stark contrast to the images of aristocratic pipe-smoking boys of other painters, for example the one in Amore allo studio. Una buona fumata (Love of Studying: A Good Smoke, 1870, fig. 3) by the elder academic painter Mosè Bianchi. Pipe and cigar smokers of more modest origins belonged to the repertoire of French Realist art from the 1840s to the 1860s. It is possible that, for El Locch, Rosso could have had in mind a particularly well-known example: Courbet’s Portrait de l’auteur, dit L’homme

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FIG. 4 Gustave Courbet, Portrait de l’auteur, dit L’homme à la pipe, 1846. Oil on canvas, 43 × 37 cm. Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

à la pipe (Portrait of the Author, Known as The Man with the Pipe, 1846, fig. 4). Courbet’s painting was considered a manifesto of the artist as rebel. The art historian Petra tenDoesschate Chu remarks, “Courbet’s pictorial self-definition was guided by . . . exterior perceptions of his personality. His Self-Portrait with Pipe, which he himself would later call ‘the portrait of a fanatic, an ascetic, the portrait of a man who, disillusioned by the nonsense that made up his education, seeks to live by his own principles’ expresses the spirit of defiance and revolt that others had seen as his main characteristic, and that was interpreted by most as Courbet’s greatest strength—a sign of independence and selfconfidence. ”100 In a manner similar to the way Courbet chose to represent himself in his portrait, Rosso expressed the figure’s self-assurance and insolence through the angle of the head, tilted slightly upward and back into space. He reinforced this idea through the pipe he dangled from El Locch’s lips, an idea he also drew from Courbet; however, he reversed the direction of the pipe to hang from the right rather than the left corner of the figure’s

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FIG. 5 Medardo Rosso, self-portrait, n.d. but probably ca. 1882. Professional photograph.

mouth. As if to intensify his sculpture’s effect, Rosso added as well a tipped hat that shades one eye and a loose necktie that cannot be found in the Courbet. In the same year, 1882, Rosso recaptured the same pose, along with the tipped hat, in a photograph of himself (although, notably, Rosso is more elegantly dressed in his photo, and he reverses the position of his sculpture by facing to the left rather than to the right), suggesting a further affinity with his sculpture that recalls Courbet’s self-portrait (fig. 5).101 Given this implied self-identification, one might hypothesize that El Locch also alluded to an image of the late nineteenth-century artist.102 Rosso envisioned El Locch’s social position—somewhere between bourgeois stability and the anarchy of the streets—as close to his own.

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Rosso’s sense of affinity with Courbet, the most internationally recognized symbol of the modern artist as proudly rebellious and free from society’s norms, makes sense. After Courbet’s death in 1877, a process of his canonization began in exhibitions and publications, and continued into the early 1880s (as was the case with Daumier, who died in 1879). And while Italian art of the period does not reflect an interest in Courbet, just as it ignored Daumier, Rosso’s friend Cameroni had called Zola the “Courbet della letteratura” (Courbet of literature).103 Italian socialist publications linked to the workers’ movements, such as La Plebe (Italy’s first socialist newspaper), also referenced the work of these artists. In the first pamphlet published by La Plebe, titled In marcia! (1879), for example, Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani, who supported the formation of the Partito Operaio Italiano (Italian Workers’ Party), mentions Courbet’s realism as a model for socially committed art and praises Daumier’s engagement with social issues.104 Anna Kuliscioff, founder of the Italian Partito Socialista (Socialist Party), also advocated social awareness in art in an 1880 article in the Rivista Internazionale del Socialismo.105 It is reasonable to assume that Rosso would have been familiar with the spirit of social commitment expressed in these publications, even if his early art appears to maintain a measure of distance from the social issues its figures describe.106 A direct connection to another French source is evident in the second work Rosso submitted to the Salone of 1882—Dopo una scappata (After a Prank, 1882, fig. 6). Scholars do not appear to have noticed that this work, later known as Il Birichino and Gavroche, is a nearly identical sculptural version of Émile Bayard’s illustration of the character of Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s wildly popular novel Les Misérables (fig. 7). Bayard’s illustrations were endlessly reproduced in numerous editions of Hugo’s novel since its first edition appeared in 1862, and were widely available in Italy. Hugo’s cheerful and resourceful street urchin, who joined the French revolutionaries on the barricades during the June Rebellion of 1832, could have been of particular interest to the young Rosso and may have spoken to his revolutionary spirit. Hugo’s character was thought to have been inspired by the young boy represented on the barricades in Eugène Delacroix’s celebrated painting La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People, 1830). In 1874 the Louvre acquired Delacroix’s painting, considered to be a manifesto of French Romanticism. Rosso would make a direct reference to the figure of Liberty (known as Marianne) in a funerary monument he made to honor the Mazzinian journalist and politician Vincenzo Brusco Onnis in 1888–89 (see chapter 4). The final work Rosso showed at the Salone of 1882, titled In esplorazione, refers explicitly to the national issues I have been tracing throughout this chapter. It was later titled at various stages Avanguardia, Bersagliere, Tirailleur italien en vedette, and, posthumously, Garibaldino (plate 2). The work’s multiple titles identify the subject as a soldier of the Risorgimento; In esplorazione, Avanguardia, and Bersagliere all refer to sharpshooters, special soldiers sent out in front of the troops as lookouts and who operated at close range. Rosso’s Garibaldian sharpshooter, however, is non-bellicose. It contrasts sharply with typical heroic portraits of bersaglieri during this period, such as those seen in

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FIG. 6 Medardo Rosso, Il Birichino [Gavroche, Dopo una scappata], 1882. Professional photograph, date of photograph uncertain but pre-1887. Raccolte Grafiche e Fotografiche del Castello Sforzesco, Civico Archivio Fotografico, Fondo Vitali, Milan.

paintings by Silvestro Lega, which represented the figures in active poses. Rosso’s marksman wears a blank, unreadable expression that might be interpreted as glum or quietly alert, but that certainly does not depict any warrior-like qualities, such as anger or determination. It does not, therefore, convey the standard mythology of heroism that still prevailed when such Garibaldian subjects were represented. The figure’s lack of military conviction is evident, finally, in the fact that the bersaglieri usually wore black metal helmets adorned with feathers. Rosso’s marksman wears a fez with a pom-pom that the bersaglieri sometimes wore at the military base but never in battle, as it was considered unsafe.107 Rosso’s choice of title might also be read in a nonmilitary vein: as a witty double entendre, by which he alluded to avant-garde art, the term being used to describe the most innovative and forward-looking artistic achievements of the time.

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FIG. 7 Émile Bayard, Gavroche, illustration from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. © PVDE/Bridgeman Images.

Thus, In esplorazione epitomizes the problems of making modern sculpture during this troubled period in Italy. It registers a no-man’s-land: neither fully committed to upholding the glorious memories of the Risorgimento’s battles nor able to imagine any new kind of heroism to replace them. His attempt to find a way out of this no-man’s-land became the catalyst that would soon lead him to design his revolutionary unheroic monuments to one of the Risorgimento’s greatest champions, Giuseppe Garibaldi. That story is told in chapter 2.

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2 MONUMENTS WITHOUT IDOLS

Two stinging professional rejections marked Rosso’s career during the early 1880s. The Italian establishment, composed of juries, academicians, and government officials, refused both of his proposed monuments to Giuseppe Garibaldi—one in 1882 and the other in 1884. In between these two rebuffs, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera expelled him in 1883, and a local cemetery removed his first radical funerary monument, La Riconoscenza. Surprisingly, these rejections, far from intimidating the artist, emboldened him to adopt a language of protest that spurned the heroic idioms of traditional sculpture.

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The death of Garibaldi, Italy’s most charismatic “father figure,” on June 2, 1882, marked a watershed moment in Italy. His passing left many citizens feeling orphaned and anxious; it reinforced feelings of abandonment and betrayal among the many Italians who had grown dissatisfied with the choices made by the new state and the unfulfilled promise of Garibaldi to realize a democratic polity. Members of Rosso’s generation experienced this disappointment most acutely. The creation of a politically unambiguous image of Garibaldi became vital to the mourning process, as suggested by the unprecedented wave of competitions for monuments that swept the country until the century’s end. In the face of uncertainty about Italy’s future, the government attempted to bolster the myth of national strength by encouraging the building of monuments with recognizable, heroic iconography.

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FIG. 8 Egidio Pozzi, Monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1882. Bronze. Piazza Castello, Pavia. Photo: Angelica Litta.

The traditional way in which aspiring sculptors established their careers and reputations took place through the creation of monuments to national heroes. Garibaldi’s death provided Rosso with his first chance to make such a monument. In October 1882, two months after the Salone and while still a student at Brera, he submitted his project for one of the first tributes to Garibaldi in Pavia. He chose to depict Garibaldi as a thinker, titling his project Il genio dell’umanità (The Genius of Humanity).1 As the committee described it, “[Rosso’s work] represents, or, to put it better, should represent, Garibaldi on a rock at the bank of the ocean, [crouched] in the act of concentration, with a strongly pensive expression, meditating on one of his courageous enterprises; the genius of humanity, freeing itself in flight on top of the hero, makes a star shine over his head.” 2 While the members of the commission recognized Rosso’s design as the most innovative of the sixteen proposals, they lamented that “the person of the general does not act strongly pensive but rather seems gloomy, glaring, and oppressed.” 3 The work was likely rejected because it did not conform to what was soon to become the typical physique for sculptures of Garibaldi: a virile, athletic-looking man who is the very image of the heroic warrior. A Garibaldi seated in melancholic reflection was not a hero the commission could embrace. The winner of that competition was the Milanese sculptor Egidio Pozzi, whose monument in Piazza Castello in Pavia reflects these criteria (fig. 8).

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Because Rosso’s revolutionary, unheroic monument ran counter to Italy’s nationbuilding program, it has received little mention, either in studies of Garibaldi or in his commemoration.4 This lacuna is surprising, for historians and art historians generally regret the homogeneity of the existing monuments to Garibaldi as the “Hero of the Two Worlds” (as he was known because of his campaigns in South America and Europe) in which he is typically represented posing valiantly, either standing or on horseback. Scholars note that the conformity of the Garibaldi monuments represents a cultural scenario that was constructed to support an increasingly inflexible official position during a process of national self-legitimization. While this interpretation is undoubtedly at least partially true, what scholars ignore is the climate of intolerance for an avant-garde artist such as Rosso. Surprisingly, Rosso scholars have conducted no primary research concerning the two Garibaldi commissions, probably due to Rosso’s own statements later in life in which he expressed his opposition to monumental sculpture.5 It is easy to see why Rosso’s project was deemed problematic in its time. Rosso’s Il genio dell’umanità was a mature, meditative, seated thinker shown with a classical winged genius flying over his head. Members of the jury sought an image of a powerful, charismatic leader, not a contemplative one.6 Commissions and judges controlled the iconography and ensured that official images of Garibaldi promoted an unambiguous political vision. As the historians Lucy Riall and Ilaria Porciani argue, the government sought to reestablish authority during a period of national crisis and appropriated the virile icon of Garibaldi to consolidate the idea of a “strong” nation.7 Why might Rosso in 1882 have opted against imagining Garibaldi as a man of action? That he had no actual memory of this image (the small Garibaldian soldier he presented at Brera in 1882 reflects his diminished, confused idea of Risorgimento heroism) is only a partial explanation. His pensive Garibaldi denotes the artist’s own sense of disorientation in the post-Risorgimento period. His less stereotypical Garibaldi might also have been intended to recognize those who, like Rosso himself, saw the current political situation in a non-heroic light, outside the moments of action in battle. Instead he emphasized Garibaldi’s wisdom and calm, as well as his love of the sea (his willful exile to the island of Caprera). Indeed, Rosso’s was perhaps the most realistic vision of Garibaldi at the end of his life. The artistic language upon which Rosso drew also reflects his engagement with a long history of ideas in sculpture about how to represent the physicality of a sitting (rather than standing) figure, while providing the viewer with evidence of his rich inner life. Since antiquity, the seated pose in sculpture had been reserved for great thinkers. During the Renaissance, the figure’s mental, spiritual, and emotional stato d’animo (state of mind) gave form to the sculptural body in a play of contrasts between the seated position and the person’s charismatic force; this contrast was established by Michelangelo in his figure of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome (1513–15) and in his tombs for two of the Medici in San Lorenzo in Florence (1520–59). Closer to Rosso’s time, the Swiss Italian sculptor Vincenzo Vela made a daring sculpture entitled Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon I (The Last Days of Napoléon I, fig. 9), created

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FIG.9 Vincenzo Vela, Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon I, 1866. Illustration from Portfolio of Photographs of Famous Cities, Scenes and Paintings (Werner Company, Chicago, ca. 1893). Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY.

in 1866, exhibited at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and sold to the French state for Versailles. Vela’s was the first sculpture to represent the French emperor in a non-victorious pose: here, the sitting position expresses discouragement, melancholy, physical decadence, and imminent demise.8 But Vela’s Napoléon did not attempt to convey an image of inner strength. In imagining a physically vigorous yet seated protagonist, Rosso was also engaging with the most important contemporary French conversations about monumental sculpture. The seated figure had been the central focus of critical and artistic debates there since the 1830s. Antoine Étex’s Cain et ses enfants maudits de Dieu (Cain and His Children Cursed by God, 1832–39), exhibited in plaster at the Paris Salon of 1833 and in marble at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Ugolino et ses fils (Ugolino and His Sons, 1865–67, fig. 10) became models for sculptors striving to represent a Michelangelesque tension between seatedness and lack of emotional repose. Strong bodies now became vehicles for expressing their subjects’ existential dilemmas. But only with Auguste Rodin’s Le Penseur (The Thinker, 1880) did

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FIG. 10 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Ugolino et ses fils, 1865–67. Bronze, 194 × 148 × 119 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

European sculptors resolve the problem of how to represent this tension, anticipating the fixation of the modern era on individual existential anguish. Given the closeness of the dates, it is impossible not to think of Rodin’s Le Penseur on his La Porte de l’Enfer (The Gates of Hell, begun in 1880) when one reads the commission’s description of Rosso’s first Garibaldi monument as showing a man “[crouched] in the act of concentration, with a strongly pensive expression.” 9 This resemblance might simply reflect a coincidence in the art of two innovative European sculptors. On the other hand, it is possible that by 1882 Rosso had seen or read something about Rodin’s La Porte de l’Enfer, begun two years earlier, and have recognized its importance for the history of modern sculpture.

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FIG. 11 Victor Pannelier, Dante (The Thinker) in Auguste Rodin’s studio, 1880–81. Albumen print, 18.3 × 13 cm. © Musée Rodin. Ph. 1020.

Although scholars believed that Le Penseur was unknown until it was first exhibited in Copenhagen in 1888, new evidence indicates otherwise. Artists recorded visits to Rodin’s studio from 1880 onward, describing a work called Dante that matches the description of Le Penseur. Rosso might have heard a verbal description or perhaps seen a reproduction of the clay version of Dante, such as the one in an early studio photograph by Victor Pannelier dated 1880–81 (fig. 11) showing Dante positioned on a scaffold, or another photograph of the same date made by an anonymous photographer (although the history of when and how these photographs circulated has not yet been established).10 As early as June 1881, the Greek stockbroker and collector Constantine Alexander Ionides began negotiations with Rodin for a commission of a small, unpatinated bronze cast of Le Penseur; this confirms that the work was known by 1881, by this title, and was being sold to international collectors.

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Le Penseur also began circulating in written descriptions and visual depictions in international journals. By 1882, William Henley, editor of the illustrated British monthly journal the Magazine of Arts, wrote to Rodin asking for drawings of the La Porte de l’Enfer and Dante / Le Penseur that he might publish; Rodin agreed. More generally, the critic Paul Leroi also announced the work in the French journal L’Art: Revue hebdomadaire illustrée in 1882: “I await impatiently for the execution of this monumental door in bronze in which he would like to incarnate Dante’s poem.” 11 And he exhorted his readers: “souvenez-vous d’Auguste Rodin; il ira loin” (remember Auguste Rodin: he will go far).12 Ultimately, Rosso’s bozzetto of Garibaldi for Pavia is extraordinary and original due to its accurate reflection of the post-Risorgimento situation in Italy. Critics were right to see it as a poorly resolved attempt to tie the seated meditative old man to the new national spirit that was attempting to take flight. One unnamed critic wrote in the report on the commission, “The figure of the genius released in the air does not compose itself harmoniously in a natural and evident connection with the figure of the hero, but rather the two figures seem disjointed from one another.” 13 This discomfort and disjunction symbolized the painful condition of the moment. In the monument, Rosso tried to link the past—in this case the lived experience of Garibaldi—with the dynamic forces shaping the future. The Italianist Enza Del Tedesco has described this disincanto (disillusionment) in a chapter on ottocento literature titled “I vecchi e i giovani: Il secolo volge al termine” (The Old and the Young: The Century Comes to an End). She describes the “exhaustion” of the Risorgimento myth in Italian literature of the period and the “impossibility to share in the present and transmit to the future a common ideal.” 14 The psychologist James Hillman has described such a phenomenon in broader terms: images of disjunction appear at historical moments when there seems to be no obvious or meaningful connection between generations. Old and new are expressed as the polarity between the senex (old man), characterized as saturnine, static, and melancholy, and his opposite, the puer (boy), a dynamic winged figure.15 Rosso’s vision of Garibaldi can be understood as the expression of an entire generation struggling to adapt in a difficult period of transition. As the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote in 1919, in historical epochs of disunity “the falcon cannot hear the falconer,” anarchy and violence explode, and “the center cannot hold.” 16 The design for the Pavia monument was the first rejection Rosso experienced. Instead of being discouraged, however, he used it as an opportunity to express dissent. He and other rejected artists immediately signed a petition, hitherto unnoticed in the Rosso literature, that protested the results of the competition. Mostly from Brera, the artists included the sculptors Renato Peduzzi, Giovanni Spertini, Enrico Braga, and Antonio Soldini (who were Italian Swiss), and Alessandro Martegani, as well as the painters Pacifico Buzio, Giuseppe Barbaglia, Filippo Carcano, and an engineer-painter named Luigi Limoni.17 But the artists’ request for more time to resubmit their proposals was ignored.

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FIG. 12 Medardo Rosso, Fine [La Ruffiana], 1883. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

OTHER NEW WORKS IN 1883

Rosso made other works during this period. In 1883 he made five new sculptures but did not exhibit them at Brera. His continued interest in physiognomic realism, as well as in the theme of laughter, is indicated by Fine (End, also known as La Ruffiana, fig. 12) and Il Vecchio (The Old Man, fig. 13), while his subversive humor is evident in the drunkard, known today as Se la fusse grappa! (If Only It Were Grappa!, erroneously known as Lo Scaccino [The Sacristan], 1883, plate 3).18 He also made small figure groups. One was Gli innamorati sotto il lampione (Lovers under the Lamppost, 1883), which included a miniature replica of a contemporary streetlamp. These new works, however, were not among the four Rosso sent in January 1883 to the Esposizione Nazionale in Rome.19 Three of them were the same subjects as those he sent to the 1882 Salon at Brera (Dopo una scappata, In esplorazione, and A zonzo). In a review of the show in L’Illustrazione italiana, the Milanese critic Luigi Chirtani singled out Dopo una scappata for praise, and a full-page reproduction appeared in an album of works the show published in Milan.20 The fourth work Rosso sent was a small statuette

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FIG. 13 Medardo Rosso, Il Vecchio, 1883.

called Cantante a spasso (Unemployed Singer, ca. 1882–83, fig. 14) that is often considered a self-portrait.21 The art historian Fred Licht has suggested that Cantante a spasso bears a visual and conceptual similarity to the portraits from Édouard Manet’s series of four paintings exhibited under the title Les Philosophes (The Philosophers), especially Le Chiffonnier (The Ragpicker, ca. 1865–70, fig. 15): “Rosso picked up on the Ragpicker’s hat, tilted over one eye, the solemn facial expression, the slumped shoulders, and especially the way the slightly bent legs separate and arch outwards in a bow-shaped fashion. . . . As if to confirm the link with Manet, in an early version of the work Rosso inserted a walking stick that resembled the one used by the Ragpicker.” 22

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FIG. 14 Medardo Rosso, Cantante a spasso, ca. 1882–83.

As with his earlier El Locch (The Hooligan, 1882, plate 1), in which Rosso reversed the position of Gustave Courbet’s pipe, here Rosso reversed and revised Manet’s figure so that the head leans to the right and the stick is in the man’s right hand, pointing upward, as opposed to Manet’s figure, which leans on the stick held in his left hand, with both the body and the stick oriented downward. Manet was known in Milan, and Rosso’s friend Felice Cameroni knew the work of the French artist through the writings of Émile Zola; in 1879 Cameroni had reviewed the Charpentier edition of Zola’s works that included the essays “Mes haines” (My Hatreds) and “Mon salon” (My Salon), dedicated to Paul Cézanne, and Zola’s 1867 pamphlet on Manet’s work “Une nouvelle manière en peinture” (A New Manner of Painting).23 Additionally, in a letter to Zola, Cameroni described Chirtani (the painter and art critic who had praised Rosso’s work and who had studied with Manet’s teacher Thomas Couture in Paris in the 1850s), as an “amico di Manet” (friend of Manet).24 Given Rosso’s friendship with Cameroni and Chirtani’s support of

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FIG. 15 Édouard Manet, Le Chiffonnier, ca. 1865–70. Oil on canvas, 194.9 × 130.8 cm. Norton Simon Foundation.

Rosso’s early career in numerous published reviews, it is unlikely that the sculptor did not know about Manet.25 Rosso’s attention to Manet also might be related to a revelation that he had about the significance of cast shadow for sculpture. Late in his life, Rosso recounted to a journalist that one day, while he was in the Hall of Statues at Brera, he noted that the ancient statues appeared to be no more than “ ‘drôle’ stuff that seemed to me less than a toy, made as if someone wanted to put fleeting clouds on a table.” 26 He looked out the window and noticed a couple passing by on the sidewalk. The figures appeared “flat” to him in relation to the sidewalk, which “rose up and came forward . . . like a tone,” and the couple spread out “in opposition” to the tone of the sidewalk:

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This shadow left behind them made them into something great. I said: I am right and I don’t know why. I leave [the Hall of Statues] and rush to another window, because the more they moved forward, the more this shadow became sacrificed, it had no effect on me. The shadow spoke more about them in that moment with its tone. . . . But if I try to grab that shadow on the ground I can’t; and it is a tone that exists like the others guided by my emotion that gives me all of those tones, so I can’t even grasp the other tones with my hand . . . so I touch and I don’t touch.27

Rosso’s conclusion from this flash of insight, which predates the ideas and language of phenomenology, was that “one cannot divide experience.” 28 It is possible that he became interested in Manet’s use of shadows to create a sense of flatness and a tangible context for his painted figures in the Philosophers series. The art historian Nancy Locke has contended that “the background in the Philosopher [The Ragpicker] is not a simple absence; it is palpable; it is felt; it holds its own next to the figure. It creates an atmosphere.” 29 Following his “revelation,” Rosso transformed the realism of his earlier sculpted physiognomies into what would become his characteristic style: rapid, modulated surfaces with blurred contours, flattened so that the figures seem to be pictorially conceived (with the backs left unsculpted), as if emerging from their environments. He would frequently claim that he sought to give his sculptures the effect of being enveloped in their surroundings, and this attempt to endow sculpture with such pictorial qualities, in which figure and surroundings seem enmeshed, would become one of his most important contributions to modern sculpture.

EXPULSION FROM THE ACADEMY IN 1883

While Rosso continued to show his work in national exhibitions, his rebellion took a new turn in March 1883, when he circulated a petition of protest against academic policy at Brera.30 Specifically he requested that the cardboard models used in the Scuola di Anatomia (anatomy class) be replaced with “real body parts [il vero] as is practiced in the Academies [of Rome and Florence].” 31 In this case, il vero did not mean live models, as has often been claimed in the literature, but rather real body parts. While students in anatomy at the Florentine and Roman art academies drew from prepared cadaver parts, Brera had suspended this practice in 1875, after eight students were infected with smallpox due to a badly prepared corpse. For hygienic reasons, Brera thereafter reverted to the more traditional use of anatomical parts made of cardboard, plaster, and wax. Rosso also petitioned for live models of “man, woman, and children, supported by the Regulations currently being used in Rome and Florence” in the Scuola del Nudo (life drawing class).32 Although Roman, Florentine, and Milanese students had long drawn live models in the Scuola del Nudo, after an introductory period spent copying from casts of famous statues, in Milan and Florence (although not in Rome) these models were typically only men, for the academies assumed that students able to draw the male form would

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automatically be able to draw the female one as well. In addition to a more diverse selection of models, Rosso requested longer posing hours. Depending on funding, artists could draw by observing live models from two to six hours per day in other academies; at Brera the posing time was two hours. Rosso’s subsequent expulsion from the academy on March 29, 1883, has resonated ever since as a battle cry for il vero; the artist became seen as the archetypal rebel, victimized by a conservative and unjust academic system.33 However, the enduring myth of the artist leading a revolt against a moribund academy is, in fact, somewhat overstated. For one thing, Rosso’s demands, as already noted, were unremarkable; by 1882 such requests were common in other Italian academies.34 And while Rosso gathered seventy-nine signatures for his petition, representing around 80 percent of the students of the Scuola di Anatomia and the Scuola del Nudo, the figure represented only about 5 percent of the total number of nearly fifteen hundred students enrolled at the Brera that year.35 Remarkably, one of the signatories was the painter Giovanni Segantini, who would later be an important figure for the Divisionist movement. In addition, and contrary to later assertions, the academy was neither occupied nor closed due to the petition.36 Most importantly, Rosso was not, in fact, expelled for rebellion against the conventional mores of the academy; he was removed because he punched Casimiro Ottone, a student who refused to sign his petition. Brera President Luigi Bisi reported to the Ministry of Education and to the local prefecture that he had expelled Rosso in order to restore a peaceful environment.37 Ironically, considering the emphasis on life drawing in his petition, Rosso’s drawings and sculptures of this period rarely reflect an interest in the representation of the human form. Moreover, had he wanted more time to draw from live models, he could have done so, for the Famiglia Artistica had founded a free Scuola del Nudo in 1874. After his expulsion, Rosso declared himself against the nude in art for which he had just petitioned: “Quale nudo? oibò! fuora i nudi! io non fo nudi” (What nude? Pah! Out with the nudes! I don’t do nudes).38 His rebelliousness, therefore, seems to have been based on defiance of authority more than on purely artistic demands.

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In October 1883, six months after his expulsion from the academy, Rosso received his first commission for a funerary monument from Pietro Curletti, an industrialist, art patron, and member of the Famiglia Artistica, for a fee of seven thousand lire.39 The monument, titled La Riconoscenza (Gratitude), was a revolutionary sculpture that showed a workingclass female figure lying prostrate over an open tomb. The work elicited public protest and was soon removed from the cemetery. Today it survives only in a drawing and two signed photographs showing the plaster modello and the bronze cast (figs. 16, 17). The nineteenth-century cemetery was a modern invention. It reflected a new bourgeois vision of death and mourning and created a boom in funerary sculpture.40 Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale of 1866, along with the five other smaller municipal cemeteries

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FIG. 16 (Top) Medardo Rosso, La Riconoscenza (bronze), 1883. Lost. FIG. 17 (Bottom) Medardo Rosso, La Riconoscenza (plaster maquette), 1883. Lost.

around the city, became popular as places to visit and as status symbols for members of the emerging middle class. A tomb at the Monumentale became as prestigious as owning a box at La Scala or a pew in the Duomo.41 The equally modern notion of the cemetery as outdoor museum encouraged visitors to admire tombs as artistic creations.42 Funerary maquettes received prizes in Brera salons, and popular genre sculptures were reproduced on tombs. Indeed, the Monumentale, with its famedio, a two-tiered hall housing the elaborate tombs of Milanese celebrities, was the most museum-like cemetery in Europe. Typically, sculptors of funerary monuments were subject to less stringent rules than other sculptors, and so their designs for such monuments could be more creative than the designs for public monuments in city squares. For a cemetery, any private citizen could submit a request to build a monument to a committee that consisted of an engineer for technical advice, the director of Brera for artistic consultation, and the cemetery’s inspector. Funerary monuments, nonetheless, remained public statements, subject not only to the tastes and religious and social concerns of individual patrons but also to public opinion. Funerary art also reflected the beginnings of private patronage of modern sculpture in Milan. Specifically, the support of Pietro Curletti, Rosso’s patron, for modern art reveals the nascent relationship between Milan’s growing industrial power and an upwardly mobile middle class that was slowly developing less-traditional collecting habits. Curletti’s father, Angelo, had introduced the chemical production of phosphatic fertilizers into Italian agriculture, for which he received the first Premio Brambilla prize of the Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere in 1870.43 After Angelo’s death in 1881, Pietro inherited his father’s business and became involved in advanced Milanese cultural society; he also became a supporter of the Divisionist painter Emilio Longoni. On September 29, 1883, Pietro requested permission from the authorities to install a bronze sculpture by Rosso called La Riconoscenza, representing a female figure, inside the chapel at the opening of his father’s tomb in the Cimitero del Gentilino, in addition to an opening with a grille on the chapel’s west wall to provide enough light to illuminate the “monumentino.” 44 The fact that Pietro commissioned a work called “Gratitude” for the tomb was intended as a tribute to his father, as well as a public sign of his support for a modern artist. Rosso scholars have dismissed La Riconoscenza and its presumably “traditional structure” as typical Scapigliatura “pathetic verismo” in its descriptive, anecdotal elements.45 But the work is anything but traditional. Rosso must have considered it important beyond its function as a funerary monument, for he attempted unsuccessfully to recover it from Curletti in 1900 for an exhibition at the Vienna Secession.46 The sculpture’s revolutionary nature is evident in the fact that it is difficult to categorize it as a typical Italian funerary monument. A female figure lying face-down on a tomb does not fit within the nineteenth-century funerary convention of the female dolente (mourner). Such a figure is usually found in one of two guises: either as a realistically portrayed family member or as an identifiable allegory of Sorrow and Mourning.47

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Furthermore, the mourner normally was represented in a restrained fashion, which means that her style of dress was modest, her pose was decorous, and her head would be bowed in prayer or raised upward to heaven. With La Riconoscenza Rosso defied such conventions, depicting the mourner as a generic popolana (working-class woman), dressed realistically in a costume that reveals her legs from the calves down. Her feet are bare, her simple sandals cast to one side. Her head is uncovered and her hair is unkempt. She lies flat on her stomach, peering intently into a gaping hole, intended to represent an opening in the ground of the chapel where the tomb would have been located. In creating his figure, Rosso rejected what he likely saw as empty religious and social conventions of mourning.48 He thus subverted the role of the female mourner (usually the deceased’s mother, wife, daughter, or sister), which was to guarantee that the dead lived on in memory, securing the reconstruction of the family ties that formed the emotional cornerstone of nineteenth-century funerary art.49 He also avoided fulfilling her didactic function by refusing to provide the viewer with proper cues on how to mourn. Indeed, since La Riconoscenza is scarcely legible as a symbol of gratitude, for a long time it was known as Ultimo bacio (Last Kiss) or Il bacio sulla tomba (The Kiss on the Tomb). It is no surprise that Rosso’s monument was read as transgressive. As cemetery inspector Carlo Galbiatti recalled in the dossier, it “provoked inscriptions on the outer walls. Obscene and satirical epigrams addressed both to the maker of the work and due to the position of the figure, and evoked in the public a sense of disgust.” 50 The work was removed from the cemetery on October 31, 1883, nine days after it had been installed.51 Attempts by Rosso and Pietro Curletti to have it reinstalled several years later failed.52 Rosso’s monument was replaced in 1905 by a conventional bronze bas-relief by Enrico Butti, depicting a kneeling dolente, her head covered and her hands piously clasped in prayer as she fixes her gaze on the heavens. Such a violent reaction to the sculpture might appear surprising for, in Milan during this period, contemporary paintings of contadine (peasant girls) at tomb sites, like Pei nostri morti (For Our Dead, 1881–82, fig. 18) by the painter Giovanni Segantini, showing a mourning popolana kneeling before a gravesite with a cross on it in a bucolic setting, do not seem to have been subjects of criticism. A comparison suggests that Segantini’s painting was a likely source for Rosso’s sculpture, although as with earlier reversals in his sculptures inspired by the paintings of Courbet and Manet, Rosso reversed the position of the figure, who faces the right edge in Segantini’s painting but faces to the left in Rosso’s sculpture.53 Like Segantini, Rosso dressed his figure realistically in a costume that reveals her legs from the calves down. As with Segantini’s peasant, in Rosso’s sculpture the mourner’s feet are bare and her simple sandals are cast to one side. Rosso appears to have drawn this detail directly from Segantini’s painting, in which the woman has removed her sandals before kneeling to pray. Yet the same gesture possessed entirely different meanings for each artist. In Segantini’s work, the figure’s removal of her sandals functions as a sign of sincere and simple devotion. Indeed, his peasant is comforting; the figure is fully immersed in her pastoral

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FIG. 18 Giovanni Segantini, Pei nostri morti, 1881–82. Oil on canvas, 30 × 67 cm. Private collection, Switzerland.

setting (sheep included), her posture is pious, and she prays for the dead in front of a reassuringly religious icon, evoking a sentimental nostalgia for the primitive simplicity of this spiritual act. Such rural scenes would become typical of Segantini’s later work. The negative reaction that Rosso’s highly realistic sculpture produced suggests that his enterprise was more daring and difficult to comprehend. In an urban setting, the prostrate (rather than kneeling) pose of Rosso’s La Riconoscenza suggested a lack of propriety and modesty. Placed in the conventional and highly codified bourgeois setting of the municipal cemetery, Rosso’s monument of a lower-class figure who had removed her shoes was read as a “genteel figure . . . covered with scanty clothing and shaggy body hair like mother Eve after the sin.” 54 In addition to mixing genres by drawing on a painting for his sculpture, Rosso introduced numerous innovations through La Riconoscenza. First, he incorporated the mundane pictorial detail of the sandals into his composition. In setting the shed zoccoli (clogs) right next to the tomb, Rosso presented evidence of an earlier act—the woman’s removal of her shoes. He thus made the scene appear to unfold horizontally in space and time as if it were a painting, rather than freezing time into a single, eternal “pregnant” moment like a sculpture. The French realist sculptor Jules Dalou included a similar gesture in his funerary monument for the journalist Victor Noir (made in 1870 but not installed in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris until 1891, fig. 19). Since Noir had been murdered by Prince Pierre Bonaparte, the cousin of Emperor Napoléon III, Dalou incorporated Noir’s hat, represented as if it had just dropped from his hand at the moment he was shot. A second modern concept introduced by Rosso was his subversion of stability and closure, those traditional ideals of sculpture. He reworked the stable posture of Segantini’s figure to emphasize the precarious, asymmetrical position of his figure’s limbs. He

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FIG. 19 Jules Dalou, Funerary Monument of Victor Noir, 1870–91. Bronze. Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

also rephrased Segantini’s kneeling mourner, who is supported by her elbows; instead, he shows his figure propped on her left hand, as if she is about to raise herself from the edge of the open grave against which she rests, or lower herself into it. The prostrate pose of Rosso’s La Riconoscenza was read as a lack of composure, decorum, and restraint—she is described in the dossier as “lying face down . . . in a lost position.” 55 Additionally, whereas Segantini’s peasant prays for the dead in front of a religious icon, Rosso’s figure is presented with her arms around a gaping hole that she seems to embrace or into which she seeks to climb, as if she wants to establish direct communication with the dead. He thus precluded any reassuring resolution by presenting the reality of death itself as an inconsolable void. One of the few critics to praise La Riconoscenza, the Italian critic Mario Mariani, who saw the work back in Rosso’s studio in 1885, called it an “artistic find inspired by Zola.” 56 Rosso also harnessed the human body to suggest psychological and emotional anguish and inconsolable grief. The “lost,” prostrate position and the arms encasing her head recall an earlier sculpture that used the body in a similar way: Auguste Préault’s Désespoir (Despair, 1835), rejected for the 1835 Paris Salon but exhibited at the 1863 Salon as Hecube (Hecuba). In his review of the 1835 Salon (which included some of the refusés), the French critic Victor Schoelcher described Désespoir as “a desperate woman who has thrown herself on the tomb of her lover[;] she rolls about with despair[,] her head leaning on the ground is hidden in one of her arms. . . . Her entire body shrivels and writhes in pain.” 57

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FIG. 20 Auguste Préault, Désespoir, 1835. Plaster. Photo: Charles Nègre.

Rosso may have known that Préault’s Désespoir was one of the few sculptures that Charles Baudelaire had praised for its modernity in his essay “Le Salon de 1859.” Baudelaire reported that he had seen, in Préault’s studio, a “figure of Mourning . . . pros­ trate, disheveled, drowned in the flood of her tears, crushing the powdered remains of some famous man beneath her heavy desolation.” 58 Visual and textual echoes of this rejected work—key to the history of modern sculpture—continued to circulate in the press. The caricaturist Cham published a disparaging caricature of it at the Salon of 1863 in Le Charivari, and the art historian Ernest Chesneau recalled the sculpture unfavo­ rably in his essay on Préault in 1864.59 The sculpture also survives in a photograph of 1858–59 by Charles Nègre (fig. 20), seen from the side with the head oriented toward the left, not unlike Rosso’s photograph of La Riconoscenza, although there is, as yet, no his­ tory of the circulation of the Nègre photograph. The most startling sculptural innovation on Rosso’s part was his abolition of a proper pedestal for La Riconoscenza. He set it directly on the ground, thereby erasing the tradi­ tional hierarchical, elevated, vertical position of sculpture. This setting predates by six years a private sculptural experiment by Edgar Degas known as Le Tub (The Tub, 1889, fig. 21), a floor sculpture showing a woman bathing on her back in a steel basin intended to be filled with real water. Degas reconfigured in three dimensions his intimate paint­ ings of the 1880s depicting women at their ablutions. Like La Riconoscenza, Degas’s tub confounded the traditional relationship between a sculpture and its base; the tub itself became the work’s “base.” Further, like La Riconoscenza, Le Tub was to be seen from above, challenging the gaze of the viewer by lowering it to the ground. Like Préault and Degas, Rosso recognized the importance of breaking down the ver­ ticality and traditionally lofty status of sculpture in order to make it modern. Instead, all three artists created low, horizontally oriented works. Nearly half a century later, modern­ ist masterpieces by Alberto Giacometti and Jacob Epstein would be set on the ground.60

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FIG. 21 Edgar Degas, Le Tub, 1889. Wax, lead, plaster, and cloth, overall without base: 22.5 × 42.3 × 47.2 cm., height of figure: 16.9 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1985.64.48.

In 1967 the critic Jack Burnham would publish his seminal essay “Sculpture’s Vanishing Base” in Artforum (and later his 1968 book Beyond Modern Sculpture); in it, he included a photograph and discussion of Rosso’s La Riconoscenza, describing the work as the first sculptural example of the fusion between a subject and its base.61 Finally, the most unsettling element of La Riconoscenza is the presence of the open grave into which the mourner appears to stare. Sculptures with open tombs in the cemetery are inevitably uncomfortable and disturbing. They challenge Christian notions of avoiding direct confrontation with the dead after burial is complete, an event seen as marking closure after the solemn passage of the spirit from one world to another. Rosso probably knew the few funerary monuments that incorporated vertical openings—but not horizontal ones—to show entrances into buildings. One famous example is the monument to Archduchess Maria Cristina of Austria in the Augustinerkirche in Vienna (1798–1805, fig. 22) by the Italian neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova. In it, a cortege of mourners enters the open doorway of the royal tomb, which symbolizes a gateway to

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FIG. 22 Antonio Canova, Funerary Monument to Archduchess Maria Cristina of Austria, 1798–1805. Marble. Augustinerkirche, Vienna.

the world beyond. Another is Antoine Étex’s 1854 funerary monument to the family of Bonapartist François-Vincent Raspail in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (fig. 23). On the tomb, Étex depicted Madame Raspail, who died while her husband was in prison, bidding him adieu by placing her hand through his cell window. The art historian Antoinette Le Normand-Romain has, in fact, suggested a link between La Riconoscenza and Étex’s work.62 This tomb was well known from the widely circulating “Le fantôme,” Daumier’s lithographic caricature of the subject from 1835.63 Cameroni also may have known it, for he considered the cemetery an essential stop for visitors to Paris.64 Rosso’s opening in the earth, however, was far more controversial, for it suggested the presence of the deceased in the ground beneath the viewer. The most revolutionary example of such an opening was Courbet’s controversial painting of a peasant burial titled Un Enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans, 1849–50, fig. 24), a composition focused on the gaping hole that functions as a grave.65 When it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon

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FIG. 23 Antoine Étex, Funerary Monument to François-Vincent Raspail, 1854. Marble. Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

in 1850, many critics condemned it, calling it blasphemous and an inappropriately mundane subject for a grand historical painting. Yet when it was given to the Louvre in 1881, only two years before Rosso presented his controversial sculpture, Courbet’s work became celebrated as the artist’s masterpiece and as the manifesto of French Realism.66 In spite of its unconventionality, La Riconoscenza did not make the kind of grand public statement offered by Un Enterrement à Ornans. La Riconoscenza was an intimate project intended as an individualized, emotionally charged image of mourning and loss. The proximity of the mourner to the grave itself suggested a direct connection between the living and the dead. It imparted a deep and expressive sense of intimacy created by the closeness of the mourner’s head to the opening. A similar sense of intimacy can be found in a roughly contemporary sculpture by Rosso titled Amor materno (Maternal Love, 1882, fig. 25), in which a mother lovingly rests her head on her child’s cheek. Careful observation of the mother’s head reveals that it is indeed that of La Riconoscenza.

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FIG. 24 Gustave Courbet, Un Enterrement à Ornans, 1849–50. Oil on canvas, 315 × 668 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

FIG. 25 Medardo Rosso, Amor materno, 1882. Illustration by Ernesto Mancastroppa from L’Illustrazione italiana, November 28, 1886, 406.

However, in La Riconoscenza, Rosso rendered the loving connection of the earlier sculpture unstable by suggesting a connection between the figure and an invisible subject. The composition here more closely resembles late nineteenth-century paintings of Narcissus looking at his own reflection in the water, although in this case Rosso’s Narcissus-like figure is female rather than male. Perhaps the negative interpretation of his figure could have been related to Italian literary examples of such female figures as sinful. Luigi Gualdo’s short story “Narcisa” (1868) and Verista author Giovanni Verga’s novel Una peccatrice (A Female Sinner, 1865) both included deranged women named Narcisa who were obsessed with their own images.67 Although not evident to Rosso in his time, the many revolutionary ideas he proposed through his personal vision of mourning in La Riconoscenza were small signs of the demise of the genre of the monument as a reflection of shared values. By the century’s end, the crisis in public life and loss of faith in established social conventions would erode the popularity of the representational monument—and belief in its capacity to create meaningful collective statements.

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The unexpected rejection of La Riconoscenza disappointed Rosso on one level but, on another, it bolstered his determination. In September 1884, he defiantly submitted a second Garibaldi monument to the competition in Milan, radically rephrasing the sculptural language he had used to present the first Garibaldi monument in Pavia. Its title, hitherto unknown, is recorded in original documents as Riconoscenza, eccitazione, promessa (Gratitude, Excitement, Promise).68 The disjunction between past and present— one that Rosso had alluded to in the first design of 1882—is now more obvious. One critic, on seeing the new work, missing a hero and dominated by an unruly mob of demonstrators, described it as “a battle cry” and an open clash between two forces.69 The rejection of Rosso’s final design for a monument to Garibaldi, his most antiheroic and modern statement up to that point, demonstrates how rigid the Italian political climate had become since his first effort in 1882. It also shows how the iconography of the leader had fossilized into standard types. In a gesture of extreme protest, Rosso eliminated the figure of Garibaldi from the very monument intended to glorify him. Whether he knew it or not, Rosso’s radical act, the making of a monument without its hero, was an early harbinger of the demise of the traditional style of the figural monument, a proposal for a new language in modern sculpture. The progressive left-wing daily newspaper La Lombardia described the project as “a group of demonstrators [that] comes to blows with the P. S. [public security] guards and with the police; a flagbearer climbs up a lamppost and waves a banner; all around are people who squabble and roll around on the ground.” 70 The project could not be understood even by enlightened Italian critics; as the critic Mario Mariani recalled, it was “strange, bizarre, so audacious as to be absurd.” 71

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The modernity of Rosso’s monument lies in its complete rejection of the tradition of heroic mythmaking in sculpture. In his written statement, Rosso declared, “It is time to put an end to conventionalisms.” 72 Mariani noted that [Rosso] told us with his frank and faithful soul of a young and vigorous man: but what colonnades, but what staircases, but what porticoes for the Hero of an entire glorious epoch: Garibaldi reduced to the proportions, to the attitudes of an ordinary Don Quixote, awkward or elegant like a little medieval puppet, it would be too grave an insult to permit this. The ardent vote of his last days was a free Italy, but entirely free: here is the monument that is truly worthy of Him; but what marbles, but what statues, but what horses and capes and bas reliefs!73

This was not how the project was received, however. Even the few sympathetic critics who praised the work’s originality nonetheless felt that Rosso had ended up “in the arms of the most strange exaggerations the artist’s mind knows how to imagine.” 74 Rosso would later recall proudly that even Cameroni, who had frequently championed him, on this occasion called him “mattoide” (nutty).75 After four rounds of the competition in which no project was chosen, a proposal by the sculptor Ettore Ximenes was accepted in 1889. His statue, erected in 1894, restored the subject’s traditional status with a heroic Garibaldi shown on horseback; the statue still stands today in Largo Cairoli in Milan (fig. 26). Rosso’s second design for a Garibaldi monument suggested division rather than unity. The clash between the demonstrators and the guards does not seem to relate to a specific historical event whose meaning could be shared by all.76 It might refer to the divisions that emerged during and after unification between military hierarchies and the spontaneous groupings that followed Garibaldi as well as between liberal-conservatives and democrats, governing bodies and the people, patriots and foreigners. But whatever the conflict was about, it was neither contained nor resolved by the reassuring and lofty presence of an iconic hero. With this monument, therefore, Rosso not only made a clear statement about his own personal disorientation (as he had suggested with the meditative figure of the first design) but now conveyed, in a single powerful image, the disorientation of his entire generation. It was nothing less than a decisive rejection of the nation-building mythology that had been constructed and deployed so ably by the government to glorify Garibaldi and promote a sense of national identity among widely different social classes. Rosso launched his fiercest challenge to the monumental sculptural tradition by abolishing the heroic notion of verticality. According to the literary historian Stamos Metzidakis, the vertical line represented by the column in sculpture from ancient times and through the nineteenth century functioned semiotically as a “degree zero” or ultimate restrictive element for movement in sculpture as well as the viewer’s body. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s phenomenological study of the role of the column in world religions, Metzidakis describes the primordial universal pillar that allowed the ancients to orient

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FIG. 26 Ettore Ximenes, Monumento a Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1889–94. Bronze. Largo Cairoli, Milan.

themselves cosmically and politically in relation to the heavens (upward) and hell (downward). Metzidakis demonstrates how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, poets like Victor Hugo reflected on the reassurance suggested by the immobility of such vertical sculptures as Napoléon’s monumental replica of Trajan’s Column in the Place Vendôme (1806–10). The poets also alluded to an anxiety that the world could be menaced or toppled, both symbolically and physically (confirmed by the Vendôme Column, toppled during the Paris Commune of 1871). Metzidakis argues that, in the second half of the century, Gautier and Baudelaire emphasized what the author calls “l’ennui de la ligne droite” (the boredom of the straight line), which signaled the agonized state of neoclassicism and presaged the beginning of modern sculpture. The vertical sculpture

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“becomes ever more retrograde,” heralding “the approach of the horizontal axis, in the form of variable and sinuous lines (a tendency reflecting a romantic and thus more modern character).” 77 By eliminating the figure of the hero in the second Garibaldi monument, Rosso negated its central point, rupturing the long-standing semiotic function of verticality. Rosso created a visual and psychological void far more radical than the hole he had represented in La Riconoscenza. In the second Garibaldi statue, Rosso rejected the image of Garibaldi as unifying “father of the Patria” as understood in the hollow and forced terms being presented during his time.78 The absence of Garibaldi in Rosso’s design also made a general statement about absent fathers, such as those who had died in the war and those whose stories of patriotism alienated them from sons who had not shared their experiences. He thus exposed what the historian Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg sees as the defining crisis of post-Risorgimento Italy, one represented by the popular fatherless figure of Pinocchio in Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883) by Carlo Collodi.79 This national psychological crisis was masked by the official public image of Garibaldi as the good hero-father, one effectively standing in for fathers who were literally absent or who could not create a dialogue with their children. The psychologist Luigi Zoja’s analysis of the evolution of the father figure, especially in Italy, finds parallels in the relationship between the feelings a public leader evokes in a country’s citizens and those that a father, in the same country and at the same time, awakens in his sons: “What we most tend to lack . . . is precisely this positive authority—within us, within the psyche— and we combat this void by demanding that it come from somewhere else, in the outside world. And demand—when directed to the outside world . . . generates supply.” 80 Rosso’s project dramatically exposed the fact that official attempts to create a sense of paternal authority and protection, for instance through standardized public monuments that cast Garibaldi in the role of father of the nation, had failed.81 The work demonstrated that such schemes neglected the needs of new and future generations; what was missing was a father figure who promoted what Zoja has called “the development of the next generation’s human potential.” 82 Ultimately, Rosso’s horizontal monument design, without a traditional vertical axis, represented a sense of conflict rather than harmony, unity, or resolution (everyone had his or her own vision of Garibaldi, who would continue to be appropriated by the left as well as by the Fascists for decades to come). In Rosso’s time, his friend the French Symbolist critic Camille de Sainte-Croix was one of the only writers to later describe the Garibaldi statue, calling it a contre-projet (counter project), for it was an early sign of the dismantling of traditional idioms of monumental art.83 Giovanna Ginex, the only scholar to have noted the importance of the second Garibaldi bozzetto, describes it as an “extraordinary . . . indirect monument . . . that overturns the pedantic logic of monumental sculpture (base plus statue plus isolated decorations), finally offering a plastic solution that is iconographically original and of European breadth.” 84 Rosso’s innovations allude

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FIG. 27 Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982. Stone. Washington, DC. Photo: Terry Adams, National Parks Service, courtesy Maya Lin Studio.

to the gradual erosion of the genre and its cultural and political functions. Giorgio de Chirico would later express this crisis very literally in such paintings as Piazza d’Italia (1915), in which classical monuments are shown abandoned in deserted city squares. In the end, Rosso’s works of the early 1880s raise the question of whether or not it is possible to create a successful monument not centered on a heroic figure. An answer might be found in our time, in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. In 1982, Lin, then an unknown twenty-one-year-old Chinese American art student, also “born too late,” won the competition for the monument (fig. 27). The resulting horizontally oriented work is a V-shaped wall composed of a series of black reflective stones sunk into the earth, with the names of those killed in action engraved in chronological order. To search out a loved one, a mourner must walk along the monument and find the name among the 57,661 listed. Consonant with Lin’s idea of the monument as a “gash in the earth,” 85 recalling Rosso’s open hole in La Riconoscenza, the lowest part of the V cuts into the ground like a painful wound in flesh; however, the composition also foresees the ground’s “suturing” and “scarring” by nature and the surrounding environment, as Malcolm Miles has noted. Like Rosso’s Garibaldi monument, Lin’s memorial avoids “the

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idealising language of allegory and the replication of social hierarchies” to “heal social wounds.” 86 The viewer’s experience of the monument as he or she walks along the wall is highly physical, unfolding horizontally but also down into the earth and back up at each end of the structure. The viewer, walking and then stopping to look at individual names, experiences both motion and stillness, and, as Miles suggests, both openness and closure. Lin’s tribute is at once of the moment and of eternity, creating a specific encounter with the name of the deceased soldier and evoking a general reflection on death and the nature of mourning. As she recalls, “I thought about what death is, what loss is . . . a sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over, a scar.” 87 Ultimately Lin’s memorial is a commemoration of specific individuals, heroes and ordinary soldiers alike, rather than a depiction of impersonal myths of fatherland and heroism. Overturning the traditional concept of the highest point as the focus of a monument, the “center” of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is its lowest and deepest point, precisely where it cuts into the ground. But the descent into the trench or casket of the past and the reality of war also precedes the viewer’s inevitable rise from its central point, suggesting catharsis and hope for the future. One hundred years earlier, Medardo Rosso had intuited this idea of creating a monument that successfully avoids a central and univocal hero figure. He deserves wider recognition for this achievement.

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“Impressionist Sculptor”?

3 “IMPRESSIONIST SCULPTOR”? The Impossibility of Categorizing Rosso

Medardo Rosso said that 1883 was the watershed year for his art. All scholars agree that his style and thinking changed significantly from that year onward. He began making sculpture with broken, painterly surfaces, open to the transient effects of light and shadow and with the backs left unsculpted. Rosso also started to focus more intensely on themes from modern life, but now he gradually detached the visual components of his subjects from their titles, cropped works into fragments, and dislocated them from their conventional sculptural bases. His sculptures became increasingly flat, less realistically modeled, and progressively more fused with, emerging from, or disappearing into what looked like masses of sculptural material.1 Through this shift, Rosso further rejected the conservative modes of making sculpture taught and practiced in Italian academies. This change did not sit well with critics in his home country, who were by then taking notice of his work and struggling to define or categorize it. It has never been clear what brought about this change or how it might be defined. Was it an unpalatable rebellion? Was it a work inspired by the Scapigliatura, Verismo, or Macchiaioli ideals? Was it a generic importation of foreign ideas or, more specifically, an attempt to introduce French Impressionism into Italian sculpture? In 1886 the French critic Edmond Thiaudière, who saw Rosso’s sculptures exhibited in Paris that year, dubbed him the founder of “Impressionist sculpture,” 2 a phrase that was immediately reprinted with great emphasis in an Italian article in L’Illustrazione italiana, which described the artist’s success in Paris.3 The following year, when Rosso first presented his new works at the Esposizione Nazionale in Venice, an Italian journalist who

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signed only with the letter “M” praised him for having “a strong, intelligent talent of the observer and of an impressionist. . . . The Milanese sculptor makes Impressionism in sculpture—of that Impressionism that in painting counts many talented and formidable enthusiasts, so many that it is already a revered and respected school.” 4 And in 1889, an unnamed Italian journalist from Il Sole hailed Rosso’s art as the work of “one of the most daring impressionist sculptors.” 5 These remarks all indicate that a handful of Italian and French critics were associating Rosso’s modern approach with the ideas of French Impressionism, the painterly movement that appeared on the Parisian scene in 1874 and whose practices were gradually becoming known to artists, critics, and literary personalities. Yet the very same critic who called Rosso an “impressionist” in 1887 also labeled his art “statuette scapigliatissime” (most Scapigliati statuettes).6 Another Italian critic of the time called him a “verista,” 7 and still another associated his art with the techniques of the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the previous generation.8 The Macchiaioli had been working in a similar style a decade before the French Impressionists, painting outdoors using a novel brushstroke technique of macchie (literally, “stains”). This general confusion suggests that a more nuanced study of how to categorize Rosso’s work is required. What is needed is a reassessment of the significance of Rosso’s ideas, in light of not only the perceptions of critics of his time but also contemporary and later developments in Western sculpture. Such a reassessment must include a rethinking of the impact of his sculptures on artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this chapter, I assess the changes in Rosso’s art from 1883 onward, when he made a new series of radical sculptural experiments that came to be labeled “impressionist” by several critics and were, at least by 1887, explicitly associated with French Impressionism. I begin by examining what might have been known about Impressionism in Italy in the 1880s and evaluate its reception in the art and literature of the time. I follow with a close analysis of four of Rosso’s works from this period, in which I believe he was developing a more robust international orientation and broader anti-academic aims by reconfiguring into sculpture subjects from the Realist legacy of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and especially Honoré Daumier. Realism itself was undergoing a process of depoliticization and aestheticization in France at the time, while remaining essentially French. Rosso’s sculpture underwent a similar process, but he attempted to make his sculptures more international in appeal. At the same time, Rosso became interested in Impressionism but may not have known much about it. I close with a discussion of Impression d’omnibus (Impression of an Omnibus, 1884– 87), a revolutionary work by which Rosso transformed a lithograph by Daumier into a lifesize sculpture to create a “monument” to modern daily life. I contend that he was challenging the very definition of a monument in an attempt to give it a modern language.

DEFINING ROSSO’S STYLE

Scholars continued to disagree on Rosso’s artistic foundations, both during his lifetime and after his death. Some have situated his stylistic changes within the local innovations

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of his fellow Milanese artists, due to a similar formal approach to surfaces that are fractured and sensitive to light.9 Examples can be found in the works of Milanese Scapigliatura painters Tranquillo Cremona and Daniele Ranzoni, and in several small sculptures by Giuseppe Grandi. Others have hypothesized that he based his ideas solely on replicating, in sculpture, images he had actually seen in real life, while still others believe his art was a form of subjective interpretation of reality. And, finally, some think that Rosso may have been looking outside Italy to Impressionism for inspiration.10 They point to the fact that since 1874, at the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, the group of French artists had presented a new modern style of painting, breaking up their images with visible rather than blended brushstrokes and with bold patches of color.11 Rosso was not explicit about his artistic sources. Throughout his life he appeared eager to erase any connection between himself and his Italian colleagues, later angering his compatriots for a supposed unacknowledged debt.12 He may well have been drawing on multiple sources for his inspiration. One might also point out that his work displays individual deviations from the ideas and practices of all those movements. Unlike the works of the Scapigliati, his sculptures were based on motifs drawn from modern life rather than from history, religion, or mythology. These subjects are clearly related to modern art as it was being proposed in France. By the mid-1880s, Rosso added the nebulous word “impression” to the titles of several works from this period. For example, he supplied the title in Italian mixed with French below a pencil drawing dated between 1884 and 1887 as Impressione.—Au chevet d’un mort (Impression.—At the Bed of a Dead Man), as well as in Italian below a close-up photo of a section of his life-size sculpture here titled In tramway.—Impressioni (On a Tram.—Impressions).

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The confusion surrounding the labeling of Rosso as an Impressionist is understandable for its time. In the early 1880s, the word “impressionism” was used but not well understood outside restricted circles in Paris. Around Europe, it was being employed loosely and generically to signal any kind of painting style with shapes represented in a blurry, indistinct fashion, impromptu sketchy images of nature, and loose or rough brushstrokes. The art historian Benno Tempel comments that “from the 1880s on, more and more often critics in many European countries began to refer to much contemporary art as ‘impressionist,’ even when the works had little or nothing to do with the French movement. By this time the name was de rigueur for modern paintings, or those that wished to be seen as such. For the critics the spontaneity and individuality of the works began to play a greater role, and more value was placed on expression and originality.” 13 To date, there has been no systematic study of the transnational impact of Impressionism on Italy in the ottocento. From the outset, I wish to establish that, contrary to scholarly claims, Impressionism did indeed reach Italy in the 1880s, largely through reproduced drawings of images, scattered reports in French and Italian journals and newspapers, and

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mentions in Italian literary criticism.14 I also would like to assert that, but for a few rare exceptions, Impressionism met with considerable resistance, even in avant-garde circles, and was therefore mostly ignored. On the whole, Italian artists (besides the handful of painters who moved to Paris) and collectors demonstrated little interest in French Impressionism and generally seemed highly critical of French modern art. Early traces of defensiveness and national pride in the 1880s are evident even in the writings of Italian intellectuals who were ostensibly receptive to foreign innovations. Luigi Chirtani (pseudonym of Luigi Archinti) is a good example of this tendency. He was a painter, journalist, and writer who had lived in Paris in the 1850s, where he studied with Manet’s teacher, Thomas Couture. He became a professor of painting at the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1888 and was one of Rosso’s greatest supporters in the 1880s. But in the preface to what he called his 1875 “liberal translation” of Louis Viardot’s Les merveilles de la peinture (The Marvels of Painting, 1868), which he retitled Le meraviglie della pittura straniera (The Marvels of Foreign Painting), Chirtani opened by saying that, despite its title, “this volume still speaks of the greatness of Italian painting, because in narrating the marvels of the foreign schools, it demonstrates the great influence of ours upon all the schools over the mountains and across the oceans.” 15 Chirtani also criticized Louis Viardot, the author of the book, who, “attracted by national self-love, saw in many French painters an originality that one cannot grant them without straying from the mandates of impartial criticism.” 16 These nationalistic assertions of Italian artistic superiority over the French, and especially over French modern art, were typical of the sentiment of the time. Chirtani added to the book a final section on modern French art, which he titled a “confusion of minds and paintbrushes.” 17 In it he declared that “French modern art represents . . . the lack of a common credo, of minds and souls that disturb, torment, and place society in danger.” 18 A rare exception was the progressive Tuscan art critic Diego Martelli, who had visited Paris several times since 1862. Martelli had already begun to sense the backwardness of Italian art and noted this in a letter to his mother from Paris in 1870: “How far behind we are. . . . In the meantime I see that we have this great quality: the hatred for everything that is foreign and the lack of any marvel for the things that are presented.” 19 During his 1878 visit to Paris (which lasted an entire year), Martelli came to know both Manet and Edgar Degas through the introduction of his friend Federico Zandomeneghi (an Italian painter who had immigrated to Paris in 1874 and who subsequently exhibited in four of the Impressionist exhibitions). Zandomeneghi also introduced him to writers who were close to the Impressionists such as Émile Zola and Louis Edmond Duranty. Degas painted two portraits of Martelli in 1879, during which time Martelli finally saw Impressionist works firsthand at the fourth Impressionist exhibition. That year, Martelli began to write reviews of French art in Italian newspapers that were published in different regions, like the Tuscan Gazzetta d’Italia and the Piedmontese Il Risorgimento. He also reported on artistic developments in the French capital in letters he sent to the Macchiaioli. However, they refused to embrace either the Impres-

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sionist division of colors or its subject matter drawn from scenes of modern life. I have found no evidence that Rosso was looking at Macchiaioli art for his sculptures, even though one critic of the time thought that this might have been his source.20 There was no Impressionist art being exhibited in Italy, but for one example. Martelli convinced Camille Pissarro to send two paintings, retitled in Italian as La tosatura della siepe (The Cutting of the Hedge, 1877) and L’approssimarsi della bufera (The Coming of the Storm, 1878) to the annual exhibition La Promotrice Fiorentina (a series of municipal exhibitions, in this case held in Florence) in 1879. Despite Martelli’s efforts to prepare Florentine audiences, the works were received with indifference and did not sell; Martelli ended up hanging them in his home. Pissarro’s friend, the Macchiaioli painter Francesco Gioli, wrote to Martelli that “standing in front of Pissarro’s paintings . . . I received no impression. . . . It seems to me worthy of a young boy who has no talent. With great effort I was able to find a tiny piece next to another, but then an immense lacuna where I am unable to discern anything but nothingness.” 21 Even more scathing was a review by a critic named Ossian: Mr. Camille Pissarro has exhibited The Coming of the Storm and asserts that this is a “study from life” made in France . . . but I would ask to be permitted to suspect that the fear of lightning, as the storm comes closer, perhaps has upset the nervous system of our painter and confused his paints on the palette. . . . Mr. Pissarro wanted to be original? In this case he has fully achieved his intent, but I would bet that very few people envy this kind of originality. In fact, what the heck sort of landscape is this, where the colors are so violently and heavily hurled so that they convert the canvas into a bas-relief, where the paints amalgamate one with the other, are confused, battle with each other in a terrible crowding together. . . . In order to represent for us such ugly nature, so untrue, he went to France. . . . And he wants us to believe that that omelet with broccoli is a “study,” “studied” from life?22

Such criticism was typical of many early reviews of Impressionist art in other countries; and in the case of Italy, no further interest in the movement on the part of enlightened figures emerged. Martelli also responded to his friend, the painter Giovanni Fattori, who had written to Martelli about his negative response to the work of Pissarro: Dear Gianni, I was utterly surprised when I read your judgment about the works by Pissarro. . . . That [Arthur] Lemon and [Stefano] Bruzzi don’t like that kind of painting is understandable . . . but you, who have painted beautiful things. . . . I don’t understand how you cannot find anything in the works of Pissarro. . . . I could understand the comment you make about the color as false . . . but what is more curious is that you speak of [the need for] a language that is intelligible to the public.23

Despite the harsh judgments of others, by 1879 Martelli had become convinced of the significance of Impressionism. In 1880 he gave a lecture at the Circolo Filologico di

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Livorno titled “Gli Impressionisti” (The Impressionists). It represents the first theoretical discussion of Impressionist ideas in Italy, and was inspired by the French novelist and art critic Duranty’s publication La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting, 1876). Like Duranty, Martelli traced the movement’s roots to French Realism: the art of Courbet, Degas, Daumier, and Manet. He stated that “Impressionism is not only a revolution in the field of thinking, but it is also a physiological revolution in the human eye. It is a new theory that depends on a different mode of perceiving the sensation of light and of expressing the [resulting] impressions.” 24 Today, Martelli’s lectures, subsequently published as a pamphlet with a printed dedication “to his friends of France—a souvenir from Diego Martelli,” are thought to indicate contemporary Italian interest in Impressionism and are seen to have played a key role in establishing awareness of it throughout Italy.25 But the immediate impact of the lectures has not been studied. The well-documented negative responses of artists, critics, and collectors to Pissarro’s paintings in Florence might allow us to assume a similar reaction to Martelli’s attempt to promote Impressionism in these lectures. Further evidence is the fact that Martelli had tried to bring French Impressionist art to the Esposizione Nazionale held in Turin in 1880, but the project failed due to the Italians’ lack of enthusiasm and the Impressionists’ own hesitations about exhibiting in Italy.26 The borders between Lombardy and Tuscany were more fluid than accounts of regionally based art movements of the period will have it. Martelli was a well-established journalist who published all over Italy and had important intellectual contacts in Milan. It is likely that the pamphlet of his lectures on Impressionism circulated in artistic and literary circles there. Still, we do not know if Rosso was aware of Martelli’s writings and what he might have learned from them given that, as far as we know, he had never actually seen any Impressionist paintings by that date. It would be naive, however, to conclude that Rosso was not informed about Impressionism, given his sophisticated, welltraveled literary friends. Rosso had other sources of information on Impressionism besides Martelli, among them his friend Felice Cameroni, the writer and journalist, who corresponded regularly with such Parisian supporters of Impressionism as the Goncourt brothers and Zola and was the first translator of Zola into Italian. But while Cameroni praised Guy de Maupassant as “an Impressionist, sure of his pen!” 27 he rejected Impressionist art, calling it “stramberie sistematiche” (systematic strangenesses).28 Nonetheless, he was aware of its connection to Rosso’s work and referred to his sculptures in French as “ces bronzes impressionnistes” (these impressionist bronzes) in a letter of 1889 to Edmond de Goncourt.29 In his review of Rosso’s work at the Exposition Universelle of that year in the newspaper Il Sole, Cameroni similarly described “the strange impressionist heads by our own Medardo Rosso.” 30 Rosso also could have learned of Impressionism through French journals. Lengthy descriptions of works appeared in French journals from the first Impressionist exhibition onward, and drawings of paintings appeared in French publications like

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L’Impressionniste. For example, Gustave Caillebotte’s Le pont de l’Europe (The Europe Bridge, 1876) and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Balançoir (The Swing, 1876) were reproduced in the April 21, 1877, issue; Degas’s Danseuse à la bar (Dancers Practicing at the Barre, 1877) appeared on April 14, 1877; and Alfred Sisley’s Le Scieur de long (The Long Sawyers, 1876) appeared on April 28, 1877. Mary Cassatt’s Un Coin de loge (In the Box, 1879) appeared in the journal La Vie Moderne on May 1, 1879. Rosso might have known of Théodore Duret’s Les Peintres impressionnistes, first published as a pamphlet in 1878. He could have read about Impressionist artists fictionalized in Zola’s L’Œuvre, the fourteenth novel in the series Rougon-Macquart (The Fortunes of the Rougons), first serialized in the periodical Gil Blas beginning in December 1885 before being published in novel form by Charpentier in 1886 and translated into Italian in the same year. All these literary works circulated in Milan. They could have allowed Rosso some sense of what the paintings looked like and how they were being perceived. Further, the movement and the Impressionist exhibitions were widely caricatured in French journals that were read in Milanese artistic circles from the time of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and Rosso would no doubt have been aware of the kinds of negative responses the new art provoked. Finally, a less-evident but possible avenue for knowledge about Impressionism might not have been via Paris but rather from London, where the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel mounted an exhibition at Dowdeswell’s Galleries on New Bond Street in 1883. The art historian Kate Flint defines this as the year Impressionism began to find a transnational audience: “This show proved a turning point not just in the reception of the Impressionists in England, but in the development of English art criticism. . . . This show [also] prompted some considerable press reaction,” which could have easily reached other countries.31 Realism continued to permeate the artistic discourse in France throughout the early years of Impressionism. Impressionists seriously grappled with the powerful legacy of Courbet, Manet, and Daumier during the 1870s and the early 1880s. Although some painters who exhibited with the Impressionists—most notably Degas and Caillebotte— normally are categorized under the banner of Impressionism, they did not adopt the Impressionist style. Rosso’s works, too, do not quite “read” along what we consider today the canonical lines of Impressionist painting. I believe that, whether by coincidence, sheer intuition, or direct knowledge, he too was reconfiguring the language of Realism for his own needs. Realist art itself was undergoing a process of reinterpretation by the French establishment in these years. Linda Nochlin contends that Courbet’s paintings were being divested of their political overtones for, shortly before his death in 1877, he was still out of official favor as a result of his participation in the Commune and his support for the destruction of the Vendôme Column. But in 1881 the French government had accepted his Un Enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans, 1849–50) for the Louvre and went on to buy five more works for the state. Courbet’s artistic reputation was gradually separated from his

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politics. Where possible his work was re-ascribed to the less contentious realm of nature (landscapes, hunting scenes, nudes, still lifes). Nochlin shows that he was inserted into the great tradition of French art “in a ploy that is at once aesthetic and nationalistic, elevating and neutralizing.” 32 By politically neutralizing Courbet’s art, critics made it more “exportable” and easy to appropriate, not only by French Impressionists but also by artists abroad. Manet’s art underwent a similar process after his death in 1883. Michael Orwics has shown how Manet was culturally legitimized. His once-radical ideas were “domesticated” and his achievements “reinvented” to fit a broader, softer version of the history of the development of modern painting that was both French in origin and universal in appeal.33 Rosso’s relationship to Realism was perhaps conceptually closest to that of Degas, for both artists demonstrated a special interest in the caricatures of Daumier. Carol Armstrong describes how Degas’s subjects from modern life, from the 1870s onward, were mostly drawn from Daumier, especially his laundresses, prostitutes, and concert performers. Degas represented Daumier’s figures “removed from their defining urban context, reduced to the single form . . . minimizing the ‘text’ of what started as a caricatural subject.” 34 As Armstrong notes, Degas’s versions of them became “largely inexpressive, emphasizing the corporeal fragment.” 35 She further observes that in paintings like Blanchisseuses (Laundresses Carrying Laundry, 1876–78), L’orchestre pendant qu’on joue une tragédie (The Orchestra during the Performance of a Tragedy, 1852), and Aux ChampsElysées (At the Champs-Elysées, 1852), Degas condensed Daumier’s works into images that were “increasingly aestheticized and neutralized. . . . [As] Daumier’s reputation was being canonized and depoliticized . . . his imagery was being given the stamp of aesthetics, which effaced the stigma of politics. . . . [Degas’s] articulation and dissolution of the elements of caricature were also part of the larger drive toward the depoliticization and privatization of realism.” 36 Rosso’s choice of modern urban subjects and his gradual abandonment of physiognomic accuracy and attention to detail suggest a similar approach to that taken by Degas. Rosso, too, avoided Daumier’s political agenda and isolated his caricatures into fragments. However, unlike Degas, Rosso concentrated on the subjective and emotional impact of his work. Rosso’s own earliest description of the word “impression” (which he would frequently revise in later years) reflected his highly personal understanding of the word, in which he created a unique blend of Realism and Impressionism in modern sculpture.37 In the following discussion of four works from this period, I will illustrate the trajectory of Rosso’s reliance on Realism for subjects and his gradual detachment and isolation of these subjects from their typical narrative modes. His works show a departure from the Realist aesthetic and the development of an impressionist style. Rather than relying on these new languages, Rosso further reconfigured his sculptures in innovative ways, and this included the conventional language of the monument.

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FIG. 28 Honoré Daumier, Intérieur d’omnibus. Entre un homme ivre et un Charcutier, 1841. Lithograph on wove paper, 36.2 × 48.9 cm. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Leisser Art Fund, 57.19.8.

S E L A F U S S E G R A P PA !

Se la fusse grappa! (If Only It Were Grappa!, 1883, plate 3) affords the first glimpse of the ways in which Rosso was disassembling and rethinking Realist art. He initially exhibited a version of the work in an unspecified medium at the 1887 Venice Esposizione Nazionale, under that title (which is in Milanese or Venetian dialect).38 The title announces that the work represents a drunk; there is no indication that Rosso intended the work to be read specifically as a drunken sacristan, as the posthumous title used today—Lo Scaccino (The Sacristan)—suggests.39 Sources for the figure have never been examined, for this work has always been seen as original. The drunkard was not a modern subject, although Realist and Impressionist painters from Manet to Degas gave the theme a new twist in their renditions of absinthe drinkers. I believe that the pose of Rosso’s drunken figure probably was based on that of a sleeping drunk man shown by Daumier in a lithograph titled Intérieur d’omnibus. Entre un homme ivre et un Charcutier (Interior of an Omnibus, Between a Drunk and a Butcher, fig. 28) published in the satirical journal Le Charivari on November 13, 1841.40 Daumier

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represented in humorous terms the uncomfortable public mingling of the urban classes at a time of increased social mobility. In this image he portrayed a prim young woman who sits between a drowsy drunkard leaning inappropriately against her on one side, legs spread wide, and a robust butcher with blood-stained hands, dressed in his work apron, on the other. To date there is no documented link between Rosso and Daumier. However, as I noted in chapter 1, in the catalogue of the Indisposizione di Belle Arti exhibition (1881) Rosso was humorously characterized as a “lithographic corporal,” a title suggesting his interest in lithography. Daumier’s lithographs would have been easily accessible to him; they were copied and sold in reproductions for many years after they first appeared in French journals and, by the 1870s and 1880s, cheap offprints were being collected by avant-garde artists in Paris and abroad. As the art historian Maxime Valsamas has shown, there was a veritable “caricature revival” in France in the latter years of the Second Empire that continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s, leading to the republication of Daumier’s prints in daily satirical newspapers long after their first appearances.41 The continued circulation of Daumier’s works in France and throughout Europe has not been studied systematically. However, it is known that Degas, for example, possessed a large collection of Daumier’s lithographs (nearly a thousand). Vincent van Gogh frequently described his interest in Daumier in his letters before he arrived in Paris and he, too, owned several of the artist’s prints. In a letter from the Hague to his brother Theo (who was in Paris) dated October 29, 1882, van Gogh asks, “Are there any cheap Daumier prints to be had, and if so, which ones?” 42 The Parisian collector Henri Rouart also amassed a collection of Daumier’s prints, as did the actress Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, who bound into twenty-eight albums her collection of approximately three thousand cutouts from local papers and reprints in the 1880s.43 Given their widespread circulation in journals and republications as centerfold inserts by Le Charivari, it is highly likely that Daumier’s lithographic caricatures also circulated in Italy during this period. Daumier’s work was well known to Italian critics, despite the claims of some Italian scholars to the contrary.44 In his review in the Gazzetta d’Italia of the retrospective of Daumier’s work held at Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1878, Martelli “identified [Daumier] as one of the undisputed stars of French art.” 45 And in the published pamphlet of his 1880 conference in Livorno, Martelli praised Daumier in particular: “He is extremely strong for the chiaroscuro that forces a bit too much by abusing the asphalts and bitumens à la Decamps [sic], and he is almost insuperable in the analysis of forms and the character of movements.” 46 I also noted in chapter 1 mention of Daumier in Milanese socialist journals in the early 1880s and a painting that represents an Italian couple reading Le Journal amusant, in which Daumier’s caricatures appeared. In Se la fusse grappa!, Rosso recaptured in sculpture not only the intoxicated condition but also the bowed head, large ear, droopy eyes, half-open mouth, swollen nose, and sleeping pose of Daumier’s drunken man on the omnibus. But by detaching the figure from its urban environment and giving it a new, unrelated title, Rosso dismantled

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Daumier’s realistic scene, isolating the single person from the uncomfortable relationships associated with modernity upon which the lithograph relied for comic effect. Furthermore, for the 1887 show, Rosso added external props and witty texts to enhance a different comic effect, reconfiguring Daumier’s subject in a mocking anti-clerical guise typical of the 1881 Indisposizione di Belle Arti.47 He also broke apart the traditional relationship between sculpture and pedestal. For the base of the sculpture he found an actual baptismal font labeled with a small metal plaque with the words “Indulgenza Plenaria” (Plenary Indulgence). He then attached his sculpture to the rim of the font in such a way that the drunken figure appeared to be gazing longingly at the holy water. To be certain that the work’s humorous element was understood, Rosso published a photograph of an elaborate mise-en-scène in the journal of the 1887 Esposizione Nazionale Artistica. He set Se la fusse grappa!, complete with its baptismal font, on a table with a picture of a Madonna hanging on the wall behind it. And finally, he printed the photograph of the ensemble on a white page and added the title Se la fusse grapa [sic] (If Only It Were Grapa) under the image, thereby giving verbal expression to the figure’s thoughts as if it were the text of a caricature (see plate 3). Although we cannot know whether the work was exhibited with all of its added props and setting at the Esposizione Nazionale, the title and the base alone functioned as indices of its comic nature.48 Rosso’s witty text, which declares the man (with his unattractive swollen nose and droopy eyes) a drunkard, functions to create a caricature-like fissure between the man’s respectability and his wishful interior imaginings. Rather than representing the heroic qualities typically enshrined in traditional sculpture, Rosso used drunkenness in Se la fusse grappa! to suggest benevolently that the man’s unheroic personal foibles are signs of his humanity. Rosso’s own approach, even though it adopts the humorous language of a caricature, evokes empathy for his character that soon became a unique feature of his art. This kind of inner dividedness between humans and their moral and physical weaknesses is the foundation of caricature. It can be related to Charles Baudelaire’s understanding of the modernity of comedy, as expressed in his three essays on caricature from the 1850s. In “De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques” (On the Essence of Laughter and the Comic in General in the Plastic Arts, 1855), Baudelaire stated that the representation of comedy in art “contains a mysterious, durable, eternal element, one truly worthy of the artist’s attention. It is curious . . . that the inclusion of this intangible element of beauty [is] even in works meant to represent to man his moral and physical ugliness! . . . This lamentable spectacle arouses in him an immortal and incorrigible hilarity.” 49 As the art historian Michele Hannoosh writes, Baudelaire ingeniously posited the “peculiar oxymoronic nature of comic art, which he treats as a contradiction in terms, represent[ing] . . . like a good caricature, the dualism of art itself, the contradiction inherent in all artistic creation, as in mankind—at once diabolical and divine, real and ideal, ugly and beautiful, temporal and enduring, inferior, and superior. . . . Here it becomes

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the necessary (and fertile condition of art) . . . the image of oneness is born of the dualism of the comic.” 50 The rising importance of the printing press during the 1880s was discussed in chapter 1. Here it is necessary to add that, like other sculptors of this period, Rosso used photographs as promotional tools; under each he added his name and studio address: “M. Rosso fece, Milano, Via Giuseppe Giusti, 17.” He took full advantage of the latest technological advances in photographic printing and mechanical typography in Milan, as used by the Tipografia Lombardi, the printer whose name appears under the photographs. Rosso’s international ambitions and his discovery of a cheap way of circulating images of his works beyond Italy are evident, for he added a French translation—“Si è etait de l’eau de vie”—albeit one full of errors, to the text below the photograph of Se la fusse grappa! Rosso established the significance of Se la fusse grappa! for the viewer by building up a series of visual and verbal cues around it. His dependence on external props and text suggests a lingering anxiety about a fundamental dilemma: how to present motifs and ideas that the viewer would be led to contemplate but that could also be left open to interpretation.

C A R N E A LT R U I

In contrast to the descriptively comic and anecdotal Se la fusse grappa!, Rosso’s second work of the period, titled Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84, plate 4), is one in which he adopted a more sophisticated strategy.51 This sculpture was modern both in subject and impressionistic style; here, Rosso represented (at least as indicated in the title) a prostitute in the guise of a fragment, specifically a part of her head, sleeping or resting, rather than a fully modeled bust, while the back remained unsculpted. Alongside the sculpture he placed a broken piece of an architectural ornament in cement, as is evident in plate 4, a photograph from the period.52 Rosso’s interest in representing a prostitute reflects a modern fascination with the subject. For writers, artists, academics, public officials, and scientists during the nineteenth century, prostitution became emblematic of the ugly realities of urban life. As in other European countries, especially France, the Italian authorities reviled prostitution as a source of public immorality and sexually transmitted diseases. France, which was at the forefront of the regulation of prostitution, introduced a law in 1802 that prohibited public solicitation of clients, making houses of prostitution mandatory for such activities. It also required prostitutes to register with the authorities and submit to regular medical examinations. Camillo Benso di Cavour referred to the French example when he instituted the “Regolamento Cavour” to regulate prostitution in Italy in 1860.53 There could be many contemporary literary and critical sources of inspiration for Rosso’s sculpture, both native and foreign. Prostitution, which became a subject of investigation by contemporary psychiatrists, criminologists, anthropologists, and lawyers,

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provided material for Italian novelists eager to capitalize on French examples. French novels by Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, and Eugène Sue, all featuring prostitutes, inspired Italian works. Rosso could have read Lucien-V. Meunier’s popular erotic book Chair à plaisir (Pleasures of the Flesh), published in 1882 and illustrated by Alexandre Ferdinandus.54 At it happens, Rosso gave this French name as the title of the sculpture when he exhibited it at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1904 and again at the Venice Biennale of 1914.55 However, the most plausible source would have been Zola’s Nanà from the Rougon-Macquart series, which was published in Paris in 1880 and in two different Italian translations in that year.56 Zola’s novel also contained illustrations, which may have fueled Rosso’s imagination. The great Milanese interest in Zola’s work is evident in the best-known Italian novel with a prostitute as protagonist: Nanà a Milano (1880), by Scapigliatura author Cletto Arrighi. Its author considered it the Italian sequel to Zolà’s Nanà and he wrote it to capitalize on Zola’s success.57 Arrighi transports Zola’s French prostitute to Milan, where she tries unsuccessfully to be redeemed. But Arrighi Italianizes: he describes Nana’s cascading golden-haired head as something that would have “made delirious Tiepolo, Giorgione, and Titian combined.” 58 If prostitutes were not favored subjects of Italian artists of this period (sacred prostitutes were the exception), they were frequently depicted in French Realist painting, and Rosso would have been familiar with these works from the previous decades. Although there is no direct similarity, Rosso would likely have heard about Courbet’s large painting of gaudily dressed modern prostitutes lounging by the Seine titled Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine (été) (Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine [Summer], 1856–57). The painting was also exhibited (including various preparatory sketches) at the retrospective of Courbet’s work held at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in May 1882. It is likely that Rosso would have known about the notorious scandal this particular work had provoked when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1857; Courbet was condemned for his glorification of an insignificant, vulgar subject in a large-scale painting. An even more important conceptual (but not visual) influence on Rosso’s choice of subject matter for Carne altrui must surely have been Manet’s Olympia (1863), first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865. It was the most controversial painting of the nineteenth century. Given its notoriety, it is impossible that this work, or the public outrage it generated in its time, could have escaped Rosso’s notice.59 Rosso might have seen a catalogue of the retrospective exhibition of Manet’s work held at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in January of 1884 with its preface by Zola; he also could have seen a copy of photographer Anatole Godet’s published album of the works in the exhibition. If, in fact, he had traveled to Paris in 1884, as some scholars suggest, he might even have seen Manet’s Olympia at first hand.60 With this painting, Manet defied established artistic conventions surrounding the depiction of the female nude, announcing a new pictorial technique as well as a modern conception of art.61 His prostitute, seen reclining on a bed staring defiantly at the viewer

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FIG. 29 Medardo Rosso, Carne altrui next to Rosso’s reproduction of Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna, titled by Rosso “Pietà Michelange.” Installation at Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904.

while a black servant brings her a bouquet of flowers, presumably from a client, was an uncompromising representation of the subject. Contemporary critics interpreted Olympia as an emblem of modernity; she represented an incomprehensible and inappropriate blurring of public and private spheres, one associated with the dramatic changes that modernity had wrought upon moral and sexual codes. In Carne altrui, Rosso radically disassembled and subverted Manet’s powerful statement by offering a prostitute without a body, detaching her from her commodifiable, sexual, and functional elements. He also removed her from any specific setting, such as a boudoir or a bed or a meeting with a client, representing her instead as only an impression or a glimpse of a face emerging from amorphous matter, seen sleeping or lost in thought. Unlike Manet’s Olympia, who stares back defiantly at us, the eyes of Rosso’s prostitute are inscrutable, denying us full understanding. Rosso’s depiction of a modern prostitute also alludes to a subversion of the burden of Italy’s glorious past. He did this by appropriating for Carne altrui elements of the Italian Renaissance, rephrasing in modern terms Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna (1521–36) that stands on the altar of the Medici Chapel in Florence. Scholars have noted an “inescapable” similarity between Carne altrui and the Medici Madonna’s slanted head, strong nose, and detached psychological state.62 Rosso’s familiarity with this work in the Medici Chapel is confirmed by the fact that at some point in his career he modeled a miniature version of the Medici Madonna and both exhibited it and photographed it alongside the Carne altrui (fig. 29), as if to undermine the Italian Renaissance art tradition.63 Late in his life, although he had used Michelangelo’s work as a springboard for his own, Rosso boasted that when he saw the Medici Chapel “non mi diceva niente” (it said nothing to me).64 The painter and critic Ardengo Soffici recounted in 1910 that “Rosso repeats to anyone who wants to hear him that since his youth he swore to himself that he would not set foot in Florence until he was sure to have brought forth in the world a work that was capable of contradicting and confounding the spirit of our Renaissance which he

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hates.” 65 His method of appropriation as a form of subversion was profoundly modern. Manet, with his Olympia, had transferred to a prostitute the pose of Titian’s Venere di Urbino (Venus of Urbino, 1538), showing a reclining female eroticized and tamed by the domestic setting of a married woman. Rosso similarly contrasted Michelangelo’s Renaissance Madonna with his modern prostitute. Without the title Carne altrui, however, it would be difficult to determine the subject of Rosso’s work other than as a sleeping woman. The entire focus in Carne altrui is on the subject’s face, impressionistically defined by strong features that barely emerge from a lump of roughly modeled clay; the face and the woman’s emotions remain inscrutable. Since the artist incorporated no other descriptive details, the work remains open to interpretation. Rosso found a new way to reject the formal specificity of Realism and the traditional rules of sculpture that read as decidedly avant-garde. The work led to some ambitious flights of fancy. Soffici, for example, suggested: In Flesh of Others . . . we see the misery of the pleasure that has been sold, which worsens and languishes on the poor face of a tired girl. Within the shadow of bangs and the curls that cover her forehead, the eyes take repose from the filth and shame: the sad mouth, still moist from the kisses of strangers, wrinkles into a pout on the sunken cushion. The wilted cheeks, puffy from drunkenness and sleep, offer themselves without desire, and anyone can caress them, touch them without love. You recognize her, my friend: she is both accomplice and victim of our first cowardly acts as men.66

Due to its ambiguous subject matter, scholars have not considered that Rosso’s choice may have been a response to Baudelaire’s suggestion, in his 1863 essay Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life), that the prostitute was an appropriate subject for modern sculpture: “Sometimes [prostitutes] find, without seeking them, poses both provocative and dignified, which would delight the most fastidious sculptor, if only the sculptor of today had the courage and the wit to seize hold of nobility everywhere, even in the mire.” 67 It is noteworthy that in France sculptors did not take up the theme of the prostitute directly. Some sculptures were known to have been based on prostitutes as models; others made veiled references to prostitutes or female perversity; and still others were read by critics as prostitutes, such as Degas’s Petite danseuse de 14 ans (Little Dancer 14 Years Old, 1881). In Italy, unlike France, there were a few examples of sculptures of prostitutes. Carne altrui possesses none of the easy readability of works such as the Tuscan Macchiaolo painter and sculptor Adriano Cecioni’s small statuettes from the early 1870s. I believe that Rosso’s fragment seems far in spirit, concept, and execution from Cecioni’s comical terra-cotta figurines like Cocotte (Courtesan, 1870–71), Vento in poppa (Tailwind, 1870– 71), or Vento in prua (Headwind, 1870–71).68 There are no other important examples of paintings or sculptures of prostitutes produced in Italy in the 1880s. Only in 1894 did Domenico Ghidoni make a figure group titled Le nostre schiave (Our Female Slaves), showing three life-size women seated on a fully sculpted sofa waiting for clients.69

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Ghidoni had been Rosso’s companion at the Brera Academy and was aware of Rosso’s sculpture. Yet Ghidoni’s was hyperrealistic, and the tone was sentimental and moralizing. In Carne altrui, Rosso avoids fully realistic sculpting and refrains from judgment. He therefore leaves room for the viewer’s subjective perception. As he had with Se la fusse grappa!, Rosso used photography to promote Carne altrui. He had the sculpture photographed and professionally printed, and he gave it a bilingual title.70 The prints of the Carne altrui sculpture included the name of “Stab. Turati,” the abbreviated name of the photography studio known as the Stabilimenti Riuniti V. Turati & M. Bassani. Count Vittorio Turati, listed in several biographies as an early owner of Rosso’s sculptures, was a noted innovator in the production of photographic prints of artworks.71 In 1886 or after, Turati published a seven-page manual on his novel photographic printing methods.72 He remains a crucial yet unstudied figure for Rosso’s later interest in shooting and printing his own photographs in unusual ways, which included significant manipulations of the printing process. It is tempting to imagine that Rosso spent enough time in Turati’s studio to glean something of his novel techniques, leading to Rosso’s own experimentation with photographic printing after he moved to Paris.

L A P O RT I N A I A

In subject and style, Rosso’s groundbreaking work of this period, La Portinaia (The Concierge, 1883–84, plate 5), is his first truly modern sculpture.73 Modeled in a forcefully rough, impressionistic style, it represents a concierge, a subject wholly associated with modernity who was a familiar figure in the apartment buildings of Milan in the nineteenth century. A new interest in protecting private spaces from the increasing frenzy and perceived hazards of the modern world resulted in the hiring of female concierges for bourgeois apartment buildings; concierge lodges were first installed in Paris in 1820. The concierge, a low-class figure identified with circulating gossip and symbolizing both modernity and privacy, physically guarded the passageway between the realms of public and private, between bourgeois exposure and withdrawal. The literary historian Sharon Marcus describes her as a kind of “privileged flâneur” with keen powers of observation and surveillance.74 The figure of the concierge was already well established in Italian urban centers by this date. She was also a known literary personage. The word portinaja or portinara can be found in dictionaries of local dialects in the early part of the nineteenth century, as well as in poems and stories, especially after Italian unification.75 The author Carlo Dossi described the concierge’s tendency to gossip in his personal diary, Note Azzurre (Blue Notes, written between 1870 and 1907).76 La portinara also appeared in such Scapigliatura novels as Paolo Valera’s Alla conquista del pane (The Conquest of Bread, 1882) and Cletto Arrighi’s La scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio (The Scapigliatura and February 6, 1862), as well as his Nanà a Milano (Nanà in Milan, 1880). But she appears nowhere in Italian visual art of this time.

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FIGS. 30A, 30B, 30C Honoré Daumier, “Le travail et la vie d’une gardienne d’immeuble,” in James Rousseau, Physiologie de la portière (Paris: Aubert, 1841). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Marcus sees the portière in Paris as symbolizing the social problems of isolation and enclosure brought about by the modern system of apartment buildings. If the essential modernity of the prostitute lay in the fact that she circulated as a worker in the public sphere, the modern portière represented a liminal figure: “The portière was herself a type, whose labor marked her appearance, but her topographical situation (at the door, in the stairwell and vestibule, shuttling between the apartment and the street, and even peering out of the space of the page) also emblematized the key locus of physiognomy—the point where external and internal coincided.” 77 As with his earlier sculptures, Rosso’s choice of subject has been considered to be original. Late in his life he recounted that the inspiration for the work had been the “impression” of the concierge at his building in Milan, and this story has been repeated in the literature.78 But I believe he was also inspired by French sources. Among the most

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FIG. 30B (continued)

important of these were, again, the lithographs of Daumier. Rosso’s concierge strongly resembles the portière caricatured in Daumier’s Locataires et propriétaires (Tenants and Landlords) series, which first appeared in Le Charivari between 1847 and 1848 and again in 1854 and 1856.79 Rosso’s figure can also be compared with that of the portière that appears in Daumier’s illustrations for James Rousseau’s Physiologie de la portière (Physiology of the Doorwoman, 1841, figs. 30a, 30b, 30c).80 Rosso produced La Portinaia soon after the publication of Zola’s novel Pot-bouille (Stew Pot) in 1882, the tenth in the Rougon-Macquart series. The novel appeared between January and April 1882 in the periodical Le Gaulois before being published in book form by Charpentier in 1883 and was widely read in Milanese literary circles, both in French and in Italian translation by Cameroni. Pot-bouille, which featured Madame Gourd the

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FIG. 30C (continued)

portière, was praised by Cameroni in Il Sole immediately after its publication.81 And in May 1885, a play written by the Sicilian author Giovanni Verga (based on his own novella, Il canarino del n. 15 [The Canary in No. 15, 1883]) and titled In portineria (In the Concierge’s Lodge) opened at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan. Rosso’s originality lay in his dramatic disassembling of the language of Realism. By detaching the figure of La Portinaia from its urban working environment, he disconnected it from its identifying iconographic attributes (such as the apron and broom represented by Daumier in his numerous lithographs). Rosso instead left only a hint of her typical bonnet, just as he had done with Carne altrui. The figure’s bowed head, like that of the bodiless prostitute, signals introspection rather than surveillance. The illegibility of La Portinaia as a concierge stands in contrast to the insistent

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readability of Realism, instead suggesting the kind of fleeting, subjective glimpse of a subject that is characteristic of Impressionism. The figure’s self-protection and introversion at once allude to, and protect, a part of one’s identity that an outsider cannot access. By destabilizing the viewer’s ability to grasp the image, Rosso intensified the work’s psychological charge as an object of contemplation that cannot be fully comprehended.

I N T R A N VA I O R I M P R E S S I O N D ’O M N I B U S

Rosso’s realist experiments of this period reached their apex in a revolutionary “monument” to modernity originally titled In tranvai (On a Tramway) and known at least by the mid-1890s as Impression d’omnibus (Impression of an Omnibus, 1884–87, plate 6).82 It is not clear when Rosso began using the word “Impression” in his title. The work survives today only through photographs, annotated variously in Rosso’s hand with the dates 1883 and 1883–84, some of which he distributed, exhibited, and published. The confusion of terminology in defining this work is evident in the first possible mention of it by the critic Mario Mariani in La Commedia umana in November 1885, who saw in Rosso’s studio “a group dal vero (taken from life) that he has been working on for some time now.” 83 Two years later, on April 3, 1887, Chirtani wrote in L’Illustrazione italiana that the sculpture had been promised to that year’s Esposizione Nazionale in Venice but was not yet finished: “If he makes it in time, Rosso Medardo [sic] will present a series of popular types from Porta Garibaldi facing forward on a line above a little tram bench. Rosso has brought into this work his way of interpreting art with great independence, even in relation to reality, by excluding everything that he feels he should leave out of the work, so that his little tram bench can do no less than evoke fierce opposition to him.” 84 By August 14, 1887, the journalist M., who now gave the title of the work as In tranvai, reported that “[Rosso] had also sent [to the exhibition] another group: on a tramway [sic]. But it broke, and he rightly felt deep disappointment.” 85 As Chirtani astutely noted, Rosso’s “monument” represents both a visual account of something observed and a subjective interpretation “even in relation to reality.” In this odd work, Rosso depicted five busts representing local “types”—a sleeping man, a proper young lady, a fat man with a hat, and two for which he provided names—the Marchande de légumes (Female Vegetable Seller) and an older woman he called La concierge (The Doorwoman), the last one perhaps either a prototype for or a reworked version of La Portinaia. The figures were joined by two elements: physically, Rosso placed the busts side by side on a table, and then he attached them together with rough lumps of clay or plaster (the material is not clear from the photograph).86 Metaphorically, he united them through the title; indeed, only the name of the work allowed the viewer to imagine these as figures riding an omnibus. The omnibus was a modern invention. There was no public transportation system in Milan before Italy’s unification except for a few horse-driven carriages. In 1861, following

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FIG. 31 Honoré Daumier, Intérieur d’un omnibus, 1864. Ink, watercolor, and black lithographic crayon on cream, moderately thick, moderately textured woven paper, 21.2 × 30.2 cm. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Photo: © CreativeCommons.

national unification, the Società Anonima degli Omnibus per la Città di Milano (Anonymous Society of Omnibuses for the City of Milan, or SAO) was created to provide a network of horse-drawn omnibuses to the city (the first was the Milan–Monza line, inaugurated on July 8, 1876). By 1881, in honor of the opening of the Esposizione Nazionale, tracks were laid for new electric omnibuses and a few began to circulate. By 1887, these vehicles began to appear around the city.87 However, they were not represented anywhere in Italian painting or sculpture of the 1880s. Rosso’s remarkable sculpture was not simply a visual translation of a new aspect of daily life in Milan or “verismo” of the kind conjured in Milanese literature and in social commentary of the day. Rosso drew on, and ingeniously reconfigured into three dimensions, a well-known lithograph by Daumier titled Intérieur d’un omnibus that first appeared in Le Monde Illustré on January 30, 1864 (fig. 31).88 Daumier’s frequently reproduced lithograph shows a controller standing at the entrance of the omnibus to the left of the scene and five passengers seated side by side on the bench inside. From left to right, Daumier shows an old woman with a child in her lap, a large man with a hat who takes up most of the seating space, and a prim-looking young woman who stares suspiciously at a man who has fallen asleep, seated to her left.

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The only known photograph of Rosso’s whole sculpture (never cast into a final medium in his lifetime) reveals that it was designed almost as a mirror image of Daumier’s lithograph, suggesting that Rosso either reversed the order of Daumier’s figures or that he printed the photograph of his work in reverse. Indeed, if one reverses Rosso’s photograph, the sculpture has clear links to Daumier’s print but with some modifications. Rosso replicated Daumier’s old woman (but without the child), the man with the hat, the prim young woman, and the sleeping man. But between the hatted man and the prim woman he added another woman, this one wearing a bonnet. Further, the sleeping man leans away from the prim woman rather than toward her. In his studio photograph of the model for the sculpture, Rosso could not resist placing himself in the exact position of the conductor in Daumier’s print; a reversal of the photograph shows the sculptor as if he is entering the scene at the left. However, what renders Rosso’s sculpture remarkable is the way in which he abolished all the carefully described interactions that created humor in Daumier’s print. He replaced the uncomfortable gazes of Daumier’s two women with obscure, introverted expressions, so that each figure appears to be absorbed in his or her own thoughts. He also reduced the exaggerated proportions of the large central figure of the man with the hat in Daumier’s print, so that each of the busts is roughly similar in size and occupies its own separate physical space. Daumier’s overlapping bodies, with which the caricaturist created a sense of social tension and unease, now do not touch one another at all. Indeed, Rosso’s complete elimination of the figures’ lower bodies renders such bodily contact impossible. The rough globs of material he inserts between the figures in order to connect them serve to reinforce their separateness even as they are fused into one object. Further, Rosso removed the regularly spaced, brightly lit windows that form the background to Daumier’s scene and framed each figure with a unified blank ground. Finally, he avoided any version of the humorous advertisements in Daumier’s print, one of which is a promotion for “peintures” (paintings) signed by “H. Daumier” himself. Most importantly, Impression d’omnibus shows Rosso addressing some of the pressing issues suggested by the sculptors of the French avant-garde, specifically how to establish a modern artistic idiom for monumental sculpture. It can be compared to Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais (The Burghers of Calais, 1884–89, fig. 32), the most innovative multifigure monument of the same years, commissioned by the city of Calais. The sculpture was intended to commemorate an event during the siege of Calais by the English in 1347 during the Hundred Years’ War. To break the siege, six of the city’s leaders, among them Eustache de Saint Pierre, described as the wealthiest member of the group and the first to rise to save Calais, were asked to surrender themselves, presumably to be executed. Rodin represents the six men as they presented themselves to the English, with nooses around their necks and the keys to the city placed in the hands of the burgher Jean d’Aire. While we do not know how much direct knowledge Rosso had of Rodin’s work, a comparison between these two contemporary works is instructive.89 The subjects are completely different: Rodin’s monument represented a historical subject, while Rosso

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FIG. 32 Auguste Rodin, Les Bourgeois de Calais, 1884–89. Bronze. Place du Soldat Inconnu, Calais, France.

chose an urban subject from his experience of the modern world. But both artists adopted a modern, unheroic, existential language. Both works also radically break up the traditional language of monumental sculpture. In Les Bourgeois de Calais, Rodin deconstructed the unity of the traditional monument, creating instead six individually sculpted figures. Rosso, too, made his six figures function as separate portraits of equal weight and significance as well as elements in a single, unified sculpture. He even photographed his busts together and separately, as did Rodin with the figures from Les Bourgeois de Calais. In different ways, Rodin and Rosso both attempted to dismantle and democratize the single, hierarchical, heroic moment that had defined monumental sculpture. Since he was not working on a public commission, however, Rosso was free to pursue a more radical agenda than his French colleague. In spite of his remarkable innovations in Les Bourgeois de Calais, Rodin relied on a known historical narrative. He also respected that it was a public work and observed in it the basic conventions of the traditional sculptural monument in terms of size, scale, and the use of the fully articulated human body. In contrast to Rodin’s sculpture, Rosso’s Impression d’omnibus was a modern tableau not based on an established narrative of any kind—in fact, it blocked any potential interpretation based on a “story.” Departing from the strictly sculptural, Rosso combined the

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vocabularies of sculpture and modern two-dimensional art as he had done in some of his previous works, making a three-dimensional work that seems from the photograph not to have been modeled at all at the back. Its revolutionary quality lay in the fact that it was a freestanding sculpture not made to be seen in the round but rather like a painting or a print. It confounded the traditional divisions between the sculptural relief and the selfsupporting sculpture. Both Rosso and Rodin dismantled the traditional sculptural base, although in different ways. While Rodin used an unprecedentedly low base for Les Bourgeois de Calais to allow viewers to literally come up to the work, Rosso abolished the base altogether by fusing his figures with the lumps of clay or plaster so that the connected figures themselves formed the “base” of the work. Like Rodin, Rosso envisioned a new, active role for the viewer by creating a sense of having “entered” the space of the sculpture. The viewer can imagine him- or herself having boarded the bus and sitting directly across from these sculpted figures, just as, through its accessibility, Rodin’s work allows the viewer the notion of participating in the actions of his anguished figures. In contrast to Rodin’s historical subject, by which he connected his work to the viewer through the universality of its theme of human suffering, Rosso’s modern urban theme captured the viewer’s daily experience. The distinctive radicalism of Rosso’s Omnibus is also evident when we compare the two sculptors’ treatment of the human body. In Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais, he suggests the suffering of the figures through their bodies and allows us to measure their bodies against our own. Indeed, in this work Rodin expanded, to an extreme, the expressiveness of the sculpted body to enhance our sense of his subjects’ spiritual anguish. By contrast, and in spite of their apparent accessibility to the viewer, the tension in Rosso’s work derives from the fact that the individual busts on his imaginary bus are completely removed from the physical scuffling often typical of an actual bus ride, and so Rosso denies the viewer any physical understanding of the complete scene. Rosso also abstracted the faces to the extent that no psychological insight of the kind exposed by Rodin is possible. Rather, Rosso’s figures wear the typical modern mask of blank introspection in public spaces. Indeed, with his Impression d’omnibus, Rosso proposed that a large-scale sculpture could allude to human presence without fully representing the human form. While Rodin’s monument had an enormous impact on the sculptors of his time, Rosso’s work was un-commissioned and ultimately not exhibited; Impression d’omnibus nonetheless entered the public discourse on modern sculpture in a rather unorthodox and highly modern way. Like Rodin, Rosso used photography to rephrase the traditional public exhibition and reception of a monument. He photographed each figure separately and then even attempted to “recompose” the sculptural group in a new manner by superimposing the plates of the separate busts together on one photographic sheet. Paola Mola has convincingly shown that this process demonstrates Rosso’s early experimentation with collage (although the term was not established for art until the technique was used

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by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso early in the twentieth century).90 Rosso’s works of this kind might also be described as a precocious form of “photomontage,” again, a word not used until much later, in this case in 1931. Finally, the way the work continued to circulate without the original object gives a sense of its transnational impact. After his arrival in Paris in 1889, Rosso would circulate photographs of the Impression d’omnibus. He is known to have shown photographs of details from it to Zola and Edmond de Goncourt in 1889, and the sculptor recorded in a letter Goncourt’s approbation.91 He also often told people he had shown the photographs to Degas, who he said admired them deeply (mistaking the work for a painting, to Rosso’s delight), although this is not confirmed in Degas’s diaries or anywhere else.92 It is possible, given his predilection for self-promotion, especially to important public figures, that Rosso also showed the photographs of the Impression d’omnibus to Rodin after they became acquainted in 1894. The Symbolist critic Camille de Sainte-Croix, who had seen the photographs in 1896, described the work in detail in a thirteen-page article on Rosso in the Mercure de France, a journal whose readership included the most progressive French artists and cultural figures of the time.93 Rosso also showed them in 1902 to the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who wrote a chapter on Rosso in his 1904 history of modern art, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst (Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics).94 Rosso even exhibited some of the fragmented figures as photographs in an unusual installation he created at the Salon d’Automne of 1904 (see chapter 8). These photographs of the destroyed sculpture group continued to circulate in publications long after Rosso’s death. In sum, while Rosso was a man of his time, I believe that his art eludes classification or inclusion in any single European movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. The work lends itself to being seen in terms of both Realism and Impressionism, but it is also so much more. In Impression d’Omnibus, Rosso intuited something about the unheroic possibilities inherent in modern sculpture that later artists would articulate more fully. One twentieth-century example is the American Pop artist George Segal’s life-size Bus Riders (1962, fig. 33), a plaster sculpture of the same subject: figures on a bus ride. Although made in a very different time, place, and cultural context, Segal’s work also depicts everyday life and spaces and shows unheroic people with their individual gestures and inner lives. Rosso’s sculptural group intuited some of the ambiguities that Segal would later express—between the figure and its environment, and the individuality of each person represented and the uniformity of the plaster casts. In particular, the whiteness of the plaster casts in Segal’s work conveys a sense of ghostliness that is at once artificial and real, so that the work both does and does not convey a slice of lived reality. Although Segal may have not known Rosso’s work, his sculpture conveys a similar sense of silence, which reflected the “urban experience of alienation, where everybody is enclosed within themselves, making no eye contact,” thereby contrasting the figures’ frozen inactivity with the bus’s forward movement.95

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FIG. 33 George Segal, Bus Riders, 1962. Plaster, cotton gauze, leather, vinyl, steel, and wood, 177.8 × 107.6 × 230.4 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photo: Lee Stalsworth. © George and Helen Segal Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY.

What makes Rosso’s art important and original is not so much whether he did or did not fit into the artistic movements of his time, but rather the way in which his art expressed themes that would become important for twentieth-century artists even outside his immediate national context. In chapter 4 I shall describe the broadening of Rosso’s work, from a national to an international outlook.

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Internationalism and Experimentation

4 INTERNATIONALISM AND EXPERIMENTATION

Rosso’s career in the mid- to late 1880s cannot be adequately understood without reference to the increasingly unstable political climate in Italy during that time. The period was one of growing tensions, caused not only by Italy’s fragile democratic system but also by its foreign policy decisions, which were determined by the nationalism of the ruling class and its supporters. The country had joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, and it imposed severe trade restrictions on France, thereby intensifying animosity between France and Italy. Rosso could not hope to find substantial support at home; he was attempting to present a modern artistic vision to a disoriented, fragmented country that was experiencing a severe crisis of identity. It is therefore not surprising that Rosso exhibited in only one more Italian show—in Venice—-in 1887. The main thrust of his new exhibition strategy was to send his works abroad.

THE JURIED PARISIAN SALONS OF 1885 AND 1886

In the 1880s, foreign artists actively sought international venues as launching pads for success in their home countries.1 Since the French Revolution, the Paris Salons were open to artists from other nations. Rosso took advantage of the opportunity to submit several small, serially produced works to the Paris Salons of 1885 and 1886. Although Rosso exhibited at these Salons, he was unwilling to show any of his newest works, which suggests his concern about how those works would be received. At the Salon of 1885 at the Grand Palais, he exhibited his bronze Garibaldian soldier, now retitled with a

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descriptive name that would be more appealing to foreigners: Bersagliere, tirailleur italien en vedette (Italian Marksman on a Scouting Mission, 1883).2 At the Salon of 1886 he showed bronze casts of his Mère et son enfant endormis (Mother and Her Sleeping Child, 1883) and his earlier Dopo una scappata, later known as Il Birichino (Street Urchin) but now retitled Gavroche (1882, see fig. 6), thereby making an explicit reference to Victor Hugo’s popular character from Les Misérables from which he had originally drawn inspiration for his figure (See fig. 7).3 After five years of sporadic critical support in Italy, Rosso was thrilled that a number of French critics noticed his works and remarked especially upon their lively quality. His scrapbook, preserved in the Archivio Medardo Rosso, contains several of these press clippings. Joseph Noulens wrote, for example, that in “Mother and Her Sleeping Child— life overflows and the flesh palpitates,” 4 and an anonymous critic stated that “Gavroche and Mother and Her Sleeping Child, by M. Rosso, are two bronze casts that I recommend to those who love lively [vivant] sculpture and heads that breathe.” 5 Rosso underlined “vivant” in his copy of this review. Alphonse Germain, who would become one of the most important Symbolist critics, closed his article on the Salon with a final note about “a hardy Gavroche by M. Rosso.” 6 Finally, in a review of the Salon of 1886 in L’Opinion, the critic and homme de lettres Edmond Thiaudière singled out Rosso’s work, noting, “Here is an Italian sculptor who happily avoids the usual Italianisms. He is not a lace needle-pointer in marble, making exquisite work, but a bit too affected and precious”; he further stated that Rosso “masterfully founds . . . Impressionist sculpture.” 7 None of these early works, however, was modeled in an Impressionist style. Thiaudière’s statement suggests that there was, as yet, no sense of what modern sculpture might look like. Anything that looked new or different might have been labeled “impressionist” and Thiaudière clearly found Rosso’s sculptures different looking in comparison with typical Italian sculpture of the time. In a broader sense, his comment is indicative of the breakdown of meaning and categories often noted to have occurred in 1886, which was the final year of the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris. Thiaudière’s laudatory review might have had something to do with the fact that Rosso was involved with an international-minded network of journalists in Milan. Thus, Thiaudière might have had advance information about the artist’s upcoming exhibition in Paris. It is possible, too, that he received a well-placed request from a Milanese critic to publish a few lines about Rosso’s work. Rosso scholars have not noted that Thiaudière was not merely a journalist but also a philosopher. He was one of the founders of Société Française pour l’Arbitrage entre Nations, as well as a fellow pacifist and a longtime friend of Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, the director of Il Secolo, the most widely read democratic Milanese daily of the time. As the historian Francesca Canale Cama notes, Il Secolo was “a cultural as much as a political network.” 8 Rosso’s letters confirm that he was friendly with Carlo Romussi, Moneta’s editor in chief.9 Clearly Rosso’s outlook was being shaped by the important political currents of progressive internationalism that had begun to develop in Milan. Moneta was the strongest

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promoter of this new spirit of universalism. It is likely that Rosso was drawn to Moneta’s democratic and liberal ideas. Influenced by such intellectuals as Giosuè Carducci, Moneta rejected the government’s rationale for joining the Triple Alliance against France; his ideas were formed in response to the “incipient Francophobia” that was emerging in Italy at that time.10 In 1907 Moneta became the only Italian to win the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his internationalist ideas about world peace and brotherhood.11 Rosso’s attraction to internationalist ideas as espoused by Moneta, an ardent Freemason, might explain another significant fact omitted from Rosso’s biographies: his application to join the Freemasonry in 1889. His request was rejected.12

INDEPENDENT PARISIAN SALONS OF 1885 AND 1886

Scholars note, but do not attribute significance to, the fact that Rosso was one of the few Italian sculptors to send works to some of the earliest independent shows that began to appear in 1884 following the Impressionist exhibitions. Rosso’s knowledge of such new shows indicates that he was alert to the latest prospects for showing modern art very soon after they had begun to appear in Paris. At the small Salon du Groupe des Artistes Indépendants held in Paris in 1885 (a short-lived offshoot of the newly formed Société des Artistes Indépendants that had established an exhibition, free of juries, the previous year), he showed two of his earlier bronze casts, a laughing old man originally titled Il Vecchio (The Old Man, 1883, see fig. 13) and a laughing old woman originally titled Fine (End, also known as La Ruffiana, 1883, see fig. 12), which still were in the Realist style. However, Rosso strategically retitled the pair for the 1885 exhibition with the Ovidian names Philémon and Baucis.13 Although scholars have not noted possible reasons for this curious title change, it is tempting to imagine that he chose the names to recall the story of hospitality given by the old couple to strangers in a foreign land. French critics again singled these works out for their liveliness—to Rosso’s great pleasure (although they were not his most radical or impressionistic works). It is worth noting that Rosso was the only Italian to exhibit in the show, which included 335 paintings; 144 drawings, cartoons, and porcelains; and 27 statuettes, busts, and small figure groups, as well as a few architectural drawings. The opportunities these new, independently run venues offered for foreign artists have not yet been studied systematically. Rosso’s interest in engaging with realms of advanced French art indicates his early attunement to new alternative options in Paris for foreigners. His growing desire to associate his art with that of the French avant-garde meant that he was also among only a handful of Italian artists to send work to the second Salon de la Société des Indépendants in Paris in 1886. Founded two years earlier by the painters Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Odilon Redon, and others, this Salon quickly became the main site for the promotion of Post-Impressionist painting. Again Rosso presented an older work, a bronze cast of Fine / La Ruffiana, but now under a far more neutral title—Portrait de vieille femme (Portrait of an Old Woman)—along with his

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Bersagliere (ca. 1882, plate 2), described in a review generically as a “buste d’un troupier” (bust of a trouper), both of which reflected the Realist style of his earlier period.14 Rosso’s caution paid off: through his participation in these exhibitions, he gained confidence and visibility. He also sold four of the works he exhibited in Paris in these years—the buyer listed as “Pesce” in the margins of the original auction catalogue was actually an Italian friend of Rosso’s rather than a major international collector.15 Italian newspapers promptly reported on Rosso’s Parisian successes. An unnamed journalist boasted in L’Illustrazione italiana that Rosso had already sold about sixty bronzes, although this number might have been an exaggeration.16 On November 1, 1885, in the “Almanacco” of the weekly journal La Commedia umana, the critic Mario Mariani published a five-page illustrated article on the sculptor, including a drawn portrait of him as well as drawings of his early works. Mariani defined Rosso as a Verista (a form of Italian naturalism that had its roots in the writings of Zola, but developed its own manner of detached observation and impersonal language) and praised his works for their subversion of the typical “licked, messed with, worked on” heads that “don’t say anything.” 17 Using the Italian word “impressione” in the same piece, Mariani also described Rosso’s project as an attempt to find the right moment and the right concept, “and thus render the impressions as they are felt and received.” 18 He thus avoided the discussion of realistic representation of life and optics, instead focusing on the “impression” as a subjective interpretation by the artist.

VENETIAN SHOW IN 1887

Even though Rosso was gaining a measure of recognition abroad, he was still seeking out exhibition venues at home. In his only Italian exhibition of the period, the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica in Venice in 1887, he finally exhibited his most advanced new works, which I discussed in detail in the previous chapter: Se la fusse grappa! (If Only It Were Grappa!, 1883, plate 3), here mounted on a baptismal font; La Portinaia (The Concierge, 1883–84, plate 5); and Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84, plate 4). He also presented three older ones: Cantante a spasso (Unemployed Singer, ca. 1882–83, see fig. 14), Amor materno (Maternal Love, 1882, see fig. 25), and Fine. Fine was the bust of the old woman, mounted in an unusual fashion on a large section of an old door with the word “Fine” scrawled on it (fig. 34).19

LONDON SHOW IN 1888

In 1888, seeking further international opportunities, Rosso exhibited in the massive Italian Exhibition held in Earl’s Court in London, whose art section was organized by the Milanese dealer Alberto Grubicy. Italy’s involvement in a customs dispute with France threatened to halt trade with one of Italy’s major trading partners. Italians hoped to gain access to new markets, specifically Great Britain and its colonies. The art historian

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FIG. 34 Medardo Rosso, Fine [La Ruffiana], 1883. Professional photograph, date of photograph unknown but pre-1887. Raccolte Grafiche e Fotografiche del Castello Sforzesco. Civico Archivio Fotografico, Fondo Vitali, Milan.

Antonella Bestaggini notes that both the Italian government and private businesses enthusiastically supported the Italian Exhibition, but the Italian government was unable to sponsor the initiative because of fragile economic conditions. It thus became a private enterprise, but the Italian government helped by granting all exhibitors a reduction on railway fares and free carriage of goods to England by a state-owned ship. However, the organizers in London were concerned that Italy was still in the grip of that “natural apathy inherent in the Italian character.” 20 Rosso sent four works to the show, three of which he had already exhibited elsewhere. The titles were changed in order to appeal to British audiences. Gavroche now became

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FIG. 35 Medardo Rosso, Aetas aurea, late 1885–86. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

the more neutral A Scamp (this version was in bronze and was purchased by the British army officer Captain Charles Balfour, who would become a famous politician); El Locch (The Hooligan, 1882, plate 1) was generically re-baptized Street Boy; and Se la fusse grappa! was translated into English as “Oh That It Were Whiskey!”, the Italian alcoholic beverage now transformed into the popular British and Scottish fermented malt libation.21 Rosso also exhibited a new sculpture called Golden Wedding (late 1885–86), later called Aetas aurea (Golden Age, fig. 35), a work that he might have withheld from the Venice exhibition.22 Aetas aurea represented a major shift in Rosso’s approach. This sculpture injected a highly subjective, emotional note and a stronger “impressionistic” style into his work. It was the first time he appears to have made a significant artistic statement drawn directly from his personal life (aside from the small figurine Cantante a spasso, considered today to be a self-portrait). The following section therefore requires a digression into

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biographical details of the period that led up to the creation of the work. By 1883, the Rosso family home on Via Montebello 3 had begun to empty out. On February 4, 1883, his brother Michele married. Rosso’s mother died on November 10, 1884, and was buried in Milan. His father remained in the family home until February 11, 1886, but then resettled permanently in Turin.23 On April 16, 1885, in the City Hall of Milan, at the age of twenty-six, Rosso married the eighteen-year-old Giuditta Pozzi, a young girl from nearby Pessina Cremonese, who was by that time two months pregnant. The Neapolitan painter Isidoro Farina was registered as his witness at the wedding. A drawing of Farina made by Rosso and dedicated to the painter, hitherto unidentified, likely dates to this period and attests to the friendship.24 Rosso was thus the last member of the family to leave home, when he moved with his new wife to a flat on Via Alessandro Volta 18 (and not, as biographies claim, on via Giuseppe Giusti). Their son was born on November 7, 1885, and was baptized on November 22, 1885, at the church of Santa Maria Incoronata in Milan, with the defiant name Francesco. Evviva Ribelle (Francesco. Hurrah Rebel). The name, perhaps considered too irreverent, was inscribed and then crossed out in the baptismal registry of the church but was registered on the child’s birth certificate.25 Scholars believe that Aetas aurea records the joy Rosso felt as a new father. He modeled the work in clay and then cast it several times in bronze (and later in plaster and wax).26 According to the artist’s son, the sculpture represents Medardo’s young wife embracing her newborn child. The work also relates in subject to his earlier, more realistically sculpted mother and child, Amor materno, but it now demonstrates Rosso’s confident handling of a more “impressionist” modeling style in which the face of the mother becomes fused with that of the child. As with the previous works, the back of the sculpture is not modeled. The art historian Rosalind Krauss has suggested that with this work Rosso, like Auguste Rodin, was reconsidering the traditional sculptural relief, especially the relief established between ground and figures. In her opinion, Rodin’s sculptural group of La Porte de l’Enfer (The Gates of Hell, 1880–1918) was more radical in both respects. With this piece, Rodin first established the ground as a completely separate, concrete element to be read as detached from the figures that emerge from it. She contends that Rosso’s reliefs did not achieve a modern interpretative opacity or self-sufficiency, that Rosso’s work continues to allude to traditional narratives, and that “no matter how ruffled and bruised the skin of [Rosso’s] The Golden Age . . . these surfaces . . . continue to refer beyond themselves to an unseen side, to a previous moment in the narrative chain, to project inward toward an internal emotional condition.” 27 In short, she opines that Rosso did not go far enough in the quest for modern abstraction. I believe, however, that despite sharing similar concerns, Rosso’s modernity is distinct from that of Rodin and that abstraction was not his ultimate goal. Rosso’s Aetas aurea alludes to that very “internal emotional condition” and its heightened intensity. In this work, Rosso discovered a sculptural language with which to represent a mutable, psychological, living moment that is absent from the Impressionist canon, as well as from traditional sculpture,

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which typically renders human emotions clear, eternal, and immediately intelligible for the viewer. Rosso, instead, makes the emotional situation contingent, ambiguous, suggestive, and perhaps tense. He thereby transmits to the viewer a vivid paradox: a deep affective relationship, an essential emotional truth, but one that is not entirely transparent and that seems to occur in the fugitive temporal space of an instant. It is as if we are glimpsing a sudden, intensely private moment of intimacy between a mother and her child, a fleetingly exposed stato d’animo that is all the more precious because of its transitory nature. As the critic Michael Brenson has eloquently written of this work, in contrast to Rosso’s usual insistence on reserved, introverted figures, “the tension between directness and secretness, nakedness and privacy, can be almost excruciating.” 28 Aetas aurea allows us a better grasp of Rosso’s own understanding of Impressionism at that moment. In a letter published on the occasion of the Venice Esposizione Nazionale Artistica of 1887, he defined his project not just as a revolution in optics, visual perception, and the effects of light, but also as part of a subjective, quasi-romantic desire to render, in sculpture, what “makes an impression upon me. . . . I try to excite human passions through the impression.” 29 This perception can be likened to what the art historian Richard Shiff has described as “the subjectivity of Impressionism . . . [as] the means to an experience through which the true could be apprehended in an act of seeing.” 30 Such an attitude would become evident in paintings by Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh in the late 1880s. Rosso felt a special affinity with the works of these two painters, especially after his later move to Paris.31

F U N E R A RY C O M M I S S I O N S I N M I L A N

Back in Milan, Rosso began to take on funerary art commissions due to pressing economic needs, notably supporting his family and paying his debts. These considerations led him to deviate temporarily from his radical artistic ambitions. At the same time, funerary works provided him with an opportunity for public exposure. One of the more traditional sculptures he made was a small monument for the tomb of Carlo Carabelli (1886), which can no longer be found in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.32 The work was mentioned—positively—in an article by Luigi Chirtani, confirming that, in spite of his nationalistic artistic views, the critic continued to support Rosso’s career.33 A note on Rosso’s relationship with foundries is useful here. In his review, Chirtani noted that Carabelli was a metal founder. Carabelli may have worked in the Fonderia Giovanni Strada in Milan, where Rosso was known to cast his sculptures, and it is possible that Rosso made the funerary monument as a gesture of friendship or to repay a foundry debt.34 Rosso’s relationship with foundry workers is further indicated by the fact that, when he separated from his wife and child in 1888, he went to live in the home of Francesco Lodi, the director of the Strada Foundry, at via Lazzaro Palazzi 29.35 As his family life deteriorated, Rosso made a final effort to gain recognition in Italy. Undoubtedly encouraged by his Parisian successes, he decided to present his new

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sculptural ideas in large-scale public form through two ambitious funerary monuments commissioned for important Italian journalists. The first, made in 1888–89, was a tribute to the intransigent political journalist Vincenzo Brusco Onnis (1822–1888) (plate 7). This work was a prelude to Rosso’s most powerful yet disjunctive public work to that date, his 1889 monument to Italy’s celebrated music critic Filippo Filippi (1830–1887) (plate 8).36 These monuments still stand today in the Cimitero Monumentale but have been disregarded by scholars. I contend that they give two accounts of how Rosso’s “impressionist” position reflected his radical artistic ideas, as well as his political and cultural internationalist outlook. Brusco Onnis was a controversial personality. He had been a major cultural and political activist during the Risorgimento, and he had remained the most loyal of Giuseppe Mazzini’s followers, even after the leader’s death and when the radical democracy he had dreamed of fell out of favor and survived only in a small but influential group of the republican left. The commission probably was awarded to Rosso through one of these radical figures, his friend Felice Cameroni, who had worked for Brusco Onnis on the journal Unità italiana from 1869 to 1870.37 Cameroni might have felt that Rosso’s rebellious artistic language would be appropriate to the subject, especially given the patriot’s similarly uncompromising character and enduring faith in his political vision. Rosso’s funerary monument to Brusco Onnis has been largely ignored. It is not discussed at all in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci’s catalogue raisonné, and the art historian Luciano Caramel briefly remarks that the monument is essentially traditional. But a closer examination reveals that the work is highly unorthodox in its experimentation with idioms that would later become key elements of the vocabulary of modern sculpture. To begin with, Rosso disregarded all the usual conventions of harmony and proportion associated with traditional sculptural monuments. Instead, he broke the piece apart into various sections that make the work confusing and difficult to read. The monument consists of a roughly sculpted, yet flattened and relief-like (nearly two-dimensional), representation of a single large head and part of a bust in a three-quarter pose, cast in bronze. The head is installed on an oddly thin and flattened bronze pedestal. The head is also wider than the pedestal, so that the pedestal cannot support it, thereby reversing the traditional proportions and relationship between sculpture and base. Rosso covered the base with traditional allegorical motifs intended to represent aspects of the patriot’s life, including a strip with the Mazzinian words “Dio e Popolo” (God and Countrymen) at the bottom, with a bronze cast of a spear or dagger placed at the foot of the pedestal behind the strip. However, he added unusual modern elements of process by including drips of clay, later cast in bronze and attached to the “pedestal,” to note only the date of Brusco Onnis’s death. Additionally, a sharp tool incised into the wet clay before casting spells out the name of the deceased diagonally across the pedestal, contributing to the play with relief as well as the asymmetry and strangeness of the whole. Finally, the work was too thin and flat to stand up on its own, so Rosso attached it to the far wall of the cemetery on a cement plaque.

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FIG. 36 Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis (detail of urn), 1888–89. Bronze. Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. Photo: Angelica Litta.

Like other radical political journalists of this period, Brusco Onnis was cremated in Milan’s Crematorium, and Rosso incorporated a version of his urn at the foot of the thin “base” next to an identically cast urn in honor of the patriot’s daughter Lina. However, he also left protruding from the urn itself the marks of his working process—the sprues he had used for casting the bronze, normally chiseled away after a cast has been made. This detail was something never seen before in a finished sculpture (fig. 36). The right side of the pedestal, below the strip of clay that records Brusco Onnis’s name, also features a crucial fragment of a highly controversial political symbol that has gone unnoticed. Rosso sculpted two identical female warrior heads, each wearing the Phrygian cap, an emblem of liberty in ancient Rome that was appropriated by the revolutionaries in France and became known as Marianne (plate 9).38 The inclusion of this symbol can only be read as a direct gesture to France and as an explicit reference to the French Revolution. At the same time, it is an evocation of the spirit of French defiance in the face of tyranny. By placing such an obviously French motif on Brusco Onnis’s tomb, Rosso summoned the deceased’s international political outlook, one suggesting the universality of the concept of political freedom. Indeed, Mazzini, a convinced republican and the ideological source for the idea of a unified Italy, had been tireless in professing the importance of establishing alliances among nations and brotherhoods, much as Moneta had

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done but from a different perspective. Additionally, Rosso’s reference to Marianne places his interest in France within the political framework of the most radical democratic republican group left in Italy. Its members inherited the ideas of the politician and journalist Alberto Mario and included such figures as the outspoken promoter of free thought Arcangelo Ghisleri and the historian Carlo Tivaroni. Like Brusco Onnis and the Mazzinian patriot and politician Aurelio Saffi, Ghisleri and Tivaroni continued, in different ways, to uphold the anti-monarchical and internationalist legacy of Mazzini. In 1883, a year after Giuseppe Garibaldi’s death, these men, declaring their affinity with France of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, began to openly extol the French revolutionary ideas of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. According to them, this was the France that had inspired the national Italian conscience and that should now serve as the model for a stagnant Italian nation in search of an identity. In accord with this spirit, in 1883 the Italian poet Giosué Carducci published twelve sonnets in Italian titled Ça ira. Settembre MDCCXCII, based on an emblematic song of the French Revolution. In gesturing to Marianne, Rosso aligned himself with the most advanced French sculpture of the nineteenth century and also expressed his internationalist aspirations. The Romantic sculptor François Rude’s enormous decoration on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, titled Le Départ des Volontaires en 1792 (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, also known as La Marseillaise, 1833–36), was the most famous of these motifs in French sculpture. In 1878 the young Rodin had sculpted a similar figure, titled La Défense ou L’Appel aux Armes (The Defense or The Call to Arms), for a competition for a monument to the French Republic and the defense of Paris. Rodin drew inspiration from Rude, as well as from Michelangelo’s Pietà (1548–55), which is in the Florence Duomo. If Rosso had, in fact, gone to Paris during the mid-1880s, as some scholars believe, he might have seen Rude’s work.39 But he did not need to go to Paris: it was reproduced full-page in Italy in Chirtani’s 1874 Le meraviglie della scultura, a translation of Louis Viardot’s Les merveilles de la sculpture (The Marvels of Sculpture, 1869).40 Rosso’s monument did not please Italian critics of his time. The mixed reviews that his design received began to appear immediately after the monument was inaugurated on March 25, 1889, the last stop in the solemn patriotic procession of the Commemorazione delle Cinque Giornate (Commemoration of the Five Days). The day of the unveiling was itself politically inflected; it was a celebration of Milanese resistance to Austrian occupation in 1848, considered a key prelude to the Risorgimento. The reviews indicate that the work created significant confusion. Some critics did not speak of it at all. The anonymous critic of Il Sole (perhaps Cameroni) only praised Rosso as “an artist who is as modest as he is talented and original,” 41 as did the critics of the local newspapers L’Italia42 and the moderate La Lombardia, who, however, also described Rosso as a “bizarre” artist.43 The Mazzinian politician Aurelio Saffi wrote a letter to Rosso commending the work but did not mention its modernity.44 The unnamed critic of Il Secolo approved only the resemblance of Rosso’s head to that of the deceased.45 This critic openly expressed his confusion; by deploring what he called Rosso’s “excessive contrived

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carelessness” and the tendency of the work “to be only sketched out,” he alluded to his dislike of Rosso’s “impressionist” style.46 Rosso’s final and most revolutionary funerary monument, to the music critic Filippo Filippi, was unveiled three months after the one for Brusco Onnis, in June of 1889.47 There exist no scholarly discussions of the monument whatsoever. Books on Rosso only mention it in passing, and it is not described in the catalogue raisonné. Surprisingly, as with the Brusco Onnis tomb, scholars have written it off as another lapse by Rosso into conventional ottocento artistic styles.48 I contend, instead, that this is a radical monument in which the language of monumental sculpture is completely overturned. Although Filippi’s name is forgotten today, he dominated the Milanese cultural scene of his time (fig. 37).49 His column on music appeared regularly in the democratic daily newspaper La Perseveranza from 1859 until his death at age fifty-seven in 1887.50 He wrote extensively on Giuseppe Verdi and Gioacchino Rossini and was the author of the first authoritative work on Giacomo Puccini. He supported the composer Arrigo Boito’s controversial opera Mefistofele, based on Goethe’s Faust, when it was presented at La Scala opera house in Milan in 1868; this work was an attempt to bring international elements into Italian opera.51 Filippi was best known for his enthusiastic defense of Richard Wagner. In 1881 Filippi declared his openly internationalist perspective, stating, “Once the doors of the great Art [of opera] had opened to the universal products of genius without too much nationalist pride, our theater . . . became enriched by foreign masterpieces.” 52 In addition to his work as a music critic, Filippi had a professional interest in art and was a regular at the Famiglia Artistica, where Rosso had exhibited his first work.53 Rosso probably knew Filippi through this connection. The fact that Rosso was awarded the commission for the tomb of the pro-Wagnerian Filippi is consonant with the artist’s alignment with the most avant-garde and internationally oriented wing of the Milanese cultural and political world of the 1880s. My research indicates that there was a public subscription taken up to pay for a monument in Filippi’s honor. The fact that the local papers did not mention the names of other sculptors competing for the Filippi monument commission suggests that there was no true competition for it. In any case, the selection of Rosso was neither publicly described nor explained.54 As with the Brusco Onnis tomb, Cameroni might have influenced the selection of Rosso, given his friendship with both Rosso and Filippi.55 Rosso’s model was chosen by a committee of Filippi’s friends that included music editors, such as the brothers Tito and Giulio Ricordi, as well as people from the Milanese music world, including the critics and editors Alessandro Fano, Leone Fortis, and Paolo Auban. It was paid for by public donations, many from friends and colleagues of the deceased. This account contradicts the anecdote first printed by Ettore Cozzani and repeated by Mino Borghi that Rosso had already cast and put a portrait of Filippi at the cemetery while the committee was busy deliberating on how to judge the competition.56 When the jury protested, Rosso was said to have angrily responded that because Filippi was his friend, he had made his portrait and expected no remuneration.

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FIG. 37 Ernesto Mancastroppa, portrait of Filippo Filippi, L’Illustrazione italiana, July 3, 1887.

It is possible that a friendship with Filippi led Rosso to be selected for the project, although until now there has been no direct evidence of their relationship.57 I would like to suggest a hitherto unobserved connection that supports the assumption of a friendship. It consists of a photograph of Rosso’s La Ruffiana (under its first title, Fine), with a dedication in Rosso’s hand to a man named “Folco.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci published this photograph in the catalogue raisonné but did not identify “Folco.” The reference was certainly to Jacopo Caponi, Filippi’s close friend and colleague at La Perseveranza who was the newspaper’s foreign correspondent in Paris and signed his articles under the pseudonym “Folchetto” (little Folco).58 Caponi would dedicate a significant amount of space to the description and illustration of Rosso’s work in his reviews of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.59 Rosso’s plaster model (plate 10),60 which can now be securely dated before August 31, 1888 (the date the commission was awarded),61 was described in appropriate terms by

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FIG. 38 Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi (detail of “PERCHE”). Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. Photo: Angelica Litta.

an anonymous reviewer in La Perseveranza and Il Secolo: “a bronze bust, with allegorical putti, and golden letters, also in bronze, all according to the model examined and accepted by the Commission.” 62 When the tomb was inaugurated on June 26, 1889, in honor of the second anniversary of Filippi’s death, the incomprehensibility of Rosso’s revolutionary work became evident. Denying the traditional stability and coherence of monumental art, he had created a roughly sculpted and cast jumble of disparate sculptural elements. The surface of the front and sides was crudely broken up and covered with the marks of the artist’s own hand and fist, while the back remained rough and unsculpted so that the three-dimensional sculpture could not be read in the round. A distorted head, which sketchily captured Filippi’s features, was turned to a three-quarter stance and awkwardly truncated below the shoulders. An elongated pedestal was neither harmoniously joined with, nor in proportion to, the head it supported, or even to the enormous horizontal stone “base” on which the monument rested. Finally, the entire work was covered with strange fragments of disproportionate decorations—among them a rather large nude woman with a child in her arms on the right side of the pedestal in an ornamental cascade also featuring a miniscule putto and a mandolin. There was an illegible musical score scratched onto a roughly cut “sheet” of bronze set at the foot of the pedestal, as well as a series of other fragments of text all over the monument, each modeled in wildly different fonts. These fragments ranged from the raised boxy capital

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letters of the enormous word “PERCHÉ” (meaning “why” or “because”) attached to the horizontal base, to the thin drippy upper- and lowercase letters of Filippi’s name sliding down the vertical pedestal (fig. 38). The unveiling of the monument generated the largest number of critical responses to a work by Rosso since his debut in Milan. There was very little of substance and much general confusion in the critics’ attempts to read the work, interpret its style, or understand the intentions of the sculptor. While the journalists for all the major Milanese daily newspapers reported on the unveiling, they misreported basic facts about the tomb. Some, for example, mistook its parts for the whole, noting that it was made entirely of bronze, while others described it as being made entirely of marble.63 One stated, also erroneously, that the bust stood over a “lapide di granite” ([vertical] granite grave marker) rather than on a bronze pedestal attached to a horizontal tomb.64 Sculptural terminology was rendered meaningless in many of these reports, with some journalists referring to the death mask of Filippi as a “busto” (bust),65 some describing it as a “basso rilievo” (bas-relief ) or a “maschera” (mask),66 and others claiming they had seen an “alto rilievo” (high relief ).67 It is evident from the descriptions that the Filippi tomb proved so confusing to the journalists that they were unable to describe it accurately or to address its design seriously. The anonymous critic of Filippi’s La Perseveranza simply abstained from judgment.68 Likewise, the unnamed critic of Il Corriere della Sera, which had publicly supported the subscription, repeated the opinions of others in vague, noncommittal tones: “About the Rosso work we heard the most disparate opinions. As chroniclers we register that there are admirers and detractors.” 69 The anonymous journalist of L’Italia reported similarly that “the opinions on resemblance and on the entire work were rather controversial.” 70 Although this critic admitted that the work had some “indiscutibili pregi” (unquestionable merits), he did not describe them. Another anonymous critic from Il Sole avoided discussing the work itself, instead resorting to platitudes: “Perhaps Rosso was not able to please everyone, but in any case he demonstrated that he is no common artist. Which is no small thing.” 71 The anonymous critic of La Lombardia, describing Rosso as an original artist with good intentions, complained that the bust bore little resemblance to Filippi and ignored the rest of the tomb.72 In one of the few newspapers to comment on the entire monument, Il Caffè Giornale Gazzetta Nazionale, an anonymous critic praised Rosso for his originality but noted the tomb’s “bizarre confusion” of a “strange agglomeration of flowers, drapery, emblems, sheet music.” 73 Only the anonymous critic of Il Sole (perhaps Cameroni) tried to account for this confusion by speaking of Rosso as “one of the most daring Impressionist sculptors.” 74 The tomb was again discussed in the newspapers on November 2, 1889, the annual Day of the Dead, as one of the new funerary works in the cemetery. Still unable to understand the language of the work, the reviewers turned decidedly critical. An anonymous critic in the satirical journal Il Pungolo framed Rosso’s sculptural Impressionism in the

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terms deployed to describe the work of the Tuscan Macchiaioli painters of the previous generation: “The artist has left a strong artistic mark, but, led astray by the search for overall effect—of macchia [stain] as it is called in art jargon—and of color, he has paid too little attention—actually, none at all—to technique and detail, and has presented us with nothing but the sketch of a good work.” 75 The harshest words came from a surprising source. Ferdinando Fontana of L’Italia, Puccini’s librettist and a close friend and biographer of the Milanese sculptor Giuseppe Grandi, a critic ostensibly open to artistic innovation, severely criticized the bust’s lack of resemblance to Filippi, as well as the entire work’s lack of “logic,” as evidenced by the sculptor’s apparent disregard for correct dimensions: The bust of Filippo Filippi by the sculptor Medardo Rosso is absolutely inferior, and by far, to what he has done up to now. That halved head is far from portraying the head of the well-known Milanese editor, who had a head known to be larger than normal. The so-called “sprezzatura” (which is really nothing more than a meaningless, empty word and is therefore simply academicism turned on its head) is pushed to disintegration. This is not the face of Filippi, what’s more, it’s not even a face. The decoration of the pedestal is also deplorable, without taste and without logic. Large real[istic]-size flowers and small putti as big as mice! . . . I leave undescribed a certain mandolin, thrown at the base of the monument, which makes one think involuntarily of bodily functions that are sacrilegious when performed on a tomb.76

These confused, angry responses make sense if one compares the Filippi tomb to the Milanese sculptor Primo Giudici’s conventional homage made in 1887 to the music publisher Domenico Vismara, who died two years before (fig. 39). This funerary bust, made during the same period for another figure from the music world, had all the required ingredients for a successful funerary work by the standards of the day. Vismara was immortalized somberly through a realistic marble portrait, neatly cut off at mid-torso, one in which he is shown elegantly dressed in carefully modeled contemporary clothing, a style typical of funerary figures of the time. In nineteenth-century sculpture, it was traditional to avoid the physical realities of death in favor of a pleasing, reassuring likeness and symbolic allusions to the afterlife. In this case, the sculptor created an image of Vismara’s living features, intended to give comfort to the mourner by avoiding visual reference to the finality of his animate existence, incorporated within a symmetrical, static, and totemic structure, inscribed with a solemn epitaph and resting on a solid architectonic base. Alongside it, Giudici showed a fully sculpted image of Vismara’s mother, whose mournful presence kneeling by the tomb ensured the eternal memorialization of his life. In his tomb for Filippi, Rosso gestured to Realism by giving a much less comforting picture of death and the deceased than that seen in traditional monuments of the period. Instead, he presented a vision of the physical realities of dying. He made the death mask

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FIG. 39 Primo Giudici, Funerary Monument to Domenico Vismara, 1887. Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. Photo: Angelica Litta.

on which the sculpture was probably based during the body’s least attractive moment— well after death had set in, when Filippi’s flesh had begun to sag and his eyes had sunk back into his head. Death as a moment of physical decomposition and disintegration recalled literary (but never painterly or sculptural) descriptions made famous by such contemporaries as Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola, and Oscar Wilde, and recaptured in Italian Scapigliatura literature but not in the visual arts in Italy. At the same time, the figure was Rosso’s most impressionistic sculpture to date. The roughly sculpted face appears to sink into and fuse with the crude material of which it is made. There is a similarity to elements in such paintings as Claude Monet’s Camille sur son lit de mort (Camille on Her Deathbed, 1879), in which the dying subject’s face,

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similarly, seems to disappear gradually into the background of hatched painted marks. Like Monet, Rosso presented death as a gradual process of loss of materiality and sub­ stance that resembled the Impressionists’ optical and pictorial dissolution of form. Rosso also adopted an Impressionistic approach by capturing only that which entered his frame of vision at the moment he made the work; in this case, it included parts of the pillow behind one side of Filippi’s head and only fragments of his arms folded over his chest. He then turned the image upright and stood it on the pedestal. By adding parts of the pillow, he considered the space behind the portrait not as a void but as a continuum of reality, much like a painter treats the area behind a figure on a canvas. More than a direct attempt to translate painting into sculpture, this work reveals Rosso’s adaptation of an “impressionistic” sculpting technique that would allow him to experiment with the traditional fully modeled sculptural form. His unusually loose hand­ ling of the material gave the conventionally solid, eternal monument a disconcerting sense of temporality and movement as the sculpture seemed to ooze, drip, shift, and dissolve before the viewer’s eyes. Additionally, Rosso had a direct and forceful bodily impact on the appearance of the sculpture as he scratched and punched it with his bare hands—an actual “impression” of his fist is evident on the right side of the pedestal— making holes, rips, and gashes in the clay which he then cast in bronze exactly as he had modeled it, without removing imperfections. It was an approach that defied the formal, technical, and aesthetic conventions of the integral sculptural surface at this time, ren­ dering it messily porous, permeable, mobile, open. However, it is consonant with what Richard Shiff has described in Impressionist painting as “the very physical signification of the term ‘impression,’ as when synonymous with ‘imprint.’ It suggests the contact of one material force or substance with another, resulting in a mark, the trace of the physi­ cal interaction that has occurred. . . . The impression is always a surface phenomenon— immediate, primary, undeveloped . . . as primary and spontaneous, the impression could be associated with particularity, individuality, and originality.” 77 With the Filippi monument, Rosso proposed an open challenge to sculpture. As opposed to La Riconoscenza (Gratitude, 1883, see figs. 16, 17), in which the artist com­ pletely eliminated the base from the sculpture, in the Filippi tomb he resurrected the pedestal in order to displace it. Here he fused the bust with a roughly modeled pedestal, an innovative construction that subverted the significance of this classical architectural element, making it appear instead to stand in awkwardly for Filippi’s absent body. The few photographs found in posthumous monographs all show the Filippi monument cut off just below the bust where Filippi’s arm fragments cross, as if the pedestal were an unnecessary distraction, which means that the photographs negate this important inno­ vation.78 It is worth noting that Rosso’s design, with Filippi’s head perched on an abstracted, barely modeled suggestion of a body, predates Rodin’s 1898 Balzac monu­ ment (and much of its criticism). In the Filippi monument, Rosso extended his disorienting strategies to the traditional position of the viewer. His disregard for the figure’s likeness to Filippi did not allow

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viewers to form a clear picture of the man as they had known him in life, an element traditionally considered necessary in a funerary portrait. With this work, Rosso presented not merely a portrait of the deceased but also a broader symbolic meditation on the nature of death itself. In a manner even more disjointed than that offered by La Riconoscenza, in which the viewer could not easily mimic the position of Rosso’s mourning figure shown sprawled on the ground as she peers down into an open grave, here he creatively dislocated the viewer’s stance, decentering the mourner’s usual solemn place directly in front of the tomb. At first, the apparent gesture toward a standard portrait-ona-pedestal construction for the Filippi tomb would have appeared to invite a traditional frontal, symmetrical reading of the kind offered by the Vismara monument. Once again, Rosso subverted this model by making his work function like a sculpture in the round. With this design he made different elements of the tomb appear and disappear to the viewer from different vantage points, forcing the person to circumnavigate the work in order to inspect it all, but never granting a satisfying whole perspective. The most unpleasant surprise for the viewer was the back of the freestanding sculpture, which turned out to be strangely flat and un-modeled. There has been no scholarly discussion of Rosso’s likely tribute to Rodin in the Filippi funerary monument. I suggest that the oversize female nude and the child jumping off the right side of the pedestal may express Rosso’s reworking of a “detached” relief from a vertical panel similar to a group by Rodin from La Porte de l’Enfer, known as Faunesse à genoux (Kneeling Faun, pre-1884). Rosso might have known of such sculptural groups from the ink drawings Rodin published in L’Art: Revue hebdomadaire illustrée in 1883.79 The figure group on the tomb represents a further effort on Rosso’s part to redefine the genre of the relief, which he had begun to explore in Aetas aurea. Rosso’s personal and highly modern ideas can be recognized in his destabilization of the traditional funerary epigraph on the Filippi tomb. On the pedestal, Rosso abolished the traditional family ties normally expressed in epitaphs by inscribing only the name and date of death for his friend. He animated the conventionally somber, uniform font and horizontal orientation of this inscription by casting the deceased’s name in whimsical hand-wrought diagonal forms (plate 11).80 In contrast, the bold bronze letters on a horizontal base that Rosso added on the ground are legible. They form the word “PERCHÉ” (meaning, as previously mentioned, both “why” and “because” in Italian), but no critic noted it or seemed to understand its intended reference. Using yet another form, Rosso made a third text for the tomb: a bronze “sheet” of music propped up on the vertical pedestal, apparently inscribed into the clay and then cast with words in his own handwriting that are nearly impossible to read. In funerary art, poetry and other lines written by the deceased were frequently inscribed on tombs, but epitaph manuals of the time warned that these words should reflect “simplicity, conciseness, clarity. . . . One should avoid those ambiguous words that render the meaning duplicitous and leave the reader perplexed about their significance.” 81 No contemporary critic or later writer on Rosso was able to decipher these texts or recognize in them a mark of Filippi’s identity.

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The two musical texts refer to songs written by Filippi, who had composed a significant body of popular songs, upon which Rosso drew for the design of the sheet music for the tomb.82 Meaningfully, both chosen fragments signify private reflections on the nature of intimacy, implying Rosso’s attempt to infuse the work with a subjective, emotional element. The single word on the horizontal base, “PERCHÉ,” is the title of a song in which a man laments the death of his beloved.83 The second portion of text, incised on the song sheet resting at the bottom of the pedestal, is a line from the song “El ti” (“The You,” using the informal form of address), written in the dialect of Filippi’s native Veneto. In it, a lover reflects on the significance of using tu (or in this case, ti in dialectical form) with his beloved. The song opens with his question “cos’elo sto ti?” (what is this tu?) and then goes on to express playfully his desires and fears about moving on from the polite lei form with her. In the refrain, the man explains to the woman that tu is permissible when two people have achieved a certain level of emotional closeness. The lover concludes, ultimately, that he has reached this point, proclaiming that “a darte del ti no fazzo fa-di-ga” (it is not difficult for me to use the familiar form of address with you).84 This was the resonant phrase, at once deeply personal and all but illegible, that Rosso chose to memorialize Filippi. It was a brilliant gesture, at once an expression of Rosso’s intimacy with his friend and a meditation on the closeness of human relationships. Characteristically, Rosso chose to immortalize Filippi’s creative work as a composer rather than his role as a critic and so gave precedence to Filippi’s artistic side over his public persona. The Filippi monument’s modernity lies in the fact that it was a very early instance of what would later be termed a sculptural ensemble. Refusing wholeness and closure at any level, the monument, supposed to reflect collective, public values, cohered as a personal and intimate statement made up of difficult-to-decipher, detached, isolated fragments. To an Italian audience that could not recognize or accept its modern idioms it appeared illegible and disorienting. In sum: although Rosso gained some measure of acceptance at home by broadening his international presence during the mid- to late 1880s, his art was still too revolutionary for the Italian public at large. I believe that, although they have been neglected by scholars, his two funerary monuments were groundbreaking for their time in form and iconography. They reflect Rosso’s friendships with important Italian political and cultural personalities of the time who professed internationalist attitudes. Yet his introduction of intimate emotional elements into his tributes to these public figures, his direct political overtures to France, which included stylistic and symbolic gestures on the monuments, and his unorthodox mixture of sculptural and pictorial languages struck many critics as confusing and problematic. Fierce criticism would lead him to relocate to Paris in 1889, where he felt his work and ideas would receive a more sympathetic hearing. He was not even present for the unveiling of the tribute to Filippi in June 1889.85

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The Artist’s Experience of Migration

5 THE ARTIST’S EXPERIENCE OF MIGRATION

Medardo Rosso moved to Paris in May 1889 at the age of thirty-one, accompanied by his friend Felice Cameroni, who was there to write a series of reviews of the Exposition Universelle and to report on the landmark exhibition of paintings by Claude Monet and sculpture by Auguste Rodin at Galerie Georges Petit. Rosso brought with him five bronzes for the Exposition Universelle, from his earliest to his most experimental: Il Birichino (Street Urchin, 1882); Bacio materno (Maternal Kiss, also called Amor materno [Maternal Love, 1882], but this might also have been Aetas aurea [Golden Age, late 1885–86]); Fine (End, also known as La Ruffiana, 1883); Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84); and La Portinaia (The Concierge, 1883–84). He won an honorable mention.1 He left behind a failed marriage, unpaid debts, and mostly lukewarm to angry reviews.2 I believe that Rosso’s move can best be understood within the context of well-known historical events—an approach to the artist’s work that has not been followed by other scholars. His decision to leave Italy belongs to the broader phenomenon of displacement and emigration that defined the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the case of Italy, fourteen million individuals—mostly men of working age—emigrated from that country between 1876 and 1914, more than three hundred thousand people per year in the last decade of the nineteenth century alone; the primary destination was France.3 While most Italians left home in search of improved economic conditions, other immigrants were politically motivated, and this was the case to some extent with Rosso. As described in earlier chapters, Rosso was disillusioned by the official promises of progressive reform made by the Italian government, promises that remained unfulfilled three

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decades after the Risorgimento. His move was a form of self-exile, a dramatic sign of protest against his own country. In addition to ideological elements, however, Rosso’s motives were economic and artistic. Like many young artists from other countries, he viewed Paris as the principal metropolis of modern art. It offered many opportunities, such as a vibrant art scene, a burgeoning market for sculpture, and a network of sophisticated artists, collectors, and critics. Bolstered by Cameroni’s encouragement and financing, Rosso viewed Paris’s rumored effervescent cultural scene as a place where his radically conceived sculptures—pieces that were not appreciated by critics at home—would find recognition at last. Rosso encountered many obstacles in his attempt to relocate from Italy to France. In the next three chapters, I examine the development of his art during the period of transition and his artistic responses to the stimuli he experienced during his dislocation. These responses include Rosso’s reactions to the challenges of migration: his need to make himself marketable as a foreigner in Paris by cultivating personal contacts (this chapter), making sculptures that engaged with the shifting avant-garde discourses of modernity emerging in France while maintaining his own artistic vision (chapter 6), and reconsidering the traditional relationship among artist, artwork, and viewer by expressing the viewpoint of the outsider (chapter 7). In each of these chapters, the focus is on the works that grew out of Rosso’s experiences. From 1889 to 1890 Rosso made numerous efforts to obtain commissions through personal contacts. Much of what we know about this period in his life comes from the fifty-two letters he wrote to Cameroni. Their correspondence ended between 1891 and 1892, when the friendship soured over Rosso’s debt.4 These uncharacteristically candid letters from Rosso provide a nuanced understanding of how he constructed his new identity and, more generally, describe the complexities of cultural cosmopolitanism in fin-de-siècle Paris. Rosso recognized Cameroni’s insights and credited his influence: “You’ve accelerated my career by several years.” 5 Rosso’s case shows the difficulties of the foreigner in integrating into the lively Parisian scene. It also reflects the foreigner’s unstable position in Boulanger’s France during the Dreyfus years.6 Furthermore, it illustrates the special problems faced by a relatively unknown artist who was struggling to make modern sculpture in an epoch and a city dominated by French sculpture, most notably the work of Auguste Rodin.

S P E C I F I C O B S TA C L E S

One difficulty Rosso faced was his attempt to forge a new, cosmopolitan identity without recourse to national definitions. His brand of cosmopolitanism led him, instead, to tread a fine line between nationalism and internationalism. Many foreign artists who came to Paris hoping for artistic acceptance, fame, and market success adopted French-sounding names on arrival, adjusted their art to fit French themes and styles, and sought protection under the umbrellas of French dealers and institutions. In other words, they abandoned their

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national roots and joined the French scene. The Italian painters Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe De Nittis, and Federico Zandomeneghi are examples of this trend. Others took the opposite approach. They flaunted stereotypes of their native countries, and in doing so remained exotic and ultimately unthreatening outsiders. Rosso avoided both extremes. Although he did not fully embrace Paris, neither did he want his work to signal exclusively Italian origins. He constructed his own “cosmopolitan-as-outsider” identity; while drawing on Parisian resources, he resisted assimilation and attempted to give his art a universal flavor. On an ideological level, Rosso rejected the idea of nations, nation-states, and hierarchies of any sort. He cultivated a form of cultural anarchism that included a broad sense of universal solidarity.7 This outlook was characteristic of cosmopolitan and anarchist ideology. The exiled poet and playwright Pietro Gori captured this sentiment in his play Senza Patria (Without a Country, ca. 1899): “We are foreigners of every country! . . . We are outcasts! We are bastards!” 8 The new ideal became the world viewed as a single family: “The whole world is our country / liberty is our law.” 9 For many Italians, estrangement from the nation-state was seen as “painful and alienating but ultimately emancipatory, [a realization] that to have no country of one’s own means that one is instead a citizen of the world.” 10 After moving to Paris, Rosso would often proclaim that he was a world citizen and a maker of art without borders or limits.11 His friend the Symbolist poet Jehan Rictus would report Rosso’s definition of himself as a “European anarchist.” 12 A second factor that contributed to Rosso’s difficulties in Paris was his recalcitrant, rebellious personality. In his art, as in his life, Rosso uncompromisingly rejected social conventions, diplomatic mediation, and the necessary skills for negotiating cultural difference. He had already declared himself an outsider in Milan, and he continued to cultivate this attitude throughout his Parisian period. As he wrote to his friend Cameroni in an undated letter from the early 1890s, “I am more in my character when I am fighting with everyone and with existence.” 13 Thus, from the outset, Rosso’s position in Paris was ambivalent: his desire to be acknowledged was at once a genuine objective and a contradiction of his personal and artistic raison d’être. Rosso’s ambition led him to avoid the path taken by some Italian sculptors who moved to Paris for success but ended up working unrecognized in the ateliers of major French sculptors.14 Instead, his autonomous trajectory resembles more closely that of émigré painters. Like other foreigners, he exploited connections from home, but he maintained a measure of separateness, remaining somewhat aloof from institutional settings and avoiding gathering places, clubs, expatriate communities, artistic circles, and educational institutions.15 Rosso’s letters to Cameroni during his early years in Paris make no mention of culture shock, the language barrier, or curiosity about local habits. Nor do they convey nostalgia for Italy. Seldom do they indicate discouragement.16 They also express no enthusiasm on Rosso’s part for the city of Paris, an attitude that was not shared by other Italian expatriate artists. As the art historian Marion Lagrange asserts, “Paris, its urbanism, nightlife, cafes, theaters, the Seine . . . and Parisian women [were] the first subjects of curiosity” for

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Italian painters.17 Anselmo Bucci wanted to “breathe ‘the air of Paris.’ ” Federico Zandomeneghi “look[ed], look[ed], look[ed].” Vincenzo Cabianca wrote, “Ah! If you could see Paris! It is a fabulous thing.” Giovanni Fattori noted the “grandiose immense streets and squares,” while Edmond de Goncourt mentioned Giuseppe De Nittis’s enthusiasm for “the modernity of the spectacle.” 18 In marked contrast, in his letters to Cameroni, Rosso ignored Parisian landmarks, museums, the new Eiffel Tower, and Jules Dalou’s plaster model of Le Triomple de la République shown in September 1889 in the Place de la Nation. Certainly more calculated was Rosso’s silence about the Monet-Rodin show at Georges Petit’s lavish gallery on rue de Sèze, heavily criticized by Cameroni in Il Sole.19 Rosso surely knew that Rodin, recently crowned with the Légion d’honneur and awarded key monument commissions, stole the show, which was considered a milestone in fin-de-siècle art.20 What Rosso did write about was the need to find a studio to “start settling in” and cease floating around “like a bird.” 21 Although he spent the first months after his arrival at Hôtel Enghien at 52 rue d’Enghien, by November, after a spell in the hospital, he had moved to another hotel in Montmartre at 19 rue Fontaine and then opened his first studio in lower Montmartre, on 52 boulevard de Clichy.22 Rosso was not the only artist drawn to Montmartre. The area, which had played an important role in the Semaine sanglante (Bloody Week) of the Paris Commune in 1871, had the reputation two decades later of being “a borderland in which bohemians and radicals could fashion alternative lifestyles and politics, and project those imagined alternatives in their art and writing.” 23 Montmartre became a central site for the development of Post-Impressionist art and modernist poetry.24 It was an appealing home to these artists “because its rustic, bohemian milieu approximated the anarchist utopia of free creativity and small-scale production.” 25 A considerable Spanish artistic community, which included Santiago Rusiñol, Miguel Utrillo, and Ramon Casas, would find a congenial atmosphere there, leading to the arrival of Pablo Picasso in 1900.26 Unlike these painters, sculptors tended to live elsewhere, perhaps because, normally, they had to rely on commercial foundries, which were situated in other areas of Paris. When Rosso later decided to establish his own studio and foundry in Montmartre, he likely had in mind this utopian idea of artisanal, anti-industrial methods of work. Historical accounts confirm Rosso’s sense of an ambivalent welcome to Paris. In finde-siècle France, the potential power of the foreign artist was neutralized not by refusing foreign art, but rather by embracing it. Studying the positive reception of German artists in Paris, the art historian Rachel Esner pinpoints the French slogan “art knows no fatherland,” which attracted foreign artists to settle in France, often drawn by the Expositions Universelles.27 However, the unstable French government and dramatic political events of the 1880s and 1890s—the Boulanger crisis, anarchist terrorism, the Dreyfus Affair— heightened France’s anxieties about foreigners. Memories of the Franco-Prussian War paradoxically fueled French cosmopolitan attitudes but, at the same time, furthered France’s interest in asserting its superior status over Germany. The historians Martin H.

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Geyer and Johannes Paulmann’s analyses of late nineteenth-century internationalism corroborate that “universal phenomena [were] being integrated into a national context without possible contradictions being noticed.” 28 The French located Italian artistic achievements—unlike those of Germany—safely in the past, which allowed France to recognize Italy’s cultural contributions to Western art while preserving its own dominance in modern art. In the absence of both a systematic understanding of exhibition opportunities available to foreigners and a sustained critical response to their works, it is difficult to estimate the ways in which foreigners like Rosso contributed to the Parisian scene. Only recently have scholars begun to challenge the traditional Franco-centric account of the birth of modern art by demonstrating that foreigners played a more active role than was previously imagined. Rosso fits the description of those figures whom the philosopher Samuel Scheffler terms “cultural cosmopolitans”: individuals who “are not to be thought of as constituted or defined by ascriptive ties to a particular culture, community, or tradition.” 29 For the film theorist Peter Wollen, “cosmopolitanism asserts neither the need for nationality, nor an identity based upon the lived vicissitudes of expatriation, but for what we might call the voluntary assumption of ‘dispatriation.’ ” 30 These people forged heterogeneous identities drawn from disparate sources and flourished as a result. Scheffler credits cosmopolitans as the catalysts for cultural flexibility and transformation, for they view history and memory as shared rather than bounded, malleable and changing across time and space. They therefore “demonstrate the very capacities that make it possible for human beings to create culture in the first place, . . . enrich[ing] humanity as a whole by renewing the stock on cultural resources on which others may draw.” 31 Wollen cites cosmopolitanism as a critical factor in cultural regeneration, yet he also notes that nationalism made this position problematic: in the twentieth century, Paris was “decisively influenced by expatriate artists, even though this influence was later underplayed, denounced, denied or funneled into a national art discourse. . . . The effect of substantial expatriate presence . . . was to encourage a cosmopolitan turn in art, inseparable from the breakthrough and paradigm shift which occurred . . . and which later, due to nationalist pressures, was shut down and ‘repatriated’ as typically French.” 32 The final obstacle faced by Rosso in establishing himself in Paris was the sheer difficulty of making himself known. Sculptors certainly did study, work, and exhibit abroad, but unlike the situation of painters, their reliance on state patronage discouraged permanent relocation. As an outsider, Rosso had no access to public commissions; a national monument in France made by an outsider was unimaginable. Thus, Rosso was forced to find other ways in which to attract attention and find patrons.

F I N D I N G H I S O W N WAY

One method Rosso employed was to appeal privately to key individuals through personal contacts. Cameroni had provided Rosso with letters of introduction to major French

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literary personalities who also championed modern French art, such as Émile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, and Zola’s disciple, Paul Alexis. The Francophile author Luigi Gualdo (see chapter 1), whose Baudelairean writings had likely inspired Rosso’s first sculpture, L’Allucinato (The Hallucinator, 1881), was among the first people Rosso sought out upon arrival.33 Rosso also contacted the Milanese painter Richard Barabandy (formerly Riccardo Barabandi, an expatriate friend of Cameroni’s who had studied at the Accademia di Brera). Yet Rosso immediately confided to Cameroni that his strategies were unlike those of Barabandi, who had altered his name and adapted by making illustrations for Triboulet, Soleil du dimanche, and L’Illustration and by selling drawings and watercolors of Montmartre street life.34 Another instance was Rosso’s call on the wealthy Hungarian salon painter Mihály Munkàscy, who had been in Paris since 1867; Munkàscy bought a bronze cast of Rosso’s El Locch (The Hooligan, 1882) and commissioned a portrait from him.35 A noteworthy dealer whose support Rosso sought unsuccessfully was Adolphe Goupil. Goupil’s firm promoted artists who were seeking to expand their audiences, but this required a measure of commercial compromise. Goupil encouraged artists who made huge historical paintings to begin making small paintings from which he might produce printed reproductions and photographs. These were then distributed for consumption around the world.36 Goupil’s strategy played an important role in the success of such expatriate Italian painters as Giuseppe De Nittis, for example. Like his compatriots, upon arrival, Rosso contacted Goupil, whom he met through the Italian Rococo genre painter Lucio (modified in France to “Lucius”) Rossi.37 Rossi’s salon successes, supported by his exclusivity with Goupil, encouraged Rosso. Yet although Rosso wrote to Cameroni of “three bronzes of which one goes to Coupil [sic],” no deal seems to have been struck. While Rosso eventually exhibited a few sculptures at the Boussod & Valadon Gallery (formerly under the ownership of Goupil) in London in 1896,38 the dealer evidently did not see a potential market for prints of his radical sculptures. Perhaps Goupil, like others Rosso approached, sensed and disliked Rosso’s desire for artistic autonomy. Rosso was equally unsuccessful in approaching other art dealers such as Georges Petit (son of dealer Francis Petit). Art dealers like Goupil, Petit, Paul Durand-Ruel, and, later, Ambroise Vollard are now considered among the first entrepreneurs of the modern art world. Rosso must have known Petit’s name from Milan, for, in characteristically optimistic form, he contacted Petit shortly after his arrival in Paris. But Petit did not seem interested in showing Rosso’s works in his extravagant gallery in the heart of the city. Rosso wrote to Cameroni: “This spring at Petit’s I will gather all these works and with these other ones I will make an exhibition.” 39 But no such exhibition materialized.40 It should be noted that Rosso’s ineffectual efforts to gain the support of internationalminded dealers after his arrival in Paris were shared by all unknown artists, given the highly unstable market for avant-garde art. As the economic historian David W. Galenson and the art historian Robert Jensen remark, “After 1874, major artists . . . discovered they could establish their careers outside the review of the Salon’s juries.” However, the

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authors go on to acknowledge that “very few dealers handled contemporary art on any significant scale until the end of the century.” 41 This was because advanced art did not sell well in nineteenth-century Paris and therefore dealers would never introduce and promote the reputations of unknown artists.42 Galenson and Jensen claim that only a few clients—among them the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, for example—bought large numbers of Impressionist paintings through dealers like Durand-Ruel. But they do not note that Faure also purchased works directly from artists, including a work from Rosso, confirming that both kinds of transactions existed at the time.43 Like the show that Rosso discussed with Petit, meetings with Le Figaro’s director about a show (“we already spoke about a show at Figaro that . . . [the director] will organize”) never came to fruition.44 After showing photographs and bringing two works to the top French bronze caster, Ferdinand Barbedienne, Rosso wrote to Cameroni: “I am hopeful from the welcome they gave me.” 45 His optimism reveals his exaggerated self-confidence: “I will easily strike a deal. . . . If Barbedienne intends to get out of his bronze candelabras this is the right time.” 46 This deal also fell through.47 Again, one suspects that the rejection might have come due to Rosso’s insistence on maintaining his autonomy rather than allowing Barbedienne to impose his celebrated trademark casting features and name onto Rosso’s works. Rosso also contacted collectors such as Henri (born Enrico) Cernuschi, the assimilated Italian banker exiled in France in 1850 and naturalized in 1871. Rosso had met Cernuschi through Carlo Romussi, a key Italian political figure who was in Paris for the Exposition Universelle.48 Yet no Rosso bronze appears in Cernuschi’s collection.49 Like most artists, Rosso was aware that international success depended on attracting the attention of sophisticated cosmopolitan writers and critics. Due to the waning power of the Salon, critics now not only judged but also publicized artworks, connecting artists to dealers and patrons and “explaining” or theorizing about the latest artistic developments. Jensen and Galenson assert that, in this respect, the critics preceded the dealers, for in spite of their pioneering role in the distribution of modern art, “dealers were [followers], not leaders in the development of modern art and its markets in the late nineteenth century. [They] played their role after talented painters had created the new art, and sophisticated critics had analyzed it.” 50 For this reason Rosso also made contact, soon after his arrival in Paris, with such famous literary figures as Émile Zola and Edmond de Goncourt, hoping that they would write about him. Rosso’s description to Cameroni of his meeting with Zola, three months after the sculptor’s arrival in Paris, crystallizes the unspoken rules for the “making” of a foreign artist in late nineteenth-century France: “[Zola] welcomed me very well. . . . He sat face to face leaving me in the light. . . . He is a great scrutinizer[,] Christ[,] but I pretended not to notice [and] went straight on my way.” 51 Relaying to Cameroni the encounter between himself and Zola, Rosso self-consciously acknowledged his discomfort. The sculptor’s perception of the room’s illumination suggests how Zola, shrouded in shadow,

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“scrutinized” Rosso as if under a spotlight. What emerges is a tension between Rosso’s desire to feel “welcomed . . . very well,” and so become part of the avant-garde Parisian art scene, and his sense of his own foreignness and his resistance to Zola’s power tactics.52 Visits like Rosso’s to Zola made foreign artists feel cosmopolitan, unconstrained by the limits of their nationality, “having worldwide rather than limited or provincial scope or bearing.” 53 But Rosso’s resistance vis-à-vis Zola also indicates a rejection of French expectations and a decision to maintain his own course and strategies. Rosso’s pursuit of French Naturalist authors and literary critics was certainly a marketing tactic, but it also appears to have been rooted in his need to find individuals capable of acknowledging his project’s worthiness. Rosso rarely articulated his artistic vision in this period, nor did he express discouragement in his letters to Cameroni. Only once, when he was ill—and in a highly confused manner at that—did he write to his friend: Tell me now if instead of seeing it like many[,] only I who always have been forced . . . to feel it can do less than obtain verismo in its true aspect of sentiment of passion in characters . . . the more they unfold themselves to you[,] while many are overtaken by the idea that il vero means making a hand or a head or anything that is modeleled [sic] and a facture that they then say is vero. But . . . they are not even trying to give you that moment of that impression obtained in the first moment. One must suffer[,] try[,] and many don’t do it because they have[,] I read or understood[,] therefore seen[,] the majority being more [taken] by this is within the reach of [a] better understanding[,] [and] how much one suffers at times seeing this.54

This emotional passage, so difficult for Rosso to put into words, suggests that, even as he understood Zola’s Naturalism and his praise of scientific observation, Rosso perceived his own enterprise as an attempt to capture the first impression, which revealed an empathetic relationship between artist and subject. This approach was unusual for most French Impressionist artists, who more easily maintained a detached attitude via their interests in optics, color separation, and the public spectacle of la vie moderne. In suffering through his experience as an outsider, Rosso illustrated the difficulty involved in creating such empathic exchanges. Eventually his experiences transformed his artistic vision. Rosso maintained a similar outlook in his personal relationships, for this empathy was a feeling that he expressed as missing in his own tense meeting with Zola. Still, aware of the need for critical support and strategic marketing tactics, Rosso asked Cameroni to implore Zola to write about his work in Gil Blas, the literary daily where the latter was serialized.55 Rosso also wanted to make Zola’s portrait and give him a bronze but could not afford the casting.56 However, Rosso was proud to have secured Zola’s permission to call him the “owner” of his Il Birichino (Street Urchin, 1882, see fig. 6) at the Exposition Universelle, prompting Italian newspapers to report that Zola had “bought” the work.57

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It is tempting to speculate whether Zola could have helped Rosso by procuring commissions or further contacts for him. Perhaps. Zola, after all, had built Édouard Manet’s career by defending his controversial Olympia (1863). Rosso approached Zola after the latter had become enamored of Rodin, which eventually led to Zola securing the Balzac commission for Rodin in 1891. The literary historians Joy Newton and Monique Fol show that Rodin’s and Zola’s aesthetic programs and notions of artistic genius were aligned. Rodin, dubbed “the Zola of sculpture” in 1886, was a different kind of “outsider” in France, eventually becoming the ultimate insider.58 His struggle to create mirrored Zola’s battles with creative limitations, and Rodin’s copious production answered Zola’s “imperious need for universality and totality.” 59 Zola identified with Rodin, who was for the former among “those great and abundant creators who carry a whole world within them.” 60 And of course, both writer and sculptor were French. Yet even with Zola’s potential influence, it is impossible to imagine a modern national monument in France being made by a foreigner like Rosso in the 1890s. It is notable that the one time that a foreigner did obtain a commission to create a national monument, that commission—Constantin Meunier’s monument to none other than Zola in 1903—was criticized by the French, not on aesthetic grounds, but because it had been given to a Belgian.61 Rosso seemed more comfortable in the meeting with Goncourt in September: “[Goncourt has] a beautiful open face of an old man (very refined). A face that certainly does not think to present itself differently that makes you immediately want to express yourself, that does not make you think you should think before speaking, and with the fear of still not getting it right.” 62 Criticizing De Nittis’s Portrait d’Edmond de Goncourt (Portrait of Edmond de Goncourt, 1881), Rosso distanced himself from Italian painters by convincing Goncourt he could make a better one: He was very happy when he asked me how I found De Nittis’s [portrait of him]. I said that the rest was magnificent but he was not that lots of bone and character were [sic] missing and he then said that that’s what he felt and left me to understand that De Nittis did not understand him but that as a pastel and a painting it was rather strong that I was right that it could be recognized as Italian because the Italian painters take great care with the surroundings.63

Although Rosso probably never executed Goncourt’s portrait, the sculptor felt understood: “I then gave him my photos and I can’t tell you my pleasure in seeing that he loved the Aetas Aurea, a [sculpture of a] dead man and a type of vegetable seller[,] those that I really care about.” 64

E N FA N T A U S E I N

One of Rosso’s new sculptures of this period draws on a subject he had already made in Italy in the 1880s, the mother and child. It is titled Enfant au sein (Child at the Breast, late

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1889–90, plate 12).65 This work was the product of his July meeting with Paul Alexis, after which Rosso sculpted a portrait of the poet’s wife, Marie-Louise Virginie (Monnier) Alexis, and her daughter Marthe, who was born January 18, 1889.66 Rosso studies have missed the fact that the baby died on June 18, 1890, very soon after Rosso had made the work, and that she was Zola’s goddaughter.67 Perhaps with a nod to Alexis’s Realism, Rosso gave the work a prosaic title. Based on Rosso’s letters to Cameroni between July 1889 and January 1890, scholars have called the sculpture a realistic representation of the visual and emotional “impression” the artist received upon seeing the nursing child at its mother’s breast, which he described in these terms: “and the [mother’s or child’s] hands are also there but because they entered the eye’s impression in that moment.” 68 When he first exhibited Enfant au sein in 1893 in Paris, critics took note of its emotional iconography: “[Rosso’s] bronzes, where one sees young mothers asleep with their child or giving them their breast, are ennobled by this august sentiment that would lead Alfred Stevens to say: ‘It [mother nursing a child] will always be an admirable subject.’ ” 69 This work became more than a merely optical and emotional impression. By 1895 at the latest, Rosso removed the mother’s head from the sculpture and cropped it out of photographs (plate 13).70 In leaving visible only the body of the mother and foregrounding the head of the child, he shifted its viewpoint. He also radically undermined the subject’s classification according to conventional genre scenes of maternal joy, eliminating the triviality and sentimentality with which the theme traditionally had been inscribed. This novel act of severing offered new formal possibilities. Rosso shifted the oncestable work to various unusual angles. He made some casts frontal and iconic, while others were positioned lying on one side; some were installed with the child coming up from below, while others showed the child hovering above. Rosso’s beheading of Enfant au sein signals its modernity by dislocating the elements of the work and focusing on the child. By fragmenting and decentering his mother-andchild duo, he now emphasized the child’s subjectivity. The work accords with the historian Philippe Ariès’s account of the transformation of childhood in the nineteenth century, which witnessed a major shift from past ideas of children as miniature adults to recognition of the significance of the child’s experience of the world.71 To be sure, the matrix is Baudelairean. In Charles Baudelaire’s seminal text on modernity and art, Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), the French poet likened the child’s fresh perception to the modern artist’s imagination. Along with the flâneur and the prostitute, the child’s perspective became a sign of modernity. Rosso was certainly aware that French painters from Manet onward incorporated images of the world from the viewpoint of children to signal their modernity.72 In removing the head of the mother, Rosso not only took on a French subject but also may have been reacting to his Italian history. He reached back to a theme he had represented in Italy but severed his ties with own past representations of the same subject. This sculpture would be the last of his mother-and-child works. He now presented the

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FIG. 40 Auguste Rodin, Iris, messagère des dieux, ca. 1895. Bronze, 83 × 85 × 39.8 cm. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum.

child’s relationship to the world as no longer attached to a particular mother. Within a scene of intense bodily conjunction, Rosso began to imagine a form of separateness for the child. This child now stands for the broader experience of childhood. Additionally, the child is completely engaged with a breast whose individual identity has been expressed beyond the personal. Furthermore, by de-literalizing “mother,” Rosso visualized the “maternal” as an amorphous mass of sculptural matter. He intensified this idea through undated studio photos, in which he positioned the work in a horizontal position or as a relief-like matrix from which the child’s head emerges attached to a barely identifiable breast (plate 14). Rosso had already exhibited sculptural heads without bodies in Italy, but never did he so dramatically displace a work’s traditional focal point. Doing so was consonant with the French taste for the sculptural fragment. He likely knew that, in these same years, Rodin performed a similar radical female beheading on Iris, messagère des dieux (Iris, Messenger of the Gods, ca. 1895, fig. 40). The figure originally represented one of the muses for the

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FIG. 41 Henry Moore, Suckling Child, 1927. Cast concrete. As photographed in 1927, present location unknown. Alfred Cracknell, reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

final version of the Monument to Victor Hugo (1889–95), commissioned for the Pantheon but rejected by the French state and never completed. Rodin nonetheless exhibited, cast, and sold a beheaded fragment of Iris upon a pole, so that the headless, gravity-defying nude body appeared caught in a powerful act of flight, her well-centered legs splayed open and vagina exposed. Rosso’s fragmented, decentered Enfant au sein, which moves between representation and abstraction, was a likely source of inspiration for a radical work by the British modernist Henry Moore, originally titled Mother and Child (Fragment) but changed to Suckling Child (1927). Moore openly acknowledged his debt to Rosso. He declared, “I have often felt that only Carpeaux, Rodin and Medardo Rosso, in the whole second half of the nineteenth century, really understood the purposes and the principles of sculpture. . . . Rodin and Medardo Rosso cleared the way [for modern sculpture.]” 73 Like Rosso, Moore reworked his group in different materials, abstracted forms, and positions (figs. 41, 42, 43). And in a manner similar to Rosso, Moore’s shift from the first to the second title and his repeated reconfiguration of the sculpture suggests a remark-

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FIG. 42 Henry Moore, Suckling Child (side view), 1927. Cast concrete. As photographed in 1927, present location unknown. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

FIG. 43 Henry Moore, Suckling Child, 1930. Alabaster, 19.7 cm. Pallant House, Chichester. Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.

ably similar transformation from a dyad to a part (child and breast) standing in for the whole. Given Moore’s declared admiration for Rosso, it is possible that the British sculptor knew of Enfant au sein or saw photographs of the work.74 Indeed, the terms by which the art historian Anne M. Wagner argues for Moore’s originality can be applied to Rosso as his predecessor: “What is fragmentary about [Moore’s] work . . . is its radical handling of female form. Even Rodin, master of the partial, never thought of this. Never thought, that is, of such extensive surgery. . . . What remains is one rounded mound of a breast . . . the rest of the work is wholly given over to the infant.” Rosso’s innovation further resembles the way Moore took his photographs—from the front and the side, eliminating context. With both artists, this strategy focused and constrained the viewer, who was left, as Wagner puts it, “struggling for answers about the real physicality of the piece, as opposed to its illusion.” 75 Furthermore, Moore’s photographs of his sculpture rework the attempts that Rosso had made forty years earlier to invest the infant with new vitality, as well as to “both name and cancel the mother” in a single work.76 At the same time, Moore’s work adapts and formally simplifies Rosso’s Enfant au sein. His elaborate experimentation with photographing his sculptures from different angles, by which he dethrones the single hierarchic viewpoint, seems to reflect upon Rosso’s earlier, if perhaps less insistent, process of doing the same. Moore, for example, returns to his sculpture and revises it further after photographing it, thereby creating another new sculpture, whereas Rosso does not repeatedly re-sculpt the same theme anew. Moore returns to the human figure, which Rosso refused; Moore engages in abstraction, as well as hollows and voids in sculpture, which Rosso mostly denied; and Moore deepens the mother-and-child group into his signature subject, while Rosso experimented with it only a few times before moving on to another subject. Rosso’s Enfant au sein might allude to the artist’s physical act of making sculpture, as Moore would later render explicit in his version. Harry Cooper argued for a similar reading of an earlier mother and child group by Rosso, Aetas aurea (late 1885–86), as an allegory of production: “What the mother does with her thumb to the child’s cheek is model it, as if it were clay. . . . Rosso converts the subject of mother and child into that of sculptor and model (where ‘model’ means not a sitter but a sculpture in progress).” 77 In the Enfant au sein, without the mother’s head, Rosso reverses these traditional roles by attributing the creative powers wholly to the child, who at present lives entirely in its own physical, emotional, and material sensations. By suggesting a parallel between the artist’s sensorial experience of sculpting raw matter and the realistically formed breast (Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci eloquently argue that this work could be titled Materia [Matter]), Rosso provided a compelling image of physical and metaphorical fertility mapped onto the artist-as-child.78 Yet perhaps Rosso remained ambivalent about his revolutionary gesture or preferred to keep both views possible. As late as 1914, the same year in which he sold headless casts to private collectors, he also donated a cast in wax with the mother’s head intact—under a slightly different title—Bambino che poppa (Child Nursing)—to the Galleria d’arte Moderna di

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Torino. I believe that the continued presence of the versions with the mother’s head intact suggests an ongoing anxiety on Rosso’s part about the disjunctive nature of the self-generative condition, which creates by erasing its own past. One might, in sum, imagine the beheaded Enfant au sein as symbolic of the émigré’s experience: Rosso’s need to sever his ties with a personal and national matrix in order to participate in the cosmopolitan’s wider, more fluid human sense of the world. This work can be envisaged as an immigrant’s reactions to, and anxiety about, the experience of dislocation. By drawing on his Italian heritage, while interweaving an understanding of French modernity together with his own new approach, Rosso intuited ideas that would be more completely developed in twentieth-century sculpture. The next chapter will explore the ways in which Rosso proceeded to more fully define, inhabit, and create art from within his outsider position.

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The Shifting Viewpoint of the Outsider

6 THE SHIFTING VIEWPOINT OF THE OUTSIDER

Throughout the 1890s, Rosso continued to have a difficult time adapting to his new life in Paris. Nonetheless, he found ways to engage with local stimuli without giving up his effort to develop his own critical position. In the new sculptures he produced during this period, he focused on marginalized, ill, or socially alienated adults and children, and he reworked French avant-garde painterly themes, such as the depiction of female cabaret performers. Among his sculptures of this time are images of convalescing men; destitute, sick, and despondent children; as well as effaced masks of French women. These include Après la visite (After the Visit, known today as Malato all’ospedale [Sick Man in the Hospital], 1889),1 Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95),2 Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette (Impression of a Boulevard, Woman with a Veil, ca. 1892–97),3 and Madame X (ca. 1896).4 In different ways, these works align with Rosso’s position as an immigrant and an outsider, in which attempts to create a full visual or emotional exchange are frustrated. They express a distance and a sense of physical and psychological separateness between artist and subject as well as sculpture and viewer. But Rosso’s Parisian works do more than that, for all of these sculptures embody his interest in rethinking the tradition of monuments by making small works that conveyed important new ideas. Rosso eventually developed a market for his eccentric sculptures that relied on the new success of serial sculpture (reproduced in multiples by mechanical means). Still, the peculiarity of his works left him more economically vulnerable than some of his compatriots. It did, however, allow him to escape criticism about the excessive artistic and commercial accommodation practiced by painters like Giuseppe De Nittis, winner of the

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1878 Légion d’honneur, who had been derided by Italian critics, one of them Diego Martelli, for “making himself Parisian” and “abandon[ing] himself to the genre sought by the public.” 5

LA BODINIÈRE

Rosso exhibited only twice in the 1890s. The first time was at the intimate foyer of La Bodinière, a theater on the rue Saint-Lazare, 18, in November 1893.6 The second occasion was in 1895, when he participated in the Salon des Champs Élysées. The latter exhibition has never been mentioned in previous biographies of Rosso.7 The Bodinière show is noteworthy for its sophisticated context, the novelty of one of the works Rosso displayed, and the critical response to his works. Between 1890 and 1902, La Bodinière was la vogue, one of the cultural “musts” for the most discriminating artists and audiences. Charles Bodinier, who had been secretary general of the Comédie-Française, put on new and experimental, as well as forgotten, theatrical pieces and performances. He combined them with small, sophisticated art exhibitions in the foyer and lectures on music history for a distinguished audience of Parisian aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and intellectuals. The show exemplified the proliferation of new, independent exhibition opportunities in Paris in the 1890s. Nothing definitive is known of the circumstances under which Rosso came to exhibit there, but it is possible that his new Montmartre friends, second-generation Symbolist writers such as the brothers Henri-Gabriel and André Ibels, cofounders with Charles Chatel of the short-lived periodical La Revue Anarchiste, were involved in securing an invitation for him.8 The show included two sculptors (Rosso and Georges Engrand) and seven painters (Joseph Granié, Henri-Pierre Paillard, Fernand Piet, Paul Vogler, AugusteLouis Lepère, Léon Giran-Max, and Alphée E. Iker); most of these individuals lived and worked in Montmartre. The exhibition received significant critical notice. Visitors included a number of major artists; one of them was Auguste Rodin, whom Rosso met there for the first time. Critics reported that the two sculptors subsequently exchanged works—Rodin’s Torso (1889) for Rosso’s bronze Rieuse (Laughing Woman, early 1890s).9 At the Bodinière show, Rosso exhibited both old and new sculptures, for it was his belief that, in order for audiences to understand him, they would have to look at the entire trajectory of his career up until that moment.10 This tactic was typical of Rosso, who wished to maintain control over his own creative history by including his earlier sculptures in the show alongside new ones. He frequently shifted his titles slightly and often rendered the names imprecise. In some sculptures for this show, he changed titles and likely made new casts of old works. Some critics mentioned seeing his early Milanese sculptures presented with French names, such as Voyou, Gavroche (from the descriptions they were likely the same work),11 and La Portinaia.12 In other cases, he mixed old and new sculptures of similar subjects, such as the various works on the theme of mother and child. This strategy of rendering titles fluid has led to difficulties among critics and scholars about the proper identification of many of Rosso’s works and the establishment of a

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chronology for them. In the case of his mother and child figures, the anonymous reviewer of L’Art Français described two sculptures of mothers with children, “young mothers sleeping with their children or giving them the breast” (probably Amor materno [Maternal Love, 1882] and Enfant au sein [Child at the Breast, late 1889–90]).13 Another critic named “P. H.” noted one sculpture of a “mother, asleep, cheek to cheek with a small infant.” 14 Another critic, “Kalophile Eremite” (pseudonym of the Symbolist critic Alphonse Germain), mentioned two sculptures on this theme but gave only one of them by its name— Aetas aurea (Golden Age, late 1885–86).15 And a third critic, who signed his review “P. H.,” described a mother nursing her child, which was likely the more recent Enfant au sein and not an early Milanese work on the same theme.16 Shifting titles was not a new strategy on Rosso’s part, but here it was used perhaps to make the marketing of his works in France easier and more successful. For example, Rosso gave one sculpture the generic title Impression, as if gesturing to French Impressionism. In the absence of installation photos, this ambiguous title has left scholars unsure of its subject. Perhaps, as Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci claim, it was the older Milanese Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84), or else it was, as Luciano Caramel believes, the newer Parisian Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette.17 As in the past, Rosso was wary of exhibiting all of his new sculptures and might have held back a few of them. Reviews of the Bodinière show mention the first work he made in Paris entitled Après la visite (After the Visit, 1889, figs. 44, 45), known today as Malato all’ospedale (Sick Man in the Hospital). This tiny, roughly modeled statuette presents a vision of a sick man slumped in an armchair. As with the slightly later Enfant au sein, scholars have relied on letters from Rosso to Cameroni to read it as a realistic record of a scene that the artist witnessed when he fell ill and spent a month in the Hôpital Lariboisière in Paris; the hospital’s register gives the dates of his hospitalization as from October 1 to November 1, 1889.18 Mola and Vittucci describe the work as “a drawing from real life.” 19 The fact that Rosso himself was in the hospital at this time has led some scholars to suggest that it may indicate the artist’s sense of empathy with his sculpted subject. I contend, however, that this work is far more complex than a straightforward and realistic rendering from life. Rosso’s choice of subject demonstrates his awareness of French prototypes, especially of Charles Baudelaire’s description of the new ways in which the modern artist perceived the world. The literary historian Barbara Spackman has shown that the model for all writings on convalescence in the second half of the nineteenth century was Baudelaire’s text Le peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863). This fictional account finds an autobiographical parallel between an author’s convalescence and the imaginary one of his protagonist, taken from the Dutch painter Constantin Guys, whom Baudelaire called “the painter of modern life.” 20 According to Baudelaire, Guys lived as if in a perpetual state of convalescence, allowing the painter, like the convalescent, to “see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.” 21 Baudelaire described the freshness of the convalescent’s experience, like that of the child, as a vivid metaphor for modernity.

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FIG. 44 Medardo Rosso, Après la visite [Malato all’ospedale], 1889. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

Rosso’s work does not emerge from an Italian tradition. Spackman shows that Baudelaire’s text was the model for Italian Scapigliatura and Verismo literature on sickness, but it should be noted that convalescence as a metaphor was never used to describe the modern artist or his image of the modern world in Italian literature of the late ottocento. Authors such as Igino Ugo Tarchetti, who gave detailed physiological accounts of illness, generally avoided mapping this fragility onto the artist’s body or onto a male body. Instead, they tended to displace sickness onto female or lower-class characters. As Spackman shows, authors such as Gabriele D’Annunzio likened artistic genius to insanity, as proposed by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. In general, the condition of male infirmity without heroic features was rarely depicted in Italian painting or sculpture.22 Rosso’s Après la visite reflects an ongoing French interest in the theme of male infirmity as a proper subject for modern art. Furthermore, it expresses an understanding of this theme as a symbol of the modern artist’s condition. An important antecedent is Gustave Courbet’s L’Homme blessé (The Wounded Man, ca. 1844–54, fig. 46). Courbet’s painting was a self-portrait in the guise of a wounded man. Considered rebellious in its time due to its explicitness, the painting was officially consecrated in 1882 through its acquisition by the Louvre, where Rosso may have seen it.23

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FIG. 45 Medardo Rosso, Après la visite [Malato all’ospedale], 1889. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

Rosso’s Après la visite differs from Courbet’s earlier painting in its projection of the state of illness onto an anonymous elderly man, with whom the artist still remained identified. Additionally, Rosso’s figure slumps forward rather than leaning back. Rosso refused realistic details by adopting a quickly modeled, spontaneous style that associated his sculpture with Impressionism rather than with Realism. Reviewers singled out this aspect as indicative of the work’s modernity; the anonymous critic of L’Art Français praised it as “a small figure of rapid facture, as if improvised,” 24 and “Kalophile Eremite” suggested it was made “with the ease of a sketch.” 25 The sketchiness that the critics saw in Après la visite actually was employed by Rosso as more than an impressionistic device. In the work, he evoked both a scene he had witnessed and a later recollection of the same scene, as if the image were in the process of being reconstructed in the artist’s mind or was about to fade away. Rosso thereby registered a kind of Baudelairean double vision, at once real and imaginary, which recaptured his own temporal process of creation and perception.26 Rosso avoided giving any reassuring descriptive details about the cause of the subject’s illness in either the work or its title, in contrast to Courbet, who made the bloody chest

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FIG. 46 Gustave Courbet, L’Homme blessé, ca. 1844–54. Oil on canvas, 81.5 × 97.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

wound realistic and visible. Rosso seemed to be evoking not the sick man per se but rather the state of sickness itself, a liminal condition that could lead either to recovery or to death. The effect of this sketchiness was to create a sense of uncertainty in the viewer. This ambiguity contributes to the work’s edgy modernity, which extended from the artist’s own hazy perception to the spectator’s emotional unease about how the story would be resolved. The uncertainty for the viewer further derives from the work’s temporally bound title: Après la visite. In his title, Rosso displaced the central moment of the traditional artistic theme of “la visite.” Incorporating the notion of time into sculpture, he represented a transitory psychological and physical state of exhaustion, once the effort toward another— the visitor—is over, thereby presupposing that there was a moment before, to which we have not been privy. The visitor is thus made analogous to, and at the same time contrasted with, the viewer. This viewer is somehow still present after the visit has ended and is thus encountering a moment of privacy otherwise unseen. The effect might be termed a sculptural syncopation, inasmuch as the central moment is twice displaced— once at the time the scene is being witnessed by the artist and once again when the sculpture is seen by the viewer.

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By focusing on the moment after the visit, Rosso shifted the central subject of the sculpture away from the actual scene of the hospital visit. In doing so Rosso destabilized the conventional rules of sculpture: in a more subtle way than he had in his funerary monuments, he disrupted the genre’s static, frozen, eternal “pregnant moment.” This approach presented a challenge to the well-known argument in Laocoön: Oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoön: The Limits of Painting and Poetry, 1766), in which the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had claimed that sculpture cannot represent sequences or movement in time and must therefore choose a single crucial moment to depict. Lessing cited poetry as the only art that can show continuous actions or a subject’s movement through time. Rosso further dismantled an accepted principle of sculpture by working small, yet imbuing his work with monumental significance. The piece thereby subverts traditional ideas about a sculpture’s size as related to its artistic importance. This subversion had been dramatically accomplished already in French Realist and Impressionist painting but rarely had been seen in sculpture. In its time, Après la visite’s tiny size would have led it to be read like a decorative bibelot-type, commercially produced, serial object. To be sure, its small dimensions reflected Rosso’s real-life constraints: his new condition as an immigrant, marked by illness and poverty, and the impossibility of sculpting big works while in the hospital. Yet when Rosso made this work, he felt its significance to be far beyond its small size. In fact, he later described Après la visite to the collector Hermann Eissler as a moment of discovery of how small sculptures can have great significance. He believed that this work was a point of departure for him, one that would have an impact on sculptures made by other artists. Among these sculptures, he counted Rodin’s monument to Honoré de Balzac.27 In spite of its small scale, scholars have noted Après la visite’s affinities with large-scale monumental art. The art historian Nancy Scott writes that, in both form and intention, it echoes Vincenzo Vela’s marble monument Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon I (Last Days of Napoléon I, 1866, see fig. 9).28 In Rosso’s convalescent, the figure’s pose radiates the same psychological and emotional aura as Vela’s monumental Napoléon who is shown in a robe and bedclothes, with blankets on his lap, supported by a pillow and staring off into space. Rosso rephrased Vela’s unheroic Napoléon by choosing an anonymous subject and a historically insignificant scene. He also avoided the realistic narrative details, such as those that Vela had incorporated, for example Napoléon’s map, which literalized, objectified, and externalized the cause of the emperor’s despondency. Perhaps Rosso wished to align himself publicly, to some degree, with his compatriot, who had garnered a major standing in France in the 1860s when the monument was purchased by the French state and installed at Versailles. At the same time, by adopting a rough sculpting style, Rosso rejected the Verista style of his Italian predecessor and the Italian tradition of well-modeled sculpture. Rosso further rephrased Realist sculpture by collapsing the language of material decomposition directly onto the sculptural object. The sketchiness and visibly worked surface highlight the sick man’s bodily decay so intensely that both figure and sculpture threaten to melt into a pool of matter. Rosso would later reinforce this sense of

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impermanence by casting the sculpture in wax. He sometimes cast the work together with its “mother mold,” using the latter as a “base,” to suggest the sculpture’s imminent dissolution. Thus, paradoxically, his intensification of the work’s language of materiality created an illusion of its dematerialization; it was at once an image reconstructed into a sculptural object and an object materially disappearing. Rosso’s small work becomes a charged metaphor, not only for the fragility of the human condition but also for the potential disappearance of sculpture’s age-old identity as a solid object. A further psychological effect of Après la visite lies in Rosso’s subversion of the ease with which a small sculpture normally can be approached. Whereas it is self-evident that, up to the twentieth century, a monumental work required the viewer to stand at a respectful distance from the piece, while a small sculpture could easily be held in the hand, Après la visite’s potential for dissolution leads to the viewer’s reluctance to pick it up or to hold it. This was a novel solution to the problem of how to present small-scale works, and it is one that Rosso began to employ more forcefully in his subsequent sculptures. Indeed, Rosso would later criticize what he called “sculpture for the blind,” for he believed that sculpture should not be touched. Despite the uncertainty presented in Après la visite, the tiny work offered a new avenue for the renewal of sculpture. Rosso created an unexpected sense of dynamism; behind the convalescent, the armchair slants backward and juts out in a sharp diagonal, giving the work a remarkably active interaction with its surrounding space. Scholars believe that Rodin, who saw Après la visite at the Bodinière, may have been struck by Rosso’s use of the diagonal and have appropriated it for his 1898 Balzac monument.29 In Rosso’s Après la visite, the marked contrast between the feeble human figure and the robust diagonal line created by the chair recalls the ambiguity that Baudelaire saw in the state of convalescence. Baudelaire viewed convalescence as an intersection between the physiological and the psychological; that meeting ground offered the artist an opportunity to formulate a new relationship between the body and the imagination.30 In Après la visite, Rosso presents no promise of resolution; the work’s central area between the man and the chair remains disturbingly empty.

HEADS OF CHILDREN

More than a third of Rosso’s Parisian production is composed of heads of children. The first was a realistically modeled head in the round that he titled Bambina che ride (Young Girl Laughing, 1889, fig. 47), made during or after Rosso’s convalescence.31 The work has been considered a conventional portrait. Margaret Scolari Barr describes it as a stylistic and iconographic relapse into Milanese “types,” while Mola and Vittucci see in it a willful return to the Italian Renaissance heads of children by Desiderio da Settignano and Leonardo da Vinci.32 This latter reading is puzzling, given Rosso’s often-expressed desire to break with the art of the past. Scholars have justified Rosso’s apparent relapse to a realistic, representational style by the fact that he made the sculpture either as a gift or

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FIG. 47 Medardo Rosso, Bambina che ride, 1889. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

to pay his hospital fees. His letters confirm that its subject was the daughter of the hospital bursar, who has been identified as Marie-Jacques Enjolras.33 If one accepts this reading, then it is possible that, in some respects, Bambina che ride functioned for the artist as a reassuring touchstone, contrasting Après la visite’s fragile subject and radical new conception with a comforting work whose title conveyed the joys of childhood and the invigorating vitality of laughter. Like the image of the man in the hospital, however, this work requires a more nuanced reading; it is not merely a simple portrait or an unproblematic representation of joyous childhood. I believe that Bambina che ride had greater artistic significance for Rosso, for he cast it numerous times, exhibited it, sold versions in wax and bronze, and even donated a wax cast to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1913.34 Barr remarked that a closer look at the child reveals an eerie smile and unformed eyes that are “blind,” “globular,” and “disturbing,” which creates a sense of the uncanny.35 Rosso reinforced this effect when he cast the work into wax, making it reminiscent of the haunting lifelike replicas of Madame Tussauds. The child’s unseeing eyes undermine her joyful smile, transmitting discomfort and evoking a certain anxiety in the viewer. I believe that

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this duality typifies all of the seven heads of children sculpted by Rosso in Paris—as well as his final masterpiece Ecce puer (Behold the Child, 1906, see fig. 80), made in London. All have disquieting eyes that are barely defined and that never meet the viewer’s gaze. Despite its cheerful title, Bambina che ride’s emotions remain unclear, evoking uncertainty and confusion in the viewer. The work at once invites and denies what the historian Ludmilla Jordanova has defined as “our capacity to sentimentalize, identify with, project onto, and reify children, [which] is almost infinite.” 36 At the same time, Bambina che ride undermines readings of the transparency of the child’s inner world, which was, in the late nineteenth century, facilitated by a conception that the child possesses its own “interiorised subjectivity, a sense of the self within,” as the historian Carolyn Steedman has termed it.37 Rosso’s work, in fact, refuses the conventionality and triviality of the way in which many artists of the time viewed childhood.38 Bambina che ride’s ambiguity reverses the means by which Rosso achieved an effect of indeterminate seeing in the hazily sketched Après la visite. Here, Rosso created a different form of ambivalent engagement and detachment that depends neither on style nor on technique; rather, it does so by evoking incompatible emotions. The child’s smile attracts while her absent gaze repels. The distance she marks off from the viewer creates psychological and physical separateness. Any effort on the viewer’s (or, we imagine, the artist’s) part to create a full visual or emotional exchange with the laughing child remains conflicted. Perhaps Rosso’s attempt to make contact, even with a French child, evoked his awareness of his own foreignness. Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy, ca. 1892–94, fig. 48) is another child’s head that hovers uneasily between a real portrait and an imaginary idea. Scholars have long argued about the identity of this somber-looking child. Rosso hinted in a letter to Cameroni that he had received a commission from the Rothschilds, but no commission for the work is documented.39 Only Oscar Ruben, the son of a Viennese Jewish banker who lost his mother at age three and would commit suicide at age twenty-one, would have been close in age to the subject. To confuse matters further, Rosso gave the work multiple, and less explicit, titles: Impression d’enfant, Tête d’enfant, Bambino, Enfant, and Petit enfant (Impression). He also called it generically Bambino ebreo when he exhibited a cast in Italy at the Prima mostra dell’impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso in 1910 and l’Enfant israelita to the collector Luigi Bergamo in 1923.40 In Bambino ebreo, heavy, shadowy indentations substitute for the child’s downcast eyes, which contribute to its mood of brooding. Rosso’s work may well exemplify the idea that childhood, far from being completely joyful, has a large measure of sorrow, an emotion that can serve as inspiration for art.41 Barr hypothesized that Rosso might have been identifying specifically with the somberness, discomfort, and sadness of the Jew, an outsider in France whose status would be targeted during the political scandal of the Dreyfus Affair. In my opinion, Rosso additionally might have recognized in Jews the prototypical cosmopolitans as they were seen in the nineteenth century—wandering, rootless, and unbound by a sense of national belonging or allegiance—desiring to fit in but remaining

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FIG. 48 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo, ca. 1892–94. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

perennial outsiders.42 Rosso’s special relationship with Bambino ebreo is evidenced by the fact that he cast and sold the work more times than any other of his Parisian sculptures, gifting it to friends, critics, and collectors as a kind of calling card. Bambino ebreo was among his most popular subjects.43 A third engaging yet disquieting head of a child by Rosso, titled Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95, fig. 49), relates childhood to a state of physical fragility. In this work, Rosso made no claims to realism. No biographical story is attached to it. Nor does the sculpture court direct visual engagement—the child’s eyes are now shut. The facial features are exceptionally tiny and the forehead is enormous. The head has frequently been read as an abstraction: a diagonally slanted oval shape, one that was said to have directly inspired Constantin Brancusi’s early sculptures such as Tête d’Enfant Endormi (Head of a Sleeping Child, 1906–7). There is no longer an attempt to identify a specific subject in

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FIG. 49 Medardo Rosso, Enfant malade, 1893–95. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

Rosso’s sculpture. For the critic Max Kozloff, Enfant malade is a sensory experience. He notes its “haptic droop” and “relinquished energy,” indicating that Rosso “finds in extreme youth accents of tentativeness and the embryonic.” 44 However, I suggest that Rosso resisted full abstraction in this work; the child’s barely open mouth gives it a sense of life, suggesting that the boy is breathing and is therefore real. Scholars have considered the subject of Enfant malade to be original. Yet they seem not to have noticed that Rosso’s preoccupation with childhood as a condition of marginality, alienation, and illness could have attracted him to the contemporary paintings of the French artist Fernand Pelez, who was Rosso’s neighbor in Montmartre. Pelez lived and worked at 62 Boulevard de Clichy starting in 1886 (Rosso lived at number 52 sometime before November 1890). In 1893, the ground floor of Pelez’s building became the

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FIG. 50 Fernand Pelez, Un martyr—Le Marchand de violettes, 1885. Oil on canvas, 87 × 100 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. © Petit Palais / Roger-Viollet.

Cabaret des Quat’z’Arts, a meeting place for artists, including Rosso, as well as composers, musicians, performers, poets, illustrators, and critics.45 It seems likely that the artists knew each other and were familiar with each other’s works. Pelez’s sad portraits of social misery in modern Paris, described by the art historian Robert Rosenblum as “the other side of post-Impressionism,” have left this artist outside the celebratory accounts of French modern art.46 Scholars have overlooked the visual and thematic similarities between Rosso’s Enfant malade and Pelez’s paintings entitled Sans asile (Homeless, 1883) and Un nid de misère (A Nest of Misery, 1887), both of which were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, where Rosso also showed sculptures. Pelez’s Un martyr—Le Marchand de violettes (A Martyr—The Violet Seller, 1885, fig. 50), exhibited at the Salon of that year, specifically depicts a poor child sleeping with a slightly open mouth. In his highly experimental photographs of Enfant malade, Rosso recaptured the pallor of Pelez’s children by shining a light onto the sculpture’s forehead. Like Pelez, Rosso also sought to render his works meaningful, but “quietly, by implication, rather

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FIG. 51 Medardo Rosso, Enfant à la bouchée de pain, ca. 1892–97.

than with a heavy moralism, pathetic appeal, or overdramatisation.” 47 Additionally, Rosso would have appreciated the way in which Pelez depicted many of his children as making no eye contact with the viewer. At the same time, Rosso suppressed Pelez’s realistic narrative elements, thereby leaving the cause of his child’s sickness unexplained. As a foreigner, Rosso likely felt distanced from, or unqualified to comment on, the social content seen in Pelez’s indignant paintings of Parisian misery. Instead he conveyed an elusive meditation on the fragile human condition. Another work by Rosso that could have been indirectly inspired by Pelez, at least in its title, is Enfant à la bouchée de pain (Child in the Soup Kitchen, ca. 1892–97, fig. 51). Rosso scholars unanimously describe the subject as an Italian one. They read this barely modeled child’s face, set within an enormous mountain of sculptural matter, as a return to Milanese social themes. Rosso’s sculpture is regularly compared to social realist paintings made in Milan in the 1880s and 1890s such as Attilio Pusterla’s Le cucine economiche di Porta Nuova (The Soup Kitchen of Porta Nuova, 1887). I believe, however, that it is more likely that Rosso was stimulated by the subject of Pelez’s masterpiece La Bouchée de pain (The Soup Kitchen, 1881–1914), commissioned by the French state. Given his outsider status, Rosso probably would not have been able or willing to use his work to make a social critique.48

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In the Rosso literature, this sculpture has been interpreted as his realistic, eyewitness representation of a scene in a soup kitchen. Mino Borghi describes “a child wrapped in a wool shawl that the artist saw in the arms of his mother during the distribution of soup.” 49 Barr notes that “social indignation at the fate of the poor shows through in Baby Chewing Bread. The sagging, puffy cheeks, the morose eye-lids, the radiating bonnet, and the envelopment of shawls from which the helpless, flattened face emerges are heartrending in their implication.” 50 If Rosso himself would later allude to such a reading through the title, in an interview with the British journalist Frances Keyzer in 1904, he offered up the following: “I saw,” he says, “a woman with a baby in her arms near a baker’s shop in one of the poor neighbourhoods. The woman’s figure, with its dull clothing, could not be separated from the tones in the wall; the child alone stood out and impressed me. It was therefore the child that I rendered in my work.” And in the mass of matter surrounding the small face of the infant are the values that give the sensation of a child in its mother’s arms, without the fact being brought heavily to our notice.51

Yet this work moves far away from a literal head. Rosso transposes, compresses, and essentializes Pelez’s monumental theme—male adults and the elderly waiting in line at a soup kitchen—onto the barely modeled face of a single child. He de-individualizes and buries that face in a mountain of matter, so that it is no longer possible to distinguish the child’s identity. Whereas the apparent abstraction of the features in Enfant à la bouchée de pain may seem to stand at the opposite extreme from the hyperrealistic Bambina che ride, both works distance Rosso’s art from easy readability. Unreadability hides the image within the safe haven of raw material, the sculptor’s most primordial form of self-comfort. This was typical of Rosso. It resonates with the anecdote told years later by his son and daughter-in-law that, when he left Paris, “Rosso hid his most precious belongings in a mound of clay, locked his studio, and moved to Milan.” 52

H E A D S O F A D U LT F E M A L E S

Rosso’s sculptures of adult female heads embody most forcefully his conflicted encounters with the urban spaces of modern Parisian life in the 1890s. By his own account, three of these sculptures represent cabaret concert performers in Montmartre. In a review of his works at the Venice Biennale of 1914, Rosso described the sculpture titled Rieuse (known as Petite rieuse, Small Laughing Woman, early 1890s, fig. 52)53 as the portrait of a cabaret singer named Bianca da [sic] Toledo, a name that Rosso gave on a list of works late in his life to the collector Luigi Bergamo.54 Giovanni Lista says that this singer was Italian and that her true name was Bianca Garavaglia.55 However, photographic postcards of this performer claim that Bianca de (not da) Toledo was actually Spanish and her nickname was La Toledo, making no mention of an Italian origin (fig. 53).56 There is also

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FIG. 52 Medardo Rosso, Rieuse (known as Petite rieuse), early 1890s. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

little visual evidence that connects the face of this performer at the Casino de Paris to Rosso’s sculpture. Rosso never recorded the identity of the female shown in the larger work, titled Grande rieuse (Large Laughing Woman, 1891–92, plate 15), who is also traditionally believed to be an image of a cabaret performer.57 Rosso’s third female head, Yvette Guilbert (1895, plate 16), on the other hand, is specifically named in the work’s title and in a review from 1895. It was a declared portrait of the famous cabaret concert singer of the Moulin Rouge, de Ambassadeurs, and the Folies Bergère.58 Guilbert was immortalized in paintings and drawings by numerous fin-de-siècle Parisian artists, most famously Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In 1895 a critic of Gil Blas known as Santillane wrote about Rosso’s “amazing” sculpture: “Astonishing Yvette Guilbert, cut off at the torso, leaning in a three-quarter position, her neck extended, rigid, fixed in her theatrical pose, in front of her public, but as if separated from it, she isolates herself, she doubles back, enjoying for herself what she sings for herself, precious, affected and violent, sharp and affectionate, pinched, insolent, exquisite, of a spiritual affectedness, improbably real.” 59 The theme of female Parisian performers as symbols of modernity was common in Realist and Impressionist paintings and caricatures, such as those by Honoré Daumier, Édouard

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FIG. 53 Postcard of “Toledo,” Casino de Paris. Reutlinger, n.d.

Manet, Edgar Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Rosso adopted these pictorial models in his sculptures but, in his typical manner, radically reworked them. As with other works by Rosso, his sculptures of women suggest an uneasy response to Parisian artistic stimuli. By removing the figures’ bodies, Rosso rejected depictions of the pleasures and vices of Montmartre. For example, he eliminated Guilbert’s signature black gloves and sensual dresses, as captured by Toulouse-Lautrec or as shown in publicity images like Henri DumontCourselles’s Tous les Soirs aux Ambassadeurs. Yvette Guilbert (Every Night at the Ambassadeurs, Yvette Guilbert, ca. 1890).60 In addition, Rosso de-individualized the features of his female sculptures. He transformed the well-rehearsed, public masks of these performers

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into impersonal and uncanny smiles, with absent eyes that do not meet the viewer’s gaze. He also cropped different casts of the same work and presented them at unusual angles. This fact has been noted by Rosso scholars, some of whom have expressed discomfort with calling the busts “portraits.” Barr describes the Grande rieuse’s features, for example, as “less individualized, as if behind veils of aerial perspective, [with] the eyes slurred over.” 61 Mola and Vittucci eloquently remark that, in Grande rieuse, Rosso “erases the person.” 62 Rosso’s most radical gesture of effacement occurs in his Parisian bust of a woman titled Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette (Impression of a Boulevard, Woman with a Veil, ca. 1892–97, plate 17).63 In this sculpture, Rosso gestured directly to his adopted city by representing an urban woman donning a voilette. The voilette, popularized from 1852 onward, was the Parisian female mask par excellence, at once a fashion statement and a sign of the mediated relationship between the bourgeois woman and the modern city. It thus revealed and concealed the changes in urban life from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. Its purpose was stated as primarily medical: to keep out the dust from demolition and construction during Baron Haussmann’s radical modernization of Paris under Napoléon III. It also became a visible sign of class, intended to protect a proper woman from being scrutinized by male passersby, thereby serving to preserve an elusive sense of feminine mystique or charm.64 The subject of the woman with a veil as a symbol of modernity has its roots in Baudelaire’s celebrated poem “A une passante” (To a [Female] Passerby, 1860), which describes a man stopped in his tracks by an anonymous, veiled woman’s piercing gaze that momentarily meets his own. It was frequently captured in Impressionist paintings of la vie moderne. It appears, for example, in Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries (Music in the Tuileries, 1862), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Madame Darras (ca. 1868), Gustave Caillebotte’s Le pont de l’Europe (The Europe Bridge, 1876), Degas’s Portrait de Femme (Portrait of a Lady, Study, 1867), and Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884). Eventually, for the most daring of modern painters, the veil became a complex metaphor for the mediated nature of making art. Transformed into visible paint strokes, the veil erased the individual features of a female face to read as a statement about the process of painting on a canvas. In Manet’s Portrait de Berthe Morisot à la Voilette (Portrait of Berthe Morisot with a Veil, 1872, fig. 54), and especially in Degas’s Aux Courses (At the Races, 1876–77), the art historian Marni Kessler contends that the representation of the female face becomes its very antithesis. For here, paint becomes the suggestion of fabric straining across faces, actually obliterating facial features as it skims the terrain. Instead of being a representation of two particular women, [Degas’s] painting depicts them as universalized, tropic figures who stand for the visual frustration associated both with wearing a veil and with trying to see through to the woman on the other side of it. . . . So much in this picture reads as surface, not face. . . . Facture hides canvas, while veils hide faces. . . . [Degas uses] the paint itself as a kind of veil, a material presence covering over something else.65

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FIG. 54 Édouard Manet, Portrait de Berthe Morisot à la Voilette, 1872. Oil on canvas, 61 × 47 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva.

Rosso transfers into sculpture this revolutionary idea of veiling as an erasure of transparency. He turns his sculpted veil into a metaphor of artistic opacity by effacing the features of the figure underneath the veil, registering a threshold not only between seeing and invisibility but also between the artist or viewer and the subject. The effect is far more disconcerting than it would be in a painting, since it is done on a three-dimensional representation of a human face. In Rosso’s sculpture, the exchange of gazes becomes impossible. Blurring the woman’s individual identity and facial features, he refuses to allow the artist or the viewer to meet his sculpture face to face. Evidencing the tension between sculpture as a material process and as a dematerialized illusion, the veil in Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette becomes a novel material threshold in which the “face” now becomes a fluid, malleable tabula rasa, a barely modulated, moving surface of sculptural matter, receptive to the artist’s touch

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and to subtle changes of light. As such, it presents a startling contrast to such celebrated, ultrarealistic sculptures of the same subject as the marble Dama velata (Veiled Lady, ca. 1845) carved by Rosso’s Milanese predecessor Raffaele Monti. Through this gesture, Rosso represents modern sculpture as something whose meaning constantly moves, shifts, and escapes. Critics of the time noted this development but did not see it as progress. The German critic Julius Meier-Graefe would write, in 1904, that Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette “is an enigma, but it does not impel the beholder to a reconstructive solution. The veil that shrouds it obscures not this alone, but art.” 66 Only much later did the philosopher Walter Benjamin understand the meaning of a veil for ideas about modernity; Benjamin described Baudelaire’s “agitated” or “moving veil” (der bewegte Schleier) as an image of the anonymous modern crowd.67 Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette is a gesture toward France that was obvious to critics and scholars, who described it as an “eminently Impressionist” work.68 It was the sculpture’s French theme that likely led the French state to acquire a wax cast of the subject in 1907. At the same time, as was typical of Rosso, while he drew on a quintessentially French subject he also revised it. I suggest that this work can stand as a metaphor for the impenetrability and opacity of Parisian life when viewed by an immigrant and outsider. Rosso created numerous sculptures that continuously hovered between the human face and its effacement. This trend is evident in a portrait of the wife of Rosso’s French collector, Madame Noblet (ca. 1897–98, fig. 55), whose features are just barely represented.69 Rosso seems to take this attempt further in his masterpiece Madame X (ca. 1896, plate 18).70 Unlike Madame Noblet, the feminine head of Madame X is at once anonymous and yet represents a cipher for femininity. Unlike nineteenth-century French paintings representing women with veils, Rosso’s sculpture eliminates context, presenting the briefest hint of eyes, a mouth, and a nose. This feminine head is the only one of Rosso’s works that directly faces the viewer, as if attempting to make a connection. The work suggests a direct, yet veiled, experience of seeing and being seen, an openness to dialogue that preserves a definite identity. Some scholars have gone so far as to opine that Madame X was a portrait of Rosso’s patroness and mistress, Etha Fles, while others saw in it the features of Dolores Prezzolini, wife of the Italian journalist and writer Giuseppe Prezzolini.71 However, it seems more likely that Madame X remains open to attracting the projections of numerous female images. Its iconic mandorla-shaped form gives a monumental feeling to a small work. In Madame X, Rosso ponders the relationship among three entities: artist, artwork, and audience. The face of Madame X is muffled, but it expresses a desire to connect with the other, without fearing exposure or forgetting difference. Rosso erases the detailed representation of a face but does not negate it. More than any of his previous works, this sculpture invites the viewer to participate in the creation of meaning, while eliminating signs of national or individual identity. The critic Max Kozloff captured the work’s

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FIG. 55 Medardo Rosso, Madame Noblet, ca. 1897–98. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

meaning in eloquent terms: “Whittled down to even less than its essentials, [Madame X] exists in a state of open possibility. This is attributable not to its vagueness, but on the contrary, to its preciseness, if one understands this word on Rosso’s terms as applying to the kind of statement which most opaquely shuts out analysis. We do not see a lady, much less a particular creature, but rather a tremulous state of being.” 72 Rosso’s new status as an outsider in Paris and his lack of access to public commissions had a significant effect on the development of his art. Despite the difficulties he encountered, his Parisian years were his most fecund, for during the 1890s he also began to experiment more intensely with photographing his sculptures and produced a noteworthy number of drawings that still need to be studied systematically. Above all, I believe that it was his nomadic self-fashioning and innovative artistic intuitions,

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characterized by the shifting viewpoint of the outsider, that would pave the way for the next generation of foreign artists in the city. Rosso thus broke ground for younger sculptors—most notably 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.

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Seeing and Being Seen

7 SEEING AND BEING SEEN Reimagining the Encounter among Artist, Artwork, and the Public

As part of his continuing efforts to make himself known in Paris, Rosso tried a number of new approaches that allowed him to take control of his public image as well as over the production and marketing of his work. These strategies—making and selling casts in wax and plaster as finished works, casting his own bronzes rather than using a commercial foundry, opening his process to the public, and selling directly from his studio— are the subject of this chapter. I shall also consider the intensification of responses by French critics to Rosso’s work as they strove to frame him within the broader movements of the time. More than survival strategies, Rosso’s new approaches articulated an outsider’s attempt to reconceive the traditional encounter between artist, artwork, and public, an idea that found its strongest expression in his final large-scale work, the plaster Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit (Impression of a Boulevard, Paris at Night, ca. 1896–99).

N E W WAYS T O B E S E E N I N P A R I S

When he lived in Italy, Rosso had used a professional foundry to cast his bronzes; his exposure to their processes gave him enough technical training to eventually do his own casting in Paris. During his first year there, Rosso sent works back to Italy to be cast in professional foundries, but he quickly began to seek out alternative places to cast his sculptures in Paris. After being refused by top bronze caster Ferdinand Barbedienne, and feeling too ambitious and self-confident to work with lesser-known founders (perhaps he

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was also wary of being labeled a mere Italian craftsman), Rosso began making and selling his works from his studio independently. His choice to maintain his autonomy was artistic, economic, political, and ideological. It reflected what the historian Richard Sonn has called the anarchists’ negative response to modern industrialization, in their idealization of “the small-scale workshop and the identity of the independent craftsman as the source of non-alienated labor . . . emphasiz[ing] . . . workers’ self management [and belief ] in the self-fulfilling creativity of artists and craftsmen.” 1 When exactly Rosso set up his own foundry is unclear. Eugène Rouart, son of the engineer and art collector Henri Rouart, claimed that in 1891 Rosso lived and cast his works in his father’s factory, which was directed by Henri’s brother Alexis, on boulevard Voltaire 137 in Paris.2 This assertion has been unanimously supported by Rosso scholars, who further rely on a painting by Degas titled Henri Rouart devant son usine (Henri Rouart in Front of His Factory, ca. 1875), which they believe shows Rouart in front of his boulevard Voltaire factory.3 This claim, however, turns out to be questionable. For one, it appears that there was no metal foundry equipment in the boulevard Voltaire factory. More importantly, as Degas expert Marilyn Brown confirms, the painting actually shows Rouart’s factory in New Orleans.4 Eugène Rouart was a child at the time he met Rosso and may have remembered incorrectly. In this period, Rosso also made an unusual portrait of Henri Rouart not as an engineer, as Degas had depicted him, but rather in a painter’s smock, as if to suggest the engineer’s more “creative” side (see fig. 73, foreground).5 In October 1895, a journalist reported that he had seen Rosso in his own foundry in Montmartre on rue Caulaincourt.6 Rosso also set up a studio and perhaps a small do-ityourself oven in Boulevard des Batignolles numbers 98–100. Official registers confirm his rental of this latter space, which remained his atelier for several decades.7 Whatever the exact date was, it is clear that Rosso’s ability to fully manage his production process was an important step. He could now fashion for himself a unique reputation as a sculptor-founder, while still producing serial sculpture and benefiting from its popularity. At the same time, he was uncomfortable with the impersonal quality of objects that were made in multiples and took pains to make his works appear hand-modeled, so much so that for years scholars considered them unique objects rather than serial casts.8 In 1895 Rosso shifted from casting exclusively in bronze to casting his works in wax and plaster as well, and selling these as finished pieces. By such actions, he exploited the new middle-class taste for cheaper sculptural materials and a growing cultural interest in craft and alternative media. Another benefit of making and marketing his own finished plasters, waxes, and bronzes was that it constituted a departure from the French bronze foundry empire, showing the possibility of independence from its immense power.9 His choice was part of a growing reaction on the part of numerous French sculptors against the intense industrialization of sculpture in France. Working in a small studio also made his process of casting simpler and more manageable and successfully concealed the fact that he often could not afford bronze.

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Fortuitously, wax, a material that took on new associations with modernity, would become the medium most associated with Rosso’s name. Back in 1881, Joris-Karl Huysmans had praised Degas’s use of wax for his startlingly realistic sculpture Petite danseuse de 14 ans (Little Dancer 14 Years Old, 1881), exhibited at the Sixth Impressionist exhibition, as a new medium for modern sculpture.10 However, Rosso’s process was different from that of Degas; Rosso never hand-modeled soft wax over armatures, as did Degas, but rather cast liquid wax into flexible gelatin molds. Rosso seemed to appreciate the liquid aspect of wax rather than its ability to be hand modeled. At the same time, his choice of wax, which captured the details of his fingers that formed the surfaces of his clay model, resonated with the French-identified word impression, thereby allowing Rosso to allude to an association with Impressionist painting. Concomitantly, the fluid, dreamy quality of his waxes aligned his sculptures with Symbolism.11 Rosso generated special excitement around his sculptures by opening his casting process to the public. He used his experience in Italian foundries, where the cire perdue (lost wax) method was regularly employed for casting bronzes, to play up his knowledge of a process that was particularly rare in France. As the art historian Elisabeth Lebon has shown, this technique had fallen out of use there and became especially prized by fin-desiècle French collectors.12 The technique involves pouring molten metal into a mold that has been created by means of a wax model. Once the mold is made, the wax model melts and drains away. After 1900, Rosso began holding casting parties in his own foundry, in which he would dramatically cast bronzes in front of his guests’ eyes using the cire perdue method—and then serve champagne to everyone. Viewers were made to feel that they had witnessed a moment of creation. In addition to the excitement thus generated, a further benefit of the casting party was that it reasserted the power of the artist, which had been taken away by the foundry industry. Something that had become part of the industrial process was restored to the sculptor. These casting parties helped Rosso promote his sculptures as unique and original objects by further emphasizing his personal role in making them, while still allowing him to take advantage of the market for multiples. Indeed, the serial production of his sculptures would play a key role in increasing Rosso’s visibility around Europe after 1900. The casting parties would later be recorded in the diaries of the poet Jehan Rictus and in newspaper reviews by Parisian critics such as Louis Vauxcelles. Audiences found them so exciting that one such incident of Rosso in the act of creation was depicted in the 1908 French roman d’art titled L’Arantelle (The Spider Web) by André Ibels (a journalist) and Georges de Lys (a novelist); Rosso inspired their fictional character Medardo Rosso, a flamboyant Italian sculptor. One can even find descriptions in the press of Rosso as a modern-day Benvenuto Cellini. His performances, it should be noted, predated the action paintings of Jackson Pollock captured on film by the photographer Hans Namuth, although it is unknown whether Pollock ever knew of Rosso and his work. What seemed at the time to be an artist’s quirky focus on process later became a major component of

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modern and contemporary art; this aspect has made Rosso particularly appealing to twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. Rosso began to publicize his casting skills on his business cards, in interviews given to journalists, and in his letters to collectors. He further deployed publicity strategies by giving clients carefully choreographed studio photographs of himself dressed as a workman, and he wrote personal letters to clients in which he appeared to divulge his special secret recipes for casting and patinating bronzes.13 Through these strategies, he reinforced his new “sculptor-founder” persona. Like many artists of the time seeking autonomy from the Salon, Rosso exploited his private studio as a site of sales, thus enhancing the aura of secrecy and mystery for which he became known.14 The element of discovery of his works became a key aspect of the sale: works shown unexpectedly, often upon invitation by the artist, in the artist’s studio.15 The gesture of sharing his works became a personal sign of intimacy, trust, and friendship between Rosso and his client.16 This strategy allowed him to orchestrate his sales pitches in dramatic ways. His tactics were comically described in the following entry from the diary of Jehan Rictus: Medardo Rosso selling a reproduction to a bourgeois is astonishing to see. It’s a truly unforgettable comedic scene. He takes the unlucky guy and turns his nose to the wall, enjoining him to stay in this penitent posture until he tells him to turn around again. Then he goes to a big Norman chest that conceals the work he wants to sell. He opens a lid, plunges into the chest, bring[ing] out either a piece of green or black plush cloth, drapes it on a wooden chest or a seat, then quickly runs to the window, plays with the curtains of the atelier for the illumination, the light. And if the restless bourgeois risks glancing at these preparations, Rosso vehemently warns him not to move, reprimanding him, “Per Cristo, don’t turn around!” Finally, after half an hour of entreaties and warnings, Rosso, having placed the wax that he wants to sell on the pedestal decorated by a plush cloth, declares: “And now look!” The relieved bourgeois turns around and in the face of so many precautions he declares—how superb it is and generally he buys. If he was not convinced he wouldn’t dare confess this and would leave with the object anyway.17

There is much to this comic view that plays upon conventional notions of the artist as mystifier. The passage suggests that Rosso expected and manipulated incomprehension on the part of a bourgeois public. An added advantage of Rosso’s use of studio sales is that he was able to circumvent the growing power of the Parisian art dealer system that was gradually becoming established and powerful. After the turn of the century, Rosso would develop other ways to market his works internationally. He aspired to revolutionize modern sculpture and was far too cosmopolitan and ambitious to restrict himself to one form of self-promotion. Rosso’s strategies for recognition and publicity notwithstanding, his status as a foreign sculptor in Paris remained difficult throughout the 1890s. He found only sporadic

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support, albeit from a highly sophisticated clientele, such as Henri Rouart; a meningitis expert named Dr. Louis-Sylvain Noblet; as well as the noted French collectors Count Armand Doria, Paul-Arthur Cheramy, Isidore Montaignac, Camille Groult, Louis Raphaël d’Anvers Cahen (an important collector of paintings by Auguste Renoir), the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, the female Belle Epoque race-car driver Camille du Gast, the pathologist Ferdinand-Jean Darier (known as the father of French dermatology), and the neurologist Joseph Babinski (credited with discovering the Babinski Reflex).

ROSSO AND THE FRENCH CRITICS

An equally restricted circle of enlightened critics hailed Rosso’s art as revolutionary. This was spurred by Rosso’s new role as a sculptor-founder, which led him to receive a wave of responses in Paris by several important critics starting in 1895. He excited both interest and controversy in erudite French circles, for he was not Italian enough to be written off as an outsider, but not French enough to be absorbed as an insider. Thus, key Parisian critics struggled to find ways to understand his work. They either tried to subsume him under broader French movements or to exclude him by highlighting national differences. Rosso primarily attracted the attention of French Symbolist critics, but what is noteworthy and never discussed is that his new emphasis on process became difficult for them to reconcile with Symbolism’s anti-materialistic stance. Symbolist critics reacted negatively to Impressionism’s interest in optical effects and technique, and this is evident in the ways they read Rosso. One example is Charles Morice, who dedicated a full article to Rosso in the daily Le Soir on September 25, 1895. Morice’s article represents the first serious attempt to assess Rosso’s project through the lens of Symbolist ideas circulating in Paris in the 1890s. Morice was a founding father of the Symbolist movement who had authored its seminal treatise, La littérature de tout à l’heure (Literature of the Future, 1889).18 Like his fellow Symbolist Alphonse Germain,19 Morice dubbed Rosso “the impressionist of sculpture,” 20 only to rephrase his definition in Symbolist terms. Morice attempted to distance Rosso from his sculpture’s physicality, as well as from the criteria of visual perception that had characterized writings on Impressionist art. In order to do so, Morice shaped Rosso’s focus on materials in conceptual terms: “Wax [is] his preferred material and the only one, undoubtedly, that lends itself to the needs of this conception of art.” 21 Notably, in his discussion of Rosso, Morice never mentioned Rosso’s skills as a founder, and only briefly noted Rosso’s sculptures, lumping them together by calling them “many heads of women, curious or charming.” 22 Adopting Symbolist rhetoric, Morice characterized Rosso’s art as a representation of human relationships, speaking of “the exchange of sentiments,—and . . . the impression that this exchange elicits in the sensibility of the artist.” 23 He praised Rosso for having found “the means to surprise and render the impressions of life, . . . of vital relations, . . .

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in their immediate and profound truthfulness. . . . [Rosso] wants to show on a face the reciprocal impression of the person as well as of that which surrounds them: the instant of relationship, which transforms not only the physiognomy but also the traits themselves: the instant of truth that the pose cannot give.” 24 For Morice, Rosso aimed to unmask the artificiality of sculpture’s decorative function, as well as its urge to arrange nature harmoniously in order to create Beauty. Relying on the idealist, quasi-religious language of Symbolism, Morice saw Rosso’s—indeed, all of art’s—task as one of breaking open the surface of materiality to gain access to a deeper Truth. It is noteworthy that Morice, in his idealized view, missed out entirely on a feature of modernity that involved the fraught nature of the relationships between self and other, which I believe was a central concern of Rosso’s art. A month after Morice’s article appeared, an anonymous journalist named Santillane portrayed Rosso as a sculptor-founder in the Parisian literary journal Gil Blas: Halfway up the Montmartre hill, at the first turn of rue Caulaincourt, not far from Steinlen’s Cate’s [sic] cottage, in a completely vacant lot, one can see a shack made of boards, flanked by bizarre huts, the true encampment of fair people. The inhabitant is the coarse Milanese who was introduced to us by Auguste Rodin: Medardo Rosso. He lives there among his wobbly partitions in front of the huge ovens that he himself built. . . . One must [go to] his factory on rue Caulaincourt . . . [and] his little museum on boulevard des Batignolles to visit his latest creations. . . . Rosso does not sculpt the material; he polishes it, flays it, fades it, patinates it, and, as if by magic, animates it.25

Santillane’s review was the first record of Rosso as a craftsman-artist who cast his own works. A malicious review followed in December of 1895, when the writer Camille Mauclair attacked Rosso as a mere craftsman in the most important Symbolist journal of the time, Mercure de France: People have also been talking about Mr. Rosso the sculptor. This is rather a small joke. Mr. Rosso is an able founder, an expert in the various tricks of his trade. But despite the fact that Mr. Rodin one day had the courtesy to respond to an offer of Mr. Rosso by sending him a bronze, it does not follow that this politeness of the master, continually bothered by naive artists, is enough to extol this malicious laborer who does not exist, artistically speaking, to any degree. Mr. Rosso surprises the bourgeois by selling them with mystery waxes that can only stand one single illumination, that are bad parodies, badly touched up and tinted, of the lithographs of Eugène Carrière, and that have no durable plastic quality whatsoever. This impressionist of sculpture is still a devotee of the Symbolist fad and of sentimental imprecision. One must not exaggerate: in these things where nothing is made but only guessed at, and where, with trickery, the praticien takes advantage of the easy chance of the sketch, avoiding everything that is difficult, there is no reason for us to repeat the claptrap of coterie with which we have been bored many times already.

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I would rather end on a mention of an artist who peacefully shows the experts that one can mix the charm of the sketch with the science of the most consummate finish and with the most systematically strong intellectuality: go see the four works by Mr. Puvis de Chavannes at Durand-Ruel.26

Rosso subsequently complained to Rodin in a letter: “I was extremely surprised by a note in the Mercure of the month of December, of an article signed Mauclair. Did you read it? He is an ignoble personality who never entered my studio and it has been three years that I do not let out what I made. . . . What do you say about it? He is a true villain.” 27 This negative view of Rosso is perhaps why Mauclair’s article is nearly always suppressed from Rosso’s biography and bibliography.28 Mauclair’s article on Rosso requires further contextualization. It was in tune with its author’s aggressive tone and critical style as well as with the underlying conservative spirit of Symbolism. As the art historian Michael Marlais has shown, Mauclair was the most representative example of the phenomenon of individualism that characterized second-generation Symbolist critics.29 He differed from early Symbolists such as Morice, who had considered themselves first and foremost writers and poets. Using his position at the Mercure de France to make his reputation, Mauclair distinguished himself with an opinionated, antagonistic approach.30 As the writer of monthly gallery reviews for the influential “Choses d’art” column, Mauclair attacked many of the most important artists of his time. In 1894 he turned against modern painting, angry at what he perceived as Impressionism’s overconcern with bizarre lighting and its overdependence on plein-air painting: “The neglect of composition and the error of consuming one’s life in doing studies and fragments—studies for what? fragments of what?—that had led painters to neglect the figure, that is to say, to kill at least half of the plastic arts.” 31 He disliked Impressionism’s sacrifice of line, structure, and composition—which he considered the very elements of style—for what he saw as acrobatic colored brushstrokes. His favorite targets were Impressionists (especially Paul Cézanne), Neo-Impressionists (most of all Paul Signac), but also Symbolists like Paul Gauguin, whose works he believed were artistic deformations.32 According to Marlais, Mauclair believed that art had fallen into a mistaken concentration on technique.33 Thus, Mauclair’s insistence on Rosso as a mere praticien was not so much a personal attack, but in line with his theoretical position, and also with Symbolism’s broader anti-materialism. Mauclair’s critique of Rosso appeared during a period of heated polemic between the critic and the Mercure de France. Gauguin’s response to a review of his work by Mauclair, sent from Tahiti to the journal’s director in July 1896, is worth quoting at length, for it gives an idea of the feelings many artists had about Mauclair: That Mauclair publishes criticism in the Revue des Deux Mondes or in the Journal de la Mode I can understand, but in the Mercure! . . . In every issue, at every exhibition of painters, he knocks me down. . . . The esteem of Degas and others is enough for me. But at random,

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without any of the knowledge needed to judge paintings, he speaks badly about everything that has the courage to have an idea, about everything that is not official artist or a salonier. Mauclair is a future Albert Wolff. If you listened to him, every writer who does not come out of the Normale is ignorant and conceited, etc. But beware, Mauclair is there watching out for the safety of art.34

Mauclair had offended so many artists that many of them began to call for his dismissal from the Mercure de France. These calls only served to spur Mauclair on, and by July 1894 he responded by saying that painters “are and will always be imbeciles.” 35 The editors forced him to publish an apology in February 1895; and after September 1896 he stepped down, probably having been asked to leave. Giovanni Lista has argued that Mauclair published the article about Rosso at Rodin’s command.36 Rodin certainly had the power to do so.37 Yet Mauclair’s independence as a critic undermines the idea that he accepted orders from Rodin to liquidate Rosso or that Mauclair’s view reflected the “hostilities of the clan of Rodinians against Rosso.” 38 Not only have I failed to uncover documents to support Lista’s claim that Rodin ordered a general boycott of Rosso—resulting in Rosso’s being barred from future exhibitions in Paris—but also I have found evidence that contradicts Lista’s claim. Literary scholars have shown that the relationship between Mauclair and Rodin was never intimate. While Mauclair increasingly admired Rodin as a representative of the return to order that he professed, letters between Mauclair and Rodin indicate that contact between critic and artist in the early to mid-1890s was distant and minimal. Joy Newton notes that in the later Rodin–Mauclair correspondence there is none of the warmth or the sense of Rodin’s “unstinting admiration” that transpires in the letters Rodin exchanged with other critics, such as Gustave Geffroy, Claude Roger-Marx, and Octave Mirbeau.39 All we can infer from the fact that Rodin did not intervene on Rosso’s behalf with the editors of the Mercure de France is that he did not wish to take up Rosso’s cause. I suggest that Mauclair’s rhetoric against Rosso can be understood in nationalistic terms, via the long-standing French denigration of Italian sculpture as shallow artisanship. In 1844, the Romantic sculptor David d’Angers wrote: The Italian sculptors concern themselves more with the primo aspetto, with exterior effect, with charlatanism of form, if I may use the term; they are extremely impressionable and they speak to a people who understand so quickly even a single sign, provided they be struck by it suddenly, that they do not feel the need to emphasize very much the study of anatomy and physiology. . . . The French sculptors differ in as much as the impression of the soul, although it has an immense influence on them, does not exclude the analytical power that is the indispensable condition of any work apt to resist the popular fashions of any period.40

Twenty years later, the critic Maxime du Camp would write in his review of Vincenzo Vela’s Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon I (Last Days of Napoléon I, 1866, see fig. 9): “I prefer the

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simple, a bit cold but very lofty manner in which our sculptors understand sculpture. In Italy, the principal merit goes to the praticien, but here at home it belongs to the artiste.” 41 For the historian Anatole de Montaiglon, Italian sculpture at the Exposition Universelle of 1878 was facile and aspiring toward sculptural “trompe l’oeil . . . the triumph of the practitioner over the sculptor, craft over art, puerile execution over form and idea.” 42 And in 1881, Joris-Karl Huysmans contrasted Degas’s radical and startlingly realistic wax sculpture Petite danseuse de 14 ans with “this abominable sculpture from contemporary Italy, these clock-decorations in wax, these mawkish women constructed from fashion engravings.” 43 In the 1890s Italian craftsmen flooded French foundries, reinforcing this perception. Indeed, in 1886, the French critic Edmond Thiaudière had framed Rosso’s bravura in opposition to facile Italian craftsmanship: “Here is an Italian sculptor who happily avoids the usual Italianisms. He is not a lace needle-pointer in marble, making exquisite work, but a bit too affected and precious.” 44 Morice wrote a response to the Mauclair critique of Rosso in Le Grand Journal of March 12, 1896. A few months earlier, upon reading Mauclair’s negative review of Rosso, Morice had written an impassioned letter to Rodin asking him to intervene on Rosso’s behalf with the Mercure de France, but apparently then decided to write his own article.45 Even more forcefully than in his first review, Morice attempted to streamline Rosso into French art history by directly linking his art to Symbolist poetry. There was no love lost between Morice, who emerged from the circle of the poet Paul Verlaine, and Mauclair, a disciple of poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Morice also disliked Mauclair for his repeated attacks on Morice’s favored artist, Gauguin. Morice now framed Rosso’s art as a synthesis (“synthèse”) or distillation and simplification of detail in favor of the essential (“essentiel”), using Symbolist concepts like vérité (Truth) and infini (Infinite) to describe Rosso’s art as an “uninterrupted vibration” that possesses an almost religious “superior clairvoyance.” 46 Adhering to Symbolist criticism of Neo-Impressionism’s unification of science and art, Morice placed Rosso’s works above science: “What science would be needed to attain such simplicity?” 47 For Morice, Rosso’s art was “in perfect harmony with that of the new poets,” 48 specifically the verse of Verlaine, “Ars poetica”: The thing taking flight That one feels is fleeing, from a soul on its way, Towards other skies, to other loves.49 Although other critics quoted Verlaine’s poem in writings about art (such as Claude Roger-Marx when he wrote about the art of Claude Monet), for Morice this poem held special meaning because Verlaine had dedicated it to him personally.50 Morice concluded that “by force of mastery, [Rosso] forgets and makes us forget the material, the form itself, in order to give us, more clearly, more intensely, more solely, the expression! To put into the work nothing but the essential.” 51 Rosso appropriated Morice’s phrase that Rosso “makes [us] forget the material” (fait oublier la matière) rendering it his official motto. Scholars unanimously attribute this phrase to Rosso, who never credited Morice.

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At this point in the development of the history of modern sculpture, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s argument that sculpture cannot be compared to poetry had been left behind. The rigid principles of academic sculpture had been shown to be irrelevant by Rodin’s success, enabling more poetic ways of reading sculpture. Morice’s interpretation of Rosso reflects the poetic aspects of Rosso’s work but, at the same time, leaves out its material aspect and its subject matter, which allude to his artistic enterprise as one that is engaged with the unease of the modern urban condition. As it turned out, Morice’s essay was his last piece of writing on Rosso. His subsequent silence has caused some perplexity among Rosso scholars. Yet here too evidence for a Rodin conspiracy, as proposed by Lista, remains inconclusive. Lista cites two folios (numbered pages 1 and 9) found among Morice’s papers of what seems to be an unpublished article entitled “Medardo Rosso, l’impressionniste de la sculpture” for the weekly series Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui.52 Lista believes that Rodin had been informed of the article and suppressed its publication. There is no evidence, however, for the reason given by Lista to explain why this article was never published. I have found among Morice’s papers numerous other unfinished and/or unpublished articles on other artists. Furthermore, the two folios on Rosso form an incomplete document. A closer examination reveals that Rosso is not mentioned on the second folio, which might not belong to the same text (it speaks of vases by Duccio and Primitivism). Nor do these two folios comprise a “book” on Rosso, as Lista claims. Additionally, folio 1 cannot be read as “proof” of a competition set up between Rodin and Rosso in which Rosso wins. Finally, these pages do not contain the typographer’s indications that Lista claims to have found on them to suggest that the manuscript was ready for printing before supposedly being “blocked.” Although we cannot exclude the possibility of Rodin’s intervention, other documents indicate that it may have been Rosso who did not pursue Morice’s acquaintance after 1896. In a journal entry dated Saturday, July 11, 1896, Morice writes: “I note that it has been a long time since I have had news from Cerblanc, Baur, and Rosso.” 53 In an entry on Thursday, November 5, 1896, Morice notes that he wrote a letter to Rosso but had not heard back, under the heading, “I am waiting.” 54 There is no information in Morice’s diaries on a break with Rosso.55 Notably, Morice did not mention Rosso in his L’enquête sur les tendances actuelles des arts plastiques (Survey of Today’s Tendencies in the Plastic Arts, 1905), in his biographies, or in his unpublished autobiography.56 The Mauclair polemic in Mercure de France reached its apex in a thirteen-page article, dated March 1896, written by the Symbolist writer Camille de Sainte-Croix. This article likely was commissioned by the Mercure de France since Sainte-Croix was not a regular contributor. Sainte-Croix occasionally published on art. He was a novelist of some standing who directed the literary supplement of the left-wing Bataille littéraire.57 His passionate apologia might have been intended to mend any perceived damage to Rosso’s reputation done by Mauclair.

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For his article on Rosso, Sainte-Croix relied on studio visits and a lengthy interview with the artist. He created a compelling and original portrait of Rosso as an intellectual craftsman, avoiding Morice’s idealizations and Mauclair’s criticisms. By uniting apparent contradictions in Rosso’s enterprise, Sainte-Croix framed Rosso as an artiste who was also a talented founder. For Sainte-Croix, Rosso’s works were “intellectual adventures, a passionate chase after ideas and impressions.” 58 He valued the artist’s intellect and ideas above all. Sainte-Croix expressed appreciation for Rosso’s “cerveau” (brain), which he felt dictated every aspect of Rosso’s art, even the most technical: “Only he can give [art] that which the praticien decorator, surpassed by his molder, can never give.” 59 Sainte-Croix also gave primacy to “the brain of the artist in structuring the composition and the construction over the exact feeling of values and perspective.” 60 He thereby created a contrast between Rosso’s intellectually guided artisanal skills and Rodin’s delegation of casting to what Sainte-Croix considered mindless practitioners. For Sainte-Croix, Rosso’s sculpted figures were “animated by a thought.” 61 Sainte-Croix’s article became the most important “biographical” text on Rosso, although it is filled with factual errors, some likely provided by the artist himself and thus crucial for his own mythography. It was probably never intended to be held to the high standard of accuracy to which Rosso scholars later raised it. Nonetheless, it is considered today the most credible portrait of the artist in Paris in the 1890s. Moved by his friendship with Rosso, Sainte-Croix would write several more articles on the sculptor. In 1902 he convinced the political journalist Edmond Claris to write a pamphlet featuring Rosso entitled De L’Impressionnisme en Sculpture (On Impressionism in Sculpture), which was subsequently reprinted in several languages. Sainte-Croix was also the first to link Rosso’s intellectual program to Charles Baudelaire’s writings on art. Ignoring national divisions, Sainte-Croix hailed Rosso as the first to challenge Baudelaire’s quip about sculpture being incompatible with modernity. In doing so, he became the first to assign Rosso a key role in the history of modern sculpture.

E VA L U AT I N G T H E C R I T I C S

The reviews of Rosso’s art that appeared in Parisian newspapers and literary journals beginning in 1895 have never been critically assessed. They confirm the ongoing difficulty in understanding and categorizing Rosso that marked his entire career. They substantiate as well the ambiguity that existed with respect to the definitions of the various strands of art placed under the banner of “avant-garde” that were developing in Paris in the 1890s. The seriousness and depth of some of the reviews of Rosso’s works, and the quality of their authors, indicate the growing power of critics to “explain” an artist’s project to the public and the extent to which artists had become dependent on critics to publicize their work, as the Salon’s power waned. The fierce tone of the battles played out over Rosso’s art in these reviews further reflects the highly competitive and antagonistic environment

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in which French art critics were operating as they created alliances and rivalries, vied for fame, and jockeyed for positions. The French reviews of Rosso summarize the multifaceted background of the development of modern art at the close of the century. On the one hand, they denote increasing nationalistic tensions in France with respect to foreign art, in this case Italian sculpture. On the other, they suggest an attempt on the part of critics to universalize the art of the fin de siècle, but doing so by subsuming foreign art under the broader and often contradictory movements that were being defined as avant-garde. With respect to the history of modern sculpture, the reviews reveal the paradoxical nature of sculpture itself. This is what the art historian Alex Potts has shown to be an awareness of a radical split in sculpture’s own identity: between the atemporal and the temporal, and between a concrete, materially made object and an evocation of imaginative, poetic ideas.

THE VIEWPOINT OF THE OUTSIDER: IMPRESSION DE B O U L E VA R D. PA R I S L A N U I T

Rosso’s final large-scale work, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit (Impression of a Boulevard, Paris at Night, ca. 1896–99, plate 19), can be considered a striking example of his attempt, from the beginning of his career, to engage with the question of how sculpture could become modern.62 The work is no longer extant, but Rosso’s idiosyncratic studio shots of it show a roughly sculpted plaster model depicting three ambiguously defined, forwardleaning figures rendered in larger-than-life size, described by the title as crossing a Parisian boulevard during nighttime.63 Rather than depicting a historical subject, Rosso represented a modern one, posing the boldest challenge ever to Baudelaire’s condemnation in 1846 of sculpture as “boring” and ill-equipped to capture the rhythms of modern life.64 Rosso went further by refashioning a new relationship among sculpture, its maker, and its public. This work’s significance has never been considered in the context of the history of the birth of the modern monument. Today, this history is told exclusively through the lens of French nineteenth-century art, which is considered synonymous with modernism. A major chapter in that history details the crisis of French sculpture at the fin de siècle, one that culminates in the succès de scandale caused by Rodin’s Balzac (1898). Balzac was initially rejected by its commissioners but later was hailed as the first modern monument. I believe that this French story misses out on a different point of view presented by Rosso, through the lens of the foreigner in France. Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit challenges the hegemonic and monolithic account of late nineteenth-century French art because it is a “monument” made in Paris, in the same decade as Rodin’s Balzac, by an immigrant. In my opinion, Rosso’s sculpture presents a disengaged mode of experiencing the world that is equally, if differently, modern. Rosso attempted to integrate a new kind of separateness that was neither heroizing nor static. By giving a foreigner’s account of “Paris,” Rosso’s sculpture represented his relationship to the mobility of life itself as a symbol of the modern condition.

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In her seminal essay on the origins of modern sculpture, entitled “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), Rosalind Krauss defined Rodin’s Balzac as the first “nomadic” monument. She noted that, despite the fact that many people recognized its groundbreaking modernity, it failed to achieve public consensus or be installed in a permanent exhibition site in Paris. Krauss marked the permanently displaced Balzac as the defining moment in “the fading of the logic of the monument,” after which a new, itinerant conception of modern sculpture was born.65 I believe that Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit can be considered equally if not more “nomadic.” The work was un-commissioned and conceived for no specific site, nor to commemorate any important personality or historical event. Furthermore, it was made by a foreigner in France and ultimately never exhibited in public. Rosso’s sculpture thus challenged, even more radically than Rodin’s Balzac, the established conventions for a monument. One aspect of the modernity of Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit was that the plaster model was never cast into a permanent medium, and there is no evidence of an effort to preserve it for eternity. The history of Rosso’s attempt to present the work in public is noteworthy. He tried unsuccessfully to exhibit the plaster in Rodin’s Pavilion d’Alma, the site of Rodin’s major retrospective during the Exposition Universelle of 1900. In a letter to Rodin, he wrote: “My dear friend, I have a piece three meters by two[,] would you be willing to exhibit it for me in your Pavilion[?]. I would be very grateful to you.” 66 One could hardly imagine a greater imbalance of power than that between Rosso, an Italian immigrant in Paris who had no access to public commissions and few exhibition opportunities, and Rodin, the most famous French sculptor of the day. It is no surprise that the Master of Meudon did not respond. Rosso never went on to cast the work into a more lasting medium. He sold the plaster “as is” to the collector Louis-Sylvain Noblet, who, sometime before 1902, had it installed in the garden of his country home in Jessains-sur-Aube in Troyes, where it deteriorated. How this installation was accomplished is not known, for Rosso made one of the figures leaning so far forward that, in his studio, it had to be attached to the ceiling (fig. 56). Unfortunately, no photos have been found of the work as installed in Noblet’s garden. Another aspect of the work’s modernity is the fact that Rosso would continue to circulate studio photographs of it in publications after the turn of the century, even though it had no presence in a public space. The sculpture’s nomadic “existence” in photographic reproductions thus became integral to the work’s identity and to its impact on other artists. Such gestures exemplify what Krauss has pointed to as the “negative condition of the monument,” 67 which later would define impermanent works, often preserved only in photographs. Rosso’s chosen subject—Parisians walking along Baron Haussmann’s fabled modern boulevards—drew on a French Impressionist painting tradition. It reflects his most daring and dramatic transformation, into three dimensions, of a theme frequently celebrated in the previous decades by artists as diverse as Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Jean Béraud, and Gustave Caillebotte. Rosso chose to

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FIG. 56 Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, ca. 1896–99. Plaster, 200 × 300 cm. Destroyed. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

FIG. 57 Georges Seurat, Night Stroll, 1887–88. Conté crayon on paper, 31.4 × 24.1 cm. Private collection.

represent his figures at nighttime, enveloped in a darkness that reduced the distinction between figures and environment, similar to the hazy yet thickly atmospheric drawings of Georges Seurat, such as the posthumously titled Night Stroll (1887–88, fig. 57). As his photographs show, Rosso recaptured in sculpture the walking figures and the long perspectival gaze that typified many of these paintings. But his solution was different from that of the Impressionists who represented this scene from above. Rather than replicating Pissarro’s or Monet’s commanding view from a balcony situated above the subjects, a view that transformed the urban crowds into tiny indistinguishable dots of

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FIG. 58 Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, 1877. Oil on canvas, 212.2 × 276.2 cm. Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1964.336, Art Institute of Chicago.

paint, Rosso preserved the large scale of the individual figures. His presence at the same eye level as his figures suggests what Nancy Forgione, in her study of the art of walking in fin-de-siècle Paris, has called an “embodied” beholder, an artist who is himself in some sense a pedestrian and thus part of the flow of the urban scene he represents.68 Rosso could have been inspired by Caillebotte’s enormous painting Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (Paris, a Rainy Day, 1877, fig. 58), especially the depictions of clusters of people crossing the street in the background. Caillebotte’s death in 1894 and the retrospective at DurandRuel’s gallery in 1896 generated particular interest in the years in which Rosso conceived his monument. Yet, while Rosso’s sculpture retains Caillebotte’s sense of a “photographic” snapshot, it rejects the painter’s predilection for photographic realism or a clear articulation of the figures’ class, gender, national, or individual identities. Rosso demonstrates no preoccupation with representing figures clad in the latest Parisian fashions or with recapturing the act of seeing and being seen that characterized the flâneur. He thus eliminated the allpowerful gaze of this proverbial figure, whose optic faculties Baudelaire had considered to be intimately connected to the viewpoint of the painter of modern life, and later would become emblematic of modern Parisian street life, as celebrated by Walter Benjamin.

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FIG. 59 Medardo Rosso, Bookmaker, ca. 1893–95. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit’s modernity is remarkable for the particular manner in which the artist represented his subject: he showed a “group” that was itself physically disconnected. He fused two of the figures together, apparently a man and a woman, but left a third of undetermined gender walking separately. He thus challenged the notion of monumental sculpture as a unified idea represented in three dimensions. He boldly divested the work of a single higher meaning or display of hierarchy and moral purpose that was part of the monument’s traditional charge. Additionally, in Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit Rosso destabilized his sculpture by rendering the work physically unbalanced. By inclining the figures forward, Rosso dislocated sculpture’s vertical, centered axis and so undermined the traditional idea of sculpture as rooted and freestanding. Earlier, Rosso had made two small full-bodied male figurines that were slanted sideways and backward, titled Bookmaker (ca. 1893–95, fig. 59)69 and Uomo che legge (Man Reading, ca. 1894–95, plate 20).70 These works predate Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit. It is necessary, therefore, to make a small detour

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and examine the two earlier figurines in detail because Impression de Boulevard. Paris la nuit can be seen as representing a final evolution of Rosso’s Parisian experiments with unbalanced figures.

BOOKMAKER AND UOMO CHE LEGGE

Rosso did not exhibit these two works in the 1890s, making them difficult to date with precision, but they appear in studio photographs that are presumed to be from that time period. Although rooted, like traditional sculptures, in bases composed of tufts of matter, Rosso’s figurines are diagonally inclined and are therefore perceived by the viewer as illogical, for their off-center pose challenges rational notions of sculpture as mimicking the human body’s true poses.71 The sources of this pose have not been examined. Rosso’s two figurines had French precedents in Realist caricature, both in painting and in sculpture. They recaptured and revised a small, yet highly advanced and privately made, sculptural figurine by Honoré Daumier called Ratapoil (Rat Skin, caricatured in 1850–51 in Le Charivari, then made into a clay statuette in 1851, fig. 60). Ratapoil was an image of one of Louis-Napoléon’s agentsprovocateurs who stirred up crowds, through bribes and by force, to convince people to return Louis-Napoléon to power. In his well-published, two-dimensional caricatures of the sinister figure, Daumier depicted Ratapoil as a deformed body that twists and protrudes backward into space; the weight of the lower half of the figure is illogically pushed forward through his jutting hips, belly, and outstretched leg, while the head and upper body pull back with equal strength to form a strong diagonal line. In his sculptural version (kept hidden during his lifetime for fear of political consequences but well known among artists and critics after 1878), Daumier exaggerated the figure for subversive and comic effect, while offsetting the unrealistic, off-balance pose from behind by leaning Ratapoil on a long cane.72 Rosso’s slanted figurines also rephrased inclined figures represented in Realist and Impressionist paintings by Degas in the 1870s. Degas was an assiduous collector of Daumier’s caricatures and attentive to his innovations. Degas re-articulated Ratapoil’s diagonal posture while smoothing out and aestheticizing its angularities in works of the late 1870s, such as Mary Cassatt au Louvre: Salle Etrusque (Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery, 1879), the pastel and studies for Mary Cassatt au Louvre (Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, 1879), and the etchings Mary Cassatt au Louvre: Salle Etrusque (Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery, 1879–80), Mary Cassatt au Louvre: La Peinture (Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery, 1879–80), and Ludovic Halévy et Albert Boulanger-Cavé dans les coulisses de l’Opera (Ludovic Halévy and Albert Boulanger-Cavé behind the Scenes at the Opera, 1879, fig. 61). In each case, Degas balanced backward-leaning figures on the point of an umbrella, making credible an otherwise untenable pose. Degas also extended and varied the psychological meanings of the pose with respect to Daumier. For Mary Cassatt, it suggested her state of contemplation, while in the backstage at the

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FIG. 60 Honoré Daumier, Ratapoil, 1851. Plaster, 43.2 × 15.2 × 17.1 cm. Elisabeth H. Gates Fund, 1954:7, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY.

ballet image, it created a nonconfrontational stance of slight withdrawal while socializing, marking a cordial distance between speaker and interlocutor. Rosso pushed both Daumier’s and Degas’s works to an unprecedented illogical extreme by eliminating all realistic counterweights. His two male figurines balance backward in empty space. They thus appear to grow out of the masses of material that hold the feet rooted rather than evolving from any logical or anatomical understanding of the distribution of the forces of gravity on the body. This placement was part of a broader shift in focus in Rosso’s thinking about the diagonal. During this period, he began to crop his photographs with sharp diagonal lines. He also made numerous drawings of figures on a slant, and shifted the balance of his sculptures on their pedestals forward or backward (fig. 62).

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FIG. 61 Edgar Degas, Ludovic Halévy et Albert Boulanger-Cavé dans les coulisses de l’Opera, 1879. Distemper and pastel, 79 × 55 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Margaret Scolari Barr claimed that “it is precisely the slant of the Rodin Balzac, a slant sideways and backward, that strikes the dispassionate observer as Rodin’s heaviest debt to Rosso.” 73 To my mind, it is also possible that Rodin and Rosso were simultaneously experimenting with throwing into question sculpture’s mimesis of the human body’s notions of gravity. I believe that by tilting the body unrealistically, they experimented with creating a new, decentered relationship between the object and its surrounding space. For a viewer today, such a shift might seem negligible, perhaps even obvious, given the fact that contemporary sculpture normally requires the viewer to forgo the experience of bodily mimesis. Today’s sculpture makes us readier to accept and understand the

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FIG. 62 Medardo Rosso, Untitled, n.d. Pencil on paper, 18 × 12.9 cm. Private collection.

illogical diagonal pose, expanding and making secondary the limited poses of the human body as primary measures of traditional sculpture. I think that Rosso was the first to understand the phenomenological sense of balance as both a physical experience and a psychological concept. As the philosopher Mark Johnson writes, balance is an activity learned wholly through our bodies, not by grasping rules or ideas. Activities of balancing, like bike riding or juggling, cannot be taught. One simply gets a “feel” for the body in balance; therefore, the meaning of balance only can emerge from the physical act of balancing. Balance is something we take entirely for granted—until it is disrupted, and its lack becomes a negative bodily experience. Johnson writes, “The meaning of balance emerges in bodily experiences in which we orient ourselves within our environment. . . . Without balance reality would be utterly chaotic, like the wildly spinning world of a very intoxicated person.” 74 In my opinion, although Rodin and Rosso were interested in the

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same formal issues, their experiences of the disoriented condition varied. Whereas Rodin filtered his experience through the perception of a man in his own country, for Rosso, the foreigner’s physical, social, and topographical disorientation represented a lived experience. Rodin’s Balzac was widely criticized. The French public evidently was not ready for such a work. It is instructive to consider that criticism in detail, for it has implications for how Rosso’s two illogical figurines would have been received in Paris of the 1890s had he exhibited them there. One criticism leveled at Rodin’s work was that it was a fiction of the mind or a representation of creation as a mental conception. Robert de la Sizeranne claimed, in Revue des Deux Mondes, that Balzac’s “body has abandoned its state of repose, but the soul has not abandoned the state of sleep. The feet are without movement. The head is heavy with dreams. With the step of a sleepwalker, he walks, and while walking . . . he creates.” 75 The same was said about Rodin’s fantasy, as “his unformed dream advances.” 76 Balzac’s “eyes seem to look inward, watching a spectacle that only he can see.” 77 Associating the artist with his creation, Caran d’Ache caricatured “the efforts of intellectuality,” 78 and other critics remarked that its maker had produced the sculpture not with his hands but through what one called a “cerebral effort.” 79 Balzac was seen as disembodied; Félix Duquesnel called it a “plaster phantom.” 80 For French critics, Balzac’s off-center stance was not logical and went “against all good judgment, defying all the simplest notions of sculpture.” 81 Jean Villemer wrote in Le Figaro: “But it’s a snowman! Look, it’s melting! It already leans to one side; it’s going to fall.” 82 Critics conflated physiological qualities with moral connotations, relating it to mental imbalance: in the Balzac monument, in Honoré de Balzac, and in Rodin himself. Jean Rameau, in Le Gaulois, called the work a “mental aberration;” 83 and Villemer, in Le Figaro, exclaimed: “It’s a madman. . . . It’s Balzac at Charenton [the psychiatric hospital] and he’s wearing his hospital gown.” 84 Gaston Leroux wrote in Le Matin that Rodin was “fou!” (mad!)85 while Duquesnel in Le Petit Journal exclaimed about the work: “This is madness!” 86 The poet Léon Bloy called Rodin’s actions an “inconceivable stroke of madness.” 87 To return now to Rosso: we cannot know what response Rosso’s figurines would have received in Paris in the 1890s since he never exhibited them there. Had he enlarged them into life-size works, he might well have been exposed to the same criticisms that Rodin had garnered with his Balzac. Indeed, for Rosso, the ridicule might have been even fiercer, given that he was a foreigner and had made his off-centered works several years earlier than Rodin’s Balzac. Rosso’s small diagonal figures, like Rodin’s Balzac, would likely have been seen as overly intellectual. Further, Rosso’s work would have been criticized, like Rodin’s Balzac, for its perceived lack of uprightness, for it is this single physical characteristic that is deemed most important in distinguishing human from beast.88 In a letter to the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, the critic Bernard Berenson called Rodin’s Balzac a “polar bear standing on his hind legs,” 89 while other critics called it a seal and a toad.90 Reducing Rodin’s Balzac further from animal to mineral, an

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anonymous critic defined it as a “stalactite,” 91 and Philippe Gille in Le Figaro labeled it an “unbalanced megalith.” 92

I M P R E S S I O N D E B O U L E VA R D. PA R I S L A N U I T ( C O N T I N U E D )

As one of the first modern monuments, Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit has some common features with Rodin’s Balzac. Both are highly subjective, not fully figurative sculptures that openly flaunt the process of their own making on their surfaces. Neither include the conventional pedestal, so that the works were positioned directly on the ground. Furthermore, as already noted, neither monument achieved public success. However, there are also significant differences between the two. Rodin’s Balzac is decentered, but it remains static and rooted in the ground, while Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit gives the viewer the sensation and conception of movement away from a center. In Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, Rosso took the concept of the monument in a different direction, both literally and figuratively: first by reversing the slant, pushing it forward rather than backward, and second by turning the work away from the viewer. By positioning the sculpture in this manner, Rosso completely revised traditional sculpture’s centered, frontal viewpoint, effacing any possibility of direct visual engagement with the figures. To be sure, several French avant-garde painters had represented figures walking from behind, including the Nabis painter Édouard Vuillard in his Young Girls Walking (1891). But Rosso used it in sculpture, and in an entirely different way. While naming Paris, the site of his displacement, in the title, he incorporated his own experience of the modern city, as if seen “from behind,” adopting a dramatically fragmented, oblique viewpoint and creating contrasting sensations of conjunction and disjunction, proximity and distance. In the twentieth century, this mode of seeing would epitomize the viewpoint of the outsider, and it would become emblematic of the modern condition of outsider-ness. Indeed, Rosso’s work predates by half a century Alberto Giacometti’s anguished expressions of urban alienation, such as La Place (City Square, 1947–48, fig. 63). Indeed, Giacometti’s direct interest in Rosso is recorded in a conversation with André Masson: “I would always retain a moving admiration for him [Rosso], and by chance during a conversation, many years later, with Giacometti, I learned that we both felt the same sentiment.” 93 This feeling of alienation would find extreme forms of representation in George Segal’s disaffected, anonymous white plaster figures in his lifesize Street Crossing (1992, fig. 64). Rosso’s interest in the question of displacement was both physical and psychological. Early in his career in Milan, he had attempted to give a life-size sculptural account of the human experience of mobility, based on a modern collective mode of transportation, in Impression d’omnibus (Impression of an Omnibus, 1884–87, plate 6). Later, in Paris, he represented walking as the most basic, autonomous human condition of movement. Unlike earlier sculptures of figures walking, such as Rodin’s L’homme qui marche (The Walking Man, ca. 1907, an assemblage based on the legs of his earlier Saint John the

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FIG. 63 Alberto Giacometti, La Place, 1947–48. Bronze, 21.6 × 64.5 × 43.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 337.1949. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY, © Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY.

Baptist of 1880), Rosso became the first sculptor to create a phenomenological sensation of mobility, expressing the modern feeling, already captured by painting, of time quickly passing. It seems relevant to mention that, at the same time, the Lumière brothers were presenting their experimental photographic sequences that would lead to the birth of cinema. Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey were actively engaged in similar problems of picturing motion. Rosso added a new layer to the temporal nature of the event by including the transitory nature of the viewer’s own perceptual instant of glimpsing it in the title (Impression de boulevard). He even included, by means of the title, the nocturnal conditions through which he imagined the sculpture to be hazily perceived (la nuit). Rosso thereby created a multilayered three-dimensional object that also incorporated its effect on the viewer. In contrast to Lessing’s Laocoön, in which the author presented the view that sculpture was a moment frozen in time, Rosso made a monument to the mobility of life itself. Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit represents a “now” that is always in motion. Rosso did more. His decision to turn the figures’ backs to the viewer reversed the traditional position of the monument, which was customarily seen frontally and allowed the viewer to walk around it completely. Rarely had a freestanding nineteenth-century sculpture before Rosso’s been made to be seen exclusively from behind. One noteworthy contemporary exception was the French sculptor Paul-Albert Bartholomé’s upright nude

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FIG. 64 George Segal, Street Crossing, 1992. Seven bronze figures with white patina, 182.9 × 487.7 × 365.8 cm. Montclair State University. © George and Helen Segal Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, NY.

figures seen from behind in his Monument aux Morts (1887–89), presented in plaster at the Salon of 1895, where Rosso had also exhibited, and installed in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in 1899; the work might well have been of interest to Rosso in these years given Bartholomé’s close friendship with Degas. By forcing the viewer to see his work from behind, Rosso gave his strongest response to Baudelaire yet, by showing that the sculptor had control over how his work could be viewed. Two decades later, Henri Matisse would make four autonomous monolithic bronze relief sculptures, which he prosaically titled Backs (1909–30). In my opinion, the dorsal view chosen by Rosso, with its particular inclination, has its roots in French Realist caricature. It recalls a highly advanced plaster relief by Daumier known as Les emigrants (The Emigrants, ca. late 1840s–1850s, fig. 65), which depicted a group of indistinctly sculpted, anonymous figures seen from behind, walking away. Rosso surely would have known the work. The relief, along with numerous paintings and drawings Daumier made of the same subject, are thought to have been privately conceived meditations that Daumier repeated in various forms for more than twenty years. Daumier was perhaps registering his personal response to the human suffering that

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FIG. 65 Honoré Daumier, Les emigrants, ca. late 1840s–1850s. Plaster, 22 × 68 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

occurred during the repression and uprisings of 1848, the cholera epidemic of 1849, the coup d’état of 1851, the republican blacklists of 1852, or, more likely, the mass waves of emigration that occurred during these decades (in France, from the country to the city, and from Europe to the United States). As the art historian Édouard Papet confirms, the subject of human suffering was headlined regularly in Le Charivari, the journal in which Daumier’s caricatures appeared, under the titles “emigration,” “exile,” and “wandering”—words that were frequently in the air in these decades.94 Daumier’s sculpture of fleeing figures was known first by the title Fugitifs (Fugitives).95 A reproduction of the sculpture appeared decades after it was made in a monograph by the critic Arsène Alexandre in 1888, where it was retitled Coup de vent (Gust of Wind) and also Les Émigrants (The Émigrés).96 Rosso, too, had made a work titled Coup de vent, which he described to Sainte-Croix as a priest with his robes raised up and seen from behind. This title might suggest that Rosso had drawn on Daumier for inspiration and that he knew of Daumier’s work by its alternate title.97 Possibly, the work that Rosso showed Sainte-Croix was actually Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, and Coup de vent was its earlier title. The renewed importance of Daumier for advanced artists in France in the 1890s could not have escaped Rosso. Although Daumier was considered a Realist, his work was praised in Symbolist writing. Daumier was “less exact, perhaps, but undoubtedly more true,” according to the Symbolist critic Albert Aurier.98 Rosso would have surely known of the cult status that the relief by Daumier had gained in Parisian art circles in the 1890s. The relief’s description in Alexandre’s monograph of 1888 (Alexandre owned one of Daumier’s paintings of the same subject) circulated among artists, critics, and

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collectors. Additionally, the plaster molder Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume, to whom Daumier had entrusted his clay model, sold copies of the relief in 1893 to the French critics Claude Roger-Marx and Armand Dayot. Dayot then had a bronze edition of five casts made by the Siot-Decauville foundry in Paris after 1893, further increasing its circulation. Another copy was bought by the French sculptor Jules Desbois, who worked for Rodin. It should be noted that both Alexandre and Dayot, who knew the relief well, wrote about Rosso in these years. Rosso had maintained an intense engagement with Daumier’s lithographs and caricatures from the very beginning of his career. His continuing interest might have led him to discover this lesser-known side of Daumier as a sculptor. This private aspect of the caricaturist’s artistic identity was well known among the French intelligentsia, and Rosso might have discovered it only upon his move to Paris. Rosso may have resonated emotionally with the title of Daumier’s relief, “Emigrants.” The exaggeratedly elongated left leg of Rosso’s Uomo che legge bears a striking resemblance to the well-modeled figure at the center of Daumier’s relief. Most significantly, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit conceptually and visually echoes Daumier’s forward-inclined figures, captured from behind. Scholars have not commented on the work’s possible ties to Daumier, nor have they noted Rosso’s fascination with this unusual posterior viewpoint in his own numerous sketches and drawings of figures. Among these drawings, Rosso submitted a self-portrait, hitherto ignored in Rosso studies, for Yveling Rambaud’s monographic profile of artists in Paris titled Silhouettes d’artistes (Artists’ Profiles, 1898). The portrait reveals that Rosso tried this angle of presentation on himself (fig. 66).99 The image is dominated by Rosso’s dark back, incompletely rendered, with his head barely turned, leaving the artist’s face partially visible. This gesture of a representation “from behind” indicates Rosso’s strongest expression of standing apart. A view of the back may hide the characters’ emotions from the spectator, but it does so far more forcefully and definitively than a mask or a veil, for it requires the viewer to remain at a discreet, nonintrusive distance. It shifts the focus of a spectator’s interest from identity or personality to an unknown side. Rather than focusing on the individual, it evokes a consideration of the greater temporal and spatial forces that propel a character’s actions “from behind.” The view from behind dramatically illustrates the dynamics of Rosso’s encounter with Paris. In any meeting between a “self” and an “other,” looking at the “front” allows one to grasp what is presented on the surface and also to project imaginary ideas and expectations, based on what is offered on that surface. The meeting with the frontal gives the newcomer important information for survival (such as whether to stay or to flee). However, it takes time for a subtler, fuller grasp of the other to be reached, which might be called “the view from the back.” This process is typical of the encounter with another culture, where the “back” represents aspects that the culture might not be proud to show, or of which it might not be aware. Such a view of the back might run counter to, or be

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FIG. 66 Medardo Rosso, self-portrait published in Yveling Rambaud, Silhouettes d’artistes (Paris: Société française d’éditions d’art, 1899), 229.

different from, the newcomer’s expectations or original projections, which were derived from the view from the front, or with a concomitant lack of awareness of the other’s collective history and fragilities. Any meeting with another culture can elicit a wish to turn one’s back on it, to withdraw, and to focus internally. Alternatively, it may elicit the development of a new awareness of, or a curiosity about, what lies in the back. Critics have not realized the wide-ranging art historical, psychological, and theoretical significance of Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit’s dorsal viewpoint. By representing his figures as walking away, Rosso intimated a sensation of disconnection and detachment. When he photographed the work in his studio, he extended this sensation to a representation of its movement away from its own setting. In one photo,

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FIG. 67 Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, ca. 1896–99. Plaster, 200 × 300 cm. Destroyed. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

Rosso positioned the sculpture partially beyond the photographic frame, cropping it so that it appears to be leaving its own scene (fig. 67). The cropped angle of presentation resembles approaches used in painting by Degas and the Nabis.100 In another photograph, Rosso represented himself in the process of leaving the scene, moving in the opposite direction from his work (fig. 68). This disengagement and detachment from one’s own work had not appeared so blatantly in sculpture before Rosso. How different are Rodin’s photographs of himself mimicking the poses of his Le Penseur and his Balzac. The three figures within Rosso’s sculpture are ambivalent about making a connection with each other, for they engage and disengage, walking at once separately and together.

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FIG. 68 Medardo Rosso, self-portrait with Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, ca. 1896–99. Plaster, 200 × 300 cm. Destroyed. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

Lista writes that “the lines correspond . . . to two different psychological situations: solitude and exchange.” 101 Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit suggests values of connection and separateness, as well as the coexistence of different viewpoints. Rosso might have been commenting, in his sculpture, on what Carol Armstrong has called Degas’s disruptive “directional discord” in paintings, such as Place de la Concorde (1875, fig. 69), in which each of three figures walks in a different direction, thereby interrupting a continuous line.102 The art historian Mari Kálmán Meller notes about Degas’s work, “The whole picture is essentially determined by the obliquity of its principal figure. . . . The Vicomte projects the transitoriness of street life, in which fragments of the scene emerge and vanish swiftly, seen by chance. The protagonist’s linear placement entails movement, disjunction and separation.” 103 Nancy Forgione adds that “Place de la Concorde is rare among paintings of the period that feature walking in Paris in that, owing to its air of disconnection, it incorporates a feeling often described as alienation.” 104

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FIG. 69 Edgar Degas, Place de la Concorde, 1875. Oil on canvas, 78.4 × 117.5 cm. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Giovanni Lista and Anne Pingeot both find a conceptual resemblance between Rosso’s monument and Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais (1884–89), a monument that proposed two different orientations in space.105 However, in Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, I do not believe that Rosso is “asking the viewer’s eye to make the connection” between the figures.106 Rather, more like Degas’s work, Rosso represents the possibility of unstable and multiple visions. In fact, to me the work does not seem to possess what Mola and Vittucci see as “only a single ‘orientation in space.’ ” 107 Rosso’s representation of human separation and connection in Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit can be likened to a small work he made, but never exhibited, during his Parisian years entitled Une conversation (ca. 1892–99, fig. 70).108 The work depicts an uneasy “conversation,” represented through a scene of exchange occurring in a group composed of three figures: two seated ladies and one standing man. Margaret Scolari Barr imagines that the figures “see” one another; but, on closer examination, one finds that they are sculpted with bits of material and have no proper faces, as she herself notes in her text.109 Nor do they truly communicate. The art historian Fred Licht describes this relationship as “fraught with mystery. We see everything, yet understand next to nothing. . . . Rosso is a pioneer of the theme of incommunicability.” 110 As such, Rosso challenges more conventional paintings of his time on the theme of conversations, such as

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FIG. 70 Medardo Rosso, Une conversation, ca. 1892–99. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

the Italian painter Victor Corcos’s Conversazione nei Giardini di Luxembourg (Conversation in the Luxembourg Gardens, 1892). In the twentieth century Matisse would represent uneasy relationships fraught with tension, such as La Conversation (1908–12). In Rosso’s Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, communication is no longer needed. The figures are single, anonymous, and connected merely by being in the same place at the same time, yet the figure that stands apart guarantees that they never represent one totality. The work’s uniqueness lies in the fact that it offers a plurality of visions without the need to unify them. Proximity is defined by affinities and connections, rather than by a fusion in the name of a single higher concept or idea. As a multifigure sculpture, the work possesses a multiple focus that does not ask to be unified or recomposed. The work’s authority is everywhere and nowhere. Rosso’s work conveys an acceptance of this sense of displacement from a single united history. The same recognition of displacement defined the position of the cosmopolitan and outsider at the fin de siècle.

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I believe that, in Rosso’s final large-scale work, Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, the artist introduced yet another modern aspect to sculpture, which is a sense of incommunicability and alienation that characterized urban life and had only been explored thus far in paintings. Only the subtitle of the work—Paris la nuit—anchors it fleetingly in time and space. In naming the city that was emblematic of modern life and avantgarde art, Rosso acknowledged the site of his displacement. His monument to modernity intuited the kinds of isolated and alienated sculptural figures that would become the trademark of Giacometti in the 1930s and 1940s, which the critic Timothy Mathews has described as a “crisis of distance, of measurement, of size, of relation and the possibility of relation.” 111 In conclusion, Rosso’s decision to stay in Paris confirms the city’s importance for him. Paris offered a breath of fresh air compared to the stagnant Milanese scene, and it was there that he found a place for his vision. In Paris, Rosso was uncomfortable with his status as “other,” yet benefited from the mystery it afforded him. In his first decades there, he remained stubbornly confined inside his visionary universe, but in so doing preserved the character of his artistic vision. By serving as a cultural incubator, Paris in the 1890s did not refuse anyone, even those who would not—or could not—quite play the game. But as Rosso would soon discover, Paris alone could not guarantee his survival.

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On the Move

8 ON THE MOVE The Quest for International Recognition

By 1900, it had become clear to Rosso that living in Paris would not suffice to create the international reputation he envisioned. Like many artists, he began to travel around Europe to promote his art, relying on new international networks and opportunities. Rosso intensified his declarations of himself as a citizen of the world and as a maker of art without borders or limits.1 Absent a national identification, Rosso instead constructed the story of his life and art in ways that highlighted qualities of transience, mobility, and a proud sense of not belonging. This chapter deals with Rosso’s travels in Europe and concludes with the creation of his final work, a portrait entitled Ecce puer (Behold the Child, 1906). Rosso’s last years of international expansion have not been examined within the context of the cultural climate of the turn of the century, which was characterized by rising nationalism and imperialism on the one hand and an expanding internationalist climate on the other. Artists were expected to shore up national traditions, while their lives were cosmopolitan and their practices were shaped by cross-cultural collaboration.2 Rosso’s efforts to create an international legacy were molded by, and against, this historical background, which frames his refusal of national categories as well as his idiosyncratic definition of internationalism. Rosso renounced his Italian citizenship on July 25, 1902, and became a French citizen in the same year.3 Yet he did not consider himself French. His Italian friend Mario Vianello Chiodo recounted how Rosso recaptured and reconfigured his Italian origins into a new myth of international mobility: “Rosso did not like to say in what city he was born, he did not like such specifications, because of his concept of being an enemy of

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classifications; if somebody persisted, he would respond that he was born on a train, given that his father worked for the railways.” 4 In a monograph of 1909, the Belgian critic Louis Piérard characterized Rosso as an artist who was completely free from the constraints of national identity: “Rosso is Italian by birth. This has no importance to him: he is ready to learn without a frown that he is not Piedmontese but rather Chinese or Papuan. His internationalism is simple, clean, radical, and impetuous. One must hear him speak about borders and the prejudices that idiots have against a man because he uses a different language with respect to theirs or, according to the words of Flaubert, he appears green on paper while they show him to be red.” 5 During the early 1900s, Rosso began to mobilize his art, international exhibitions, and publications in innovative ways to express his highly personal definition of Impressionism. He wished to be seen but not branded, recognized by movements and institutions but not defined, or exhausted, by classification. Several of the experimental strategies he developed show his grappling with conceptual modes of self-presentation that would come to characterize avant-garde artists in the twentieth century.

S C U L P T U R E A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L I Z AT I O N

Recent research into the phenomenon of the internationalization of the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has focused on painting, leaving a gap where sculpture is concerned. On the whole, when it came to internationalization, sculpture remained more conservative than painting. In the age of “monumentomania,” sculptors still established their reputations through public commissions in their home countries, typically producing traditional monuments that reflected collective national and political ideas. Furthermore, monuments were site-specific and not mobile, thus hampering sculptors’ ability to move easily from one country to another. While many sculptors studied abroad for limited periods (such as the French sculptors who won the Prix de Rome), worked abroad (as in the French sculptors Jules Dalou in London, Auguste Rodin and Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse in Belgium, or the Belgian sculptors Constantin Meunier and George Minne in Paris), or took part in large construction projects and prestigious foreign commissions (such as Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who made the Statue of Liberty for New York), they still, by and large, relied on an association with their countries of origin to promote their reputations at home and abroad. Even the most international of avant-garde sculptors, Auguste Rodin, remained committed to institutional recognition in France during his lifetime, despite clashes with French commissions over his daring proposals. Rodin’s international success and popularity around the world after 1900, in fact, depended on his earlier canonization in France. The demise of the French Salon and the increasing international dissemination of Impressionist painting opened up new markets for all artists around 1900. The democratization of art and the rise of internationally minded dealers catering to demand from bourgeois consumers in Europe and the United States led artists to become increasingly

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entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan. For sculptors, the growing popularity, lower costs, and technical improvements of industrially produced serial sculpture, dominated by France, afforded an alternative means to make and distribute casts with greater speed and efficiency.6 The smaller scale of serial casts rendered sculptures portable and mobile, facilitating circulation, transport, exhibition, and sales in different cities and to more clients. Seriality also enabled sculptors to disseminate mechanical reductions of their more famous large-scale monuments. The greater ease of producing two-dimensional mechanical reproductions of sculptures in prints, such as those made and sold by the French dealer Adolphe Goupil, provided another modern way for sculptors to extend their reputations abroad more easily. Rosso was one of the first sculptors to construct his career outside his home country and to make a reputation without having a monument to his name. He took full advantage of the growing international status of sculpture, relying on serial sculpture’s popularity and especially its mobility. He also employed serial sculpture for artistic experimentation.7 In all these ways, Rosso struggled with issues that modern sculpture would continue to engage with in a major way. After the first decade of the twentieth century, sculptors from Constantin Brancusi to Alberto Giacometti became famous while living in Paris and would no longer have to create reputations through traditional site-specific monuments. Nor did they need to seek the full support of institutions in their home countries in order to become successful internationally.

PA R I S , 19 0 0

Rosso’s participation in the Exposition Universelle of 1900 was a major event that his biographies list but do not fully describe or critically analyze. In fact, it functioned as his launching pad for internationalization beyond Paris. The growing number of international exhibitions toward the end of the nineteenth century provided sculptors with more avenues for visibility and new ways to receive a worldly stamp of approval that established their reputations abroad and back at home. One of the most important of these venues was still the Parisian Exposition Universelle, which, since its inception in 1855, had functioned as a site for spontaneous international exchanges. Rosso himself had moved to Paris after exhibiting at the 1889 edition of the Exposition. The 1900 edition is widely acknowledged as a turning point for the internationalization of modern art. Three events held in conjunction with the Exposition solidified France’s central position in that history. The first was the Centennale exhibition of French painting that included art from 1879 to 1889, which brought awareness to Europeans of a canonical Impressionism and established for the world that Impressionism was at the center of a French tradition.8 France’s preeminence was reinforced by the second event, which was the display of Gustave Caillebotte’s Impressionist collection at the Musée de Luxembourg. The third event was the retrospective of Rodin’s sculptures in his personal Alma Pavilion, through which he was crowned as France’s greatest living sculptor.9

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Biographies do not address the complex mechanics of Rosso’s participation in the 1900 Exposition. He had not shown his works anywhere in the preceding five years and was eager to take part in this major exhibition. Nationalistic biases made his involvement difficult. He had by now lived in Paris for more than a decade and apparently applied to exhibit in the French Pavilion but was refused due to his Italian citizenship.10 His only remaining option was to exhibit in the far less prestigious Italian Pavilion. Additionally, the invitation came only after the Exposition had been inaugurated. This fact is documented in a letter from the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Paris dated April 15; Rosso noted, in pen, at the top of the letter that it had arrived at his studio on April 17, two days after the opening of the Exposition.11 The invitation detailed the works Rosso was asked to show.12 True to form, he refused to exhibit some of the approved works on the list. At the bottom of the letter he wrote angrily in French: “What nerve, I exhibited that which I believed [to be right]—otherwise I would have removed everything. Some nobodies came to allow me to exhibit from [Commissioner of the Italian Pavilion, the sculptor Ettore] Ferrari [to] [President of the Italian Commission Camillo] Boito.” 13 For reasons that have never been clear, neither Rosso’s name nor his works appear in the catalogue. This omission, remarked upon in the French press, was seen by Rosso as another affront and makes it difficult to ascertain which works he actually exhibited. 14 Several reviews note a few sculptures from the approved list, such as Rieuse and Enfant malade, but other reviews describe different works: Portrait de Madame X (Madame Noblet) and Vers le soir: femme à la voilette.15 It is not clear whether the work noted in the press as Au soleil: impression d’enfant (In the Sun: Impression of a Child) is the generic “head of a child, high relief in bronze” 16 cited in the letter or another head of a child. Rosso withheld the approved portrait of Henri Rouart, as well as a “head of a young man, bronze on a round pedestal,” 17 which was probably a bronze cast of his early Milanese Il Birichino (Street Urchin, 1882, see fig. 6). What can be said is that all the subjects he chose to exhibit were made in Paris. Several, such as the portrait of Madame Noblet, Enfant malade, and Enfant au soleil, were works he had never exhibited before. Once in the Italian Pavilion, Rosso had to struggle to gain visibility. His sculptures appeared among 216 other artworks by 112 Italian exhibitors (75 painters showed 129 paintings and 37 sculptors showed 87 sculptures).18 His works were denied a prominent position and placed in a dark corner. This placement was corrected only later, when the five sculptures were moved into a special gallery in which a retrospective of paintings by Giovanni Segantini was presented. Jean Mitron wrote in La Petite République socialiste that it was almost by a miracle that, in the Italian section, the greatest living artist that Italy could have to honor, Medardo Rosso, could have slid into a corner four of his works, that are, in our opinion, the four rarest marvels of art of this Exposition Universelle. It is with pleasure that I return to this fact today to note that when the Italian Pavilion opens its doors, things will have changed due to a brusque response. Five and no longer four of the works by Rosso, Enfant malade, Portrait of Madame X . . ., Rieuse, In the Sun, the Evening on

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the Boulevard, will have been relocated from the dark corner that was assigned to them in order to be exhibited in a place of honor, in the gallery of the paintings by Segantini, the painter who died two years ago. We add that the vigorous intervention of two members of the jury, the deputy sculptor Ferrari and the painter Jacovacci, made a strong contribution, so that the Italian art section is honored by this act instead of dishonoring itself as did our French judges here at home.19

The presentation of Rosso’s works in the same room with Segantini provides an example of a nationalistic reaction to cultural intersection; it suggests the Italians’ unsuccessful attempt to reclaim national identification for two artists who had not been living and working in Italy for years.20 Apart from their national origins, these two artists had little in common. After seeing Rosso’s sculptures near the paintings of Segantini, the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe described them as “a tender muffled voice among fishwives.” 21 Rosso’s sculptures received mixed reviews. One French critic declared that he was “the Italian Rodin, who for fifteen years exercises a very great influence upon his compatriots and also upon foreigners.” 22 Arsène Alexandre, the prominent critic of Le Figaro who had coined the word “Neo-Impressionism,” preferred the “superb” and “remarkable” works of Vincenzo Gemito.23 He described Rosso’s sculptures as “sketches . . . sometimes curious, sometimes incompletely made.” 24 Other French critics believed Rosso should receive an award. In La Petite République socialiste, Jean Mitron exhorted that there is still time to remind the competent juries that it would be unpardonable after so many faults to not at least do for the foreigners that which has not been done for France, giving the first prizes of sculpture to the Belgian sculptor Jef Lambeaux, whose Triumph of Woman is as beautiful as a very beautiful Rubens, and to the Milanese sculptor Medardo Rosso, the genius creator of an artistic formula that will remain one of the greatest glories of this end of the nineteenth century.25

An Italian reviewer attempted to reclaim Rosso for his country of origin: If our fears should come to be justified by the facts, those who try to blame the lack of success exclusively on the artists would be ill advised. Because here, more than in painting, there are some who have demonstrated boldness by setting out in new directions without hesitation. I want to only cite one . . . Medardo Rosso, who was able to push through in Paris, where too many succumb, and to elevate the name of his country.26

It is noteworthy that most critics could not free Rosso from national labels, as is evident in the words of the French reviewer who called Rosso “the Italian Rodin.” Despite Rosso’s rejection of the Italian attempts to reclaim him at the Exposition Universelle, he had a major effect on one artist of the country’s developing avant-garde who had traveled to Paris for the exhibition. Scholars have overlooked an unpublished letter dated October 16, 1900, written by the young painter Giacomo Balla to the dealer Alberto Grubicy

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de Dragon. Balla, who would soon become a founding member of the Futurists, wrote of his negative impression of the Parisian art world but of being struck by Rosso’s work: In the same gallery as the great artist [Segantini] there are exhibited modeled heads by a certain Rosso, but expressed with such sentiment and such poetry and especially with such an intellectual eye in interpreting the form placed in its environment by color that is truly striking and surprising. And yet in seeing my enthusiasm in front of these good qualities many look at me with marvel while others think I’m crazy.27

Biographies traditionally claim that it had been another Italian Futurist, Umberto Boccioni, who discovered Rosso’s art but only a decade later, after Futurism had begun to establish itself as a bona fide movement. In his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912), Boccioni would hail Rosso as the revolutionary Italian forefather of Futurism. Rosso, however, staunchly denied this attempt to claim him, thereby refusing his own place as the precursor of modern Italian art.28 It has not been established that Rosso was given an award, as some scholars believe.29 My examination of the lists of winners does not show Rosso’s name. To be sure, a stamp conserved in the Rosso Archive, with the date of September 8, 1907, and with Rosso’s Parisian address reads: “M. Rosso / sculpteur & fondeur / cire perdue procedé Rosso / aute [sic] reconais. Exp. Univ. 1900.” However, a prize by that name did not exist and the inscription is misspelled in French, leading me to believe that this stamp was handmade by Rosso. Nor did Rosso receive another form of recognition by having a work purchased by the French state.30 Nevertheless, his sculptures captivated a number of foreigners who had come to Paris to see the Exposition and who would play key roles in the development of modern art. Such spontaneous moments of cultural and artistic intersection would open the door for him to create an international reputation.

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One of the foreigners who came to the Exposition Universelle was Etha Fles, a wealthy Dutch writer, artist, and critic. She was enraptured with Rosso’s art when she first saw it and soon thereafter became his patroness, supporter, and mistress. Thanks to Fles’s support, Rosso would extend his career to Holland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.31 Fles had come to Paris to help the Dutch commissioners select paintings from the Exposition for a show of French Impressionism in Holland.32 The idea for such a show was daring, since works by Impressionist artists had appeared only sporadically on the Dutch exhibition circuit before 1900.33 Fles chose to frame Rosso through the lens of French Impressionist painting, selecting five sculptures by Rosso in addition to two or three paintings each by Georges d’Espagnat, Gustave Loiseau, Camille Pissarro, Maxime Maufra, Claude Monet, Henry Moret, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. The exhibition, titled Tentoonstelling van

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FIG. 71 Medardo Rosso’s works in Etha Fles’s home, possibly 1913.

schilderijen uit de moderne Fransche school en beeldhouwwerken van M. Rosso, opened in Amsterdam in January 1901 and traveled to Rotterdam, Utrecht, and the Hague.34 Of the five works by Rosso listed in the catalogue—Portrait (bronze); Impression d’enfant, Tête (wax); Dame à la voilette; Impression à l’hôpital (wax); and Rieuse—only three can be identified with certainty by their titles.35 As with the Exposition Universelle, all the works he chose to show were made during his French period (he made no separate heads of very young children or small portraits during his Milanese years).36 Rosso had high hopes of being welcomed in Holland, expecting that, “in the country of Hals and Rembrandt, where people hate the academic, I shall be understood.” 37 However, things did not work out as Rosso expected. Not much is known about the fate of this show. What is clear is that only one of his bronzes was in Amsterdam for the opening. This might have been the reason, as Margaret Scolari Barr suggested, why Rosso hardly garnered any press.38 Fles wrote a lengthy, glowing review in the Groninger Courant, in which she said that “in Paris and Vienna the casts of Rosso’s work command prices that surpass our imagination, therefore he is not interested in selling here.” 39 In reality, the exhibition was also intended as a commercial enterprise. Upon examination, Fles’s copy of the catalogue includes handwritten prices for Rosso’s works.40 No records have emerged to assess whether any sculptures were sold, although Fles amassed a significant collection (fig. 71).

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Given that this would be Rosso’s only exhibition in Holland, one might surmise that it did not generate the hoped-for Dutch reception. During this period, Rosso made a life-size portrait of Fles’s father. The only record of the Portrait of Dr. Fles (1901, lost or destroyed) is a photograph by Rosso that he frequently published, suggesting that the work held significance for him not only as a private commission but also as a public statement. The portrait represents the culmination of an ongoing effort by Rosso to articulate a full-bodied male figure in terms that fit with his modern project. He expands upon earlier ideas expressed in his busts of Filippo Filippi and Vincenzo Brusco Onnis, as well as in a bust of the Milanese businessman Giovanni Francesco Trebini (date uncertain, lost or destroyed).41 Trebini was also an art patron.42 The fully modeled face and body in the Portrait of Dr. Fles is more complete than the portrait of Henri Rouart, which has a smaller-than-normal head and has been sculpted only down to its knees. The Portrait of Dr. Fles enlarges dramatically the miniaturized and sketchy representations of seated and standing male figures in Après la visite (After the Visit, or Malato all’ospedale [Sick Man in the Hospital], 1889, see figs. 44, 45) and Une Conversation (ca. 1892–99, see fig. 70). More than any of these works, the Portrait of Dr. Fles is highly modern in its representation as a mass of sculptural material.

DRESDEN, 1901

Thanks to his visibility at the Exposition Universelle, Rosso’s works were exhibited in several German museums and galleries between 1901 and 1902. Although Fles may have been involved, the German interest in Rosso seems to belong more to what the art historian Robert Jensen has described as Central Europe’s investment in transforming French Impressionism into a pan-European modern phenomenon.43 Georg Treu, the internationally minded director of the Albertinum in Dresden and curator of its sculpture department, was among the first German cultural figures to become fascinated by Rosso’s work at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Treu subsequently invited Rosso to exhibit at the Albertinum (probably in June 1901).44 Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci believe that Rosso sent the five works from the Dutch tour; but, to date, we cannot confirm the subjects of two of the works exhibited in Holland. Furthermore, my research indicates that, in a letter, Rosso spoke to Treu of “eight works that I will exhibit.” 45 In the same letter he asked to include “a wax and not of large dimensions” from Fles’s collection, which may or may not have been among the eight works indicated.46 Four of the sculptures, which are not all from the Dutch show, can be identified in a letter from Rosso to Treu’s secretary Paul Hermann. In the letter, dated September 6, 1901, after the show closed, Rosso asked Hermann to send back “1. le grand portrait bronze de Mons Rouart; 2. Le grand portrait bronze Madame X 3. Bronze petite figure homme malade à l’hopital (bronze) [sic]; 4. Grande cire femme impression de boulevard.” 47 All four were from Rosso’s Parisian period.

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FIG. 72 Medardo Rosso, Head of Vitellius, ca. 1894. Bronze, 36 × 26 × 25.7 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

Dresden’s early institutional interest in Rosso is not surprising; it had been the first German city to witness exhibitions of modern French art since the 1890s. The road for modern sculpture in Dresden had been paved by Rodin, who became famous in Central Europe through his exhibition at the Dresden Internationale Kunstausstellung in 1897. Treu, who wrote on Rodin after 1900, had been buying Rodin’s works for the Dresden sculpture collection since 1894.48 Treu ended up buying one work from Rosso in July 1901: a wax version of Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95, fig. 49). He paid a high price for it, given that it was a non-noble material—1,600 marks—but this was his only purchase.49 Seemingly unrelated to Rosso’s modern project was his sale to Treu, for 400 marks, of one of the reproductions he had made of an ancient work—a bronze Head of Vitellius, to be placed in a section of the museum that housed copies from antiquity (fig. 72).50 According to letters from Rosso to Treu, the transactions began on March 14, 1902. The museum registers date the work’s entry into the collection as January 16, 1903.51 A fuller discussion regarding the place of Rosso’s reproductions of sculptures from previous centuries within his oeuvre belongs here. While making copies of antique works was not unique, and although a thriving international market for pastiches existed, reproductions of ancient art signed by modern artists seem unusual for the time. Although Rosso began to make these reproductions in Paris and sold several of them in

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London in the 1890s, the sale in Germany to Treu of the bronze Head of Vitellius marks Rosso’s recognition of the conceptual potential of his reproductions and the importance of their place within his project.52

ROSSO’S REPRODUCTIONS FROM THE PAST

The physical process by which Rosso made the reproductions is still not clear. It is likely that he obtained plaster copies from various ateliers de moulage.53 He would then either make exact copies from the plasters that he bought (as Mola and Vittucci suggest) or else he would study them and hand model his own versions in clay (as Volker Krahn suggests). The latter possibility seems to me more likely, or else he employed a process that combined both techniques.54 There is no controversy that the next step involved casting his models into plaster, wax, and bronze. There has been no systematic study of the formal similarities and differences between Rosso’s reproductions and the sculptures that gave rise to them. Therefore, we cannot give a definitive account of the differences between the original works, the plaster casts of them that were available to the public, and Rosso’s handmade and self-cast reproductions. In an age of the availability of mechanical reproductions, Rosso’s decision to model at least some of them by hand appears to be a statement on its own about his sense of the importance of the artist’s hand in the making of serial sculpture. To date, the reasons Rosso made reproductions remain elusive. His contemporaries, such as Meier-Graefe, wrote that Rosso produced them for financial reasons. MeierGraefe regarded the works as a cheapening and inferior aspect that was separate from Rosso’s artistic project: [He] suffered the fate typical of every ambitious and unscrupulous foreigner in Paris. . . . To earn an initial crust in Paris he had stooped as low as it was possible to go. As soon as he could bestir himself—and he certainly made free use of his elbows—there was nothing to prevent him from acting in whatever ways he thought fit. One logical conclusion to be drawn from this was to salvage his Italian legacy: a skill that could make him the dangerous forger of works from all periods and climes.55

Yet, in the same article, Meier-Graefe notes the way Rosso presented these works as signposts to locate his own position in the history of sculpture. Following Barr, Luciano Caramel gives these works second-tier status. He opines that the reproductions were intended as “comparison pieces,” made in order for Rosso to show the superiority of his modern sculptures over those of the past.56 Giovanni Lista considers the reproductions in a nationalistic vein: as a form of emulation by Rosso of the Italian masters. In his opinion, they demonstrate Rosso’s artistic interest in Michelangelo and Donatello, which Lista believes was consonant with the cultural climate of the time in Italy.57 Mola and Vittucci are of the opinion that the reproductions were integral to Rosso’s overall project,

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expressing his personal interest in experimental processes of casting and patinating. They note that this seems to be part of Rosso’s greater tendency to transfer from one form to another and from one material to another in all of his works.58 I believe that Rosso’s reproductions express a novel form of imaginal motion, through the use of the sculptor’s hands and casting techniques, across history, beyond the constraints of time, space, national boundaries, and artistic movements. This form of imaginal movement intuits the roaming mode of apprehension of the artists of today, with stops that tread lightly but insistently on the terrain of the past, making a brief home in it, reconfiguring it in their art, and then quickly moving on. A study by the art historian Volker Krahn illustrates the research still to be done on Rosso’s reproductions. Krahn examined a bozzetto of the Martelli David, originally thought to be by Donatello but recently revealed to be by Rosso: The statuette’s most striking formal detail is the gesture made by its left hand, the back of which rests in a distorted fashion on the raised upper left leg. . . . The position of the sling is unconvincing: it protrudes from behind the right hand, but it is unclear how it is secured or held. The position of the bronze’s right foot is also formally unsatisfactory, as the toes do not touch the ground but are roughly indicated in Goliath’s hair. This detail is by contrast anatomically complete in the Martelli David. In the bronze, Goliath’s head is shapeless and undifferentiated at the back. There is also insufficient space for it between David’s feet, so that it looks squashed. . . . [Overall, its] surface is very sketchily executed, the physiognomic details in particular being strikingly coarse, whereas the partial subsequent reworking of the bronze is in remarkable contrast to the sketchy modelling.59

Krahn is the first to use technical analysis on this work to establish that the alloys in Rosso’s version were not the ones employed during the Renaissance, thereby confirming the work as a nineteenth-century creation by Rosso rather than a Donatello. It is also not resolved whether the work Rosso called David di Verrocchio was the same or a different work or whether Rosso inadvertently or intentionally shifted the title of the work’s maker, Donatello, to that of his greatest heir, Verrocchio, whose David is visually quite distinct from Donatello’s. It might suggest that such precision did not matter to Rosso in the greater flow of art history. A strategy of shifting titles is evident in Rosso’s modern works. The utility of research such as Krahn’s goes far beyond the establishment of the author of the reproduction. I believe that the contribution of this investigation lies in the close attention that Krahn has given to the formal and material deviations that Rosso made with respect to the Martelli David. I suggest that these deviations should be read as statements of Rosso’s modernity. The coarse physiognomic features, the sketchily executed details, and even the materials used are all part of Rosso’s modern vocabulary. The reproduction is thus not an attempt to emulate the details of Donatello’s David accurately but rather a modern-day sculptor’s form of creatively locating and dislocating the pillars of the sculpture of the past.

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To date, scholars have not adequately considered the reasons for Rosso’s choice of subjects for his reproductions. Looking at the range of subjects, one might wonder whether there was some significance to their selection. The choice of David, for example, might relate to Rosso’s sense of his position vis-à-vis the Goliath Rodin. A large number of Rosso’s subjects belong to ancient Rome. These subjects include Julius Caesar, a Roman Senator, Head of an Ancient Roman, and the decadent Emperor Vitellius, reproduced by Rosso at least three times in bronze, in different ways, including one with a striking gilt patination. The task of unpacking Rosso’s choice of subjects for his reproductions remains for future scholars. Here I will limit my comments to one suggestive instance, that of the Vitellius. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, Thomas Couture’s large history painting Romains de la décadence (1847), which included the figure of Vitellius, had been re-exhibited and made a strong impression on French thinkers, philosophers, and poets of the time. Rosso’s Vitellius should be considered in relation to discussions in intellectual circles expressing a modern pessimistic notion of Paris as a center of culture in decline.60 These ideas existed alongside the glowing view of the fin de siècle as la belle epoque and the positivistic faith in progress. Given his friendships with major French poets such as Jehan Rictus and Charles Morice, both of whom were close to Paul Verlaine, the notable decadent poet, we can safely conclude that Rosso must have been aware of this intellectual theme.61 It might have been the impetus for his focus on the late Roman Emperor Vitellius, known as lazy, self-indulgent, obese, and gluttonous, symbolizing the entire decadence and decline of the Roman empire in its most distasteful, repulsive physical form. With his sale of the Vitellius to Treu, Rosso took his reproductions in a new direction. From this moment onward, Rosso insisted that his own hand be recognized as the maker of the reproductions and that his name appear on a label beside them.62 When he sold the Vitellius, he issued a receipt to Treu that read “reproduction by my hand,” then crossed this out and replaced it with the words “reproduction made by my hand,” and in another letter as: “Reproduced and cast by Medardo Rosso from the original in the Vatican in Rome.” 63 Scholars have not paid attention to the modern artistic significance of Rosso’s unconventional gesture of remaking and signing the reproductions in his own name. In my opinion, Rosso’s act throws into disarray the notion of originality as well as authorship in art. This question is familiar to us now but only from later discussions of modern art. Rosso sought to redefine the meaning of artistic conventions by disrupting the accepted relationship between signature and maker, which normally identifies the latter as authorizing agent. In fact, Rosso questioned the very notion of signature in all of his works. He often did not sign his modern works and did not permit foundries to stamp their names on them, effacing and confusing the artist’s signature as authorial sign. In the context of questions of authorship and attribution, it is worth noting the case of a series of ancient and Renaissance casts that, judging from their specific titles, appear

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to have had some relationship to Rosso’s reproductions but were attributed to Paolo Sutto, an Italian founder who worked in Paris and for a time collaborated with Rosso. The works are first mentioned at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.64 On June 16, one reviewer described having unexpectedly found, in the industrial section of the Italian Pavilion—which displayed ceramics, embroidery, and crystal—four copies of ancient sculptures by a certain Mr. Paolo Sutto di Acqui, who is described as a student of Medardo Rosso. The author laments that these works should have been in the artistic section.65 The works had already been noted a week earlier, on June 7, when the critic Jean Mitron exhorted: “Go to see in the Italian palace the admirable bronzes by Paul Sutto d’Acqui: the Old Man by Houdon; the Roman Senator, the Caesar at the Louvre, the Doctor by Donatello, etc. etc. Without extravagant combinations of patinas, without vulgar tricks, for the wise observation of the model, for the physiognomic comprehension of the work, the excellent artist has resuscitated the old secrets of ancient bronze.” 66 In another article dated July 2, a critic named “B. D.” described seeing five (rather than four) works that included a Vitellius. “B. D.” complained that the exhibition catalogue omitted the name of the “artist,” Paolo Sutto d’Acqui, who he believed had used Rosso’s methods for patinating his works.67 We know little of Sutto or his relationship to Rosso. There seems to have been some form of partnership between the two, for Sutto circulated business cards in which he advertised that he used Rosso’s cire perdue (lost wax) procedure for casting.68 The association between Rosso and Sutto led Lista to believe that Rosso exhibited the copies of ancient art at the Exposition under Sutto’s name. The fact that Sutto was given a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle and that Rosso, too, claimed to have won this medal might suggest collaboration.69 In summary, it appears that Rosso’s casts were appreciated for his bravura, but their novel ideas were not understood in Germany. He did not succeed in his attempts in 1903 to sell Treu another reproduction in bronze, a Roman Senator, despite his allusion to financial difficulty and an offer to lower the price from 400 to 350 marks.70 The museum’s registers show that Rosso also donated to Treu a plaster version of his radical figure group Une conversation (ca. 1892–99, fig. 70) in the same month as he sold the Vitellius.71 Thus 1903 can be said to mark the beginning of Rosso’s practice of exhibiting his modern sculptures alongside his ancient reproductions. Rosso’s novel artistic strategies, his peregrinations in Germany, and his nascent internationalism were accompanied by his intense personal difficulties as an outsider, a problem that plagued him throughout his life. These difficulties can be gleaned from a series of his unpublished letters to Treu, written on hotel stationery in Dresden, and during his later travels to Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna. They describe long periods of confinement inside hotel rooms, suggesting isolation and discomfort about his foreignness. As with his early Parisian years, Rosso never mentions specific places—the cities, their artistic treasures—nor does he describe contact with a foreign culture. Furthermore, no place in Germany provided a stimulus to him for the creation of new sculpture; he had not modeled any new subjects since the turn of the century although he continued to recast and

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rework his older ones. His letters paint a poignant portrait of human unease: an artist who wished to be welcomed and understood, yet had trouble engaging with the world. Rosso frequently overwhelmed his interlocutors with displays of affection and appeals, inducing in them—through his clinginess—a wish to distance themselves. Unaccountably, Treu did respond to the sculptor’s requests for introductions to many German cultural personalities, paving the way for future travel in Germany and Austria.72

BERLIN, 1902

Rosso’s subsequent trajectory in Germany and Austria followed the route of the internationalization of modern art from 1900 to 1904. Whereas Paris remained Francocentric in its artistic development, Central Europe was attempting to create a pan-European modern art scene. Following his exhibition in Dresden, Rosso showed his works with his compatriot, the Italian-born sculptor of Russian descent, Prince Paul (Paolo) Troubetzkoy, in the commercial art gallery Keller und Reiner in Berlin in January 1902.73 At that time, Berlin, the commercial and political capital of Germany, superseded all regional art capitals; between 1895 and 1900 it had witnessed the greatest growth of art galleries— from two to eight. By 1900, ambitious German dealers became convinced that modernist art was a salable commodity and could be considered a good long-term investment.74 Fierce competition led to the importation of foreign art and a lucrative expansion of the contemporary art market in Berlin. Keller und Reiner, one of Berlin’s chic new galleries, had opened in 1898 at 122 Potsdamer Straße and was immensely prestigious. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke made his debut as an art critic at its first Neo-Impressionist exhibition, and the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe advised the gallery on Rodin’s sculptures. In the spring of 1900 alone, Keller und Reiner held exhibitions of the Berlin artists Ludwig von Hofmann and Walter Leistikow, the Parisian Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, and the Belgian Fernand Khnopff. Keller und Reiner most likely chose to exhibit Rosso’s works as part of its new internationalist marketing strategy. Through the Keller und Reiner show, Rosso attempted to entice Germany’s cultural sophisticates. Robert Jensen observes that this gallery was known for its “elite ambiance . . . with . . . entertainment appeal for polite society, and its remarkable internationalism . . . [where] commerce [was] suppressed in favor of pedagogy and entertainment.” 75 We do not have the specifics of which works Rosso exhibited, but evidence shows that he made more sales here than in Dresden. This show likely convinced Treu to buy Rosso’s Head of Vitellius reproduction and Berlin industrialist Walther Rathenau to buy a Tête de jeune fille (Head of a Young Girl, 1889, medium unspecified) for 1,500 marks in September 1903.76 Harald Gutherz, a German scholar, bought a bronze Il Birichino (Street Urchin, 1882), and Karl Ernst Osthaus, who was amassing a collection of French Impressionist art in Hagen (which later became the Folkwang Museum), bought a bronze Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy, ca. 1892–94) and an Enfant au soleil (Child in the Sun, 1891– 92) in 1904.77

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The sales to collectors notwithstanding, no Berlin museum purchased any of Rosso’s works. For example, Hugo von Tschudi, director of the National Gallery, who is credited with bringing modern art to Berlin, seemed uninterested in an acquisition, although he was introduced by Treu to Rosso.78 This was also the case with Wilhelm von Bode, at the time curator of the Kaiser Friedrich Skulpturensammlung and a member of Berlin’s cultural establishment. Letters from Rosso to von Bode reveal that, as the sculptor had done with Treu, he tried to entice von Bode by claiming to divulge secret patination recipes.79 It might have been an aspect of Rosso’s personality that put off both von Tschudi and von Bode. Ironically, it was the same von Bode who in 1894 had purchased Rosso’s Martelli David from a dealer in London under the mistaken assumption that it was by Donatello.80

L E I P Z I G , 19 0 2

Rosso’s final German peregrination led him to exhibit in Leipzig. Richard Graul, the director of the Museum der bildenden Künste there, also introduced to Rosso by Treu, gave him a substantial one-person show whose title can now be confirmed as Kleinplastik in Bronze, Wachs und Papiermasse des Impressionisten Medardo Rosso, Paris, likely in September 1902. A packing list dated November 29, 1902, after the show closed, itemizes an impressive thirteen sculptures—six in bronze and seven in wax—as well as seven photographs and four glass vitrines for sculptures.81 No installation photographs of the show exist. Some works seem to be from Rosso’s Milanese period, while others are from his Parisian years.82 Graul’s transnational outlook likely led to his interest in Rosso. He had been the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst’s Paris correspondent and was on the editorial board of Pan, the German arts and literary magazine published from 1895 to 1900 in Berlin by the journalist and editor Otto Julius Bierbaum and Meier-Graefe.83 Graul bought a bronze Laughing Child from Rosso in August 1903 for an unspecified sum, as attested in Rosso’s letters to Graul, the collector Gottfried Eissler in Vienna, and Rictus in Paris.84 The work does not appear in the museum’s registers and never entered the collection.

BACK IN PARIS, 1902

In Paris, Rosso became the protagonist of a survey of French Impressionist sculpture, entitled De l’Impressionnisme en Sculpture, by the French political journalist Edmond Claris.85 The survey first appeared as a series of three articles in the Nouvelle Revue in Paris in June 1901 and was then published as a book in April 1902. The book was translated and republished in German in Utrecht by Fles, then circulated in Germany, proving her continued support for Rosso’s efforts to create a name in Germany and confirming its transnational circulation. Today De l’Impressionnisme en Sculpture is considered a key publication on the question of the relationship between sculpture and painting at the turn of the century. It is

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composed of interviews on this subject with the major artists, critics, collectors, and dealers of the time.86 That the book was intended as a pro-Rosso statement is evident from the fact that, whereas the interviews are with different people, most of the photographs are of Rosso’s works. In this book, Claris published for the first time fifteen idiosyncratic photographs that Rosso had made in his studio. They spanned his entire career and included a photographic portrait of Rosso himself. By contrast, only four photographs of works by Rodin were included, plus a reproduction of a portrait of Rodin drawn by the British artist William Rothenstein. No illustrations were included of the other artists interviewed. This is the first documented publication of Rosso’s experimental photographs of his works, suggesting that he had devised a new strategy for the international circulation of his sculptures via published photographs. Claris’s book garnered reviews in the Parisian press and gave Rosso a new form of visibility. Its success fed into a controversy in the press as to whether Rosso or Rodin was the true originator of Impressionist sculpture. The controversy had begun during the Exposition Universelle. On September 10, 1900, an unnamed journalist wrote, in La Petite République socialiste, that Charles Morice was preparing a lecture on Rodin and asked Morice to comment on Rodin’s debt to Rosso.87 This led to a spate of further articles on Rosso as a victim of Rodin, a position that Rosso himself approved of. One example of the distribution and effect of Claris’s book can be gleaned from a letter from Camille Pissarro to the French critic Théodore Duret, dated December 16, 1902, which has been overlooked by Rosso scholars. In the letter, Pissarro wrote to Duret enthusiastically about Rosso as a “sculptor of great talent.” 88 Pissarro raved about Claris’s book, especially Rosso’s idiosyncratic photographs: “You will see that this stuff is not banal.” 89 Another avant-garde artist in Paris who probably saw this publication was the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. Picasso scholars suggest that it was this book, in its Spanish translation, that may have inspired Picasso to try his hand at sculpture soon after the book appeared.90 Rosso’s efforts in Germany and the success of Claris’s book led to a visit by MeierGraefe to Rosso’s Paris studio sometime in October 1902.91 Like many others, MeierGraefe had discovered Rosso at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. He came to the studio with Wilhelm Bernatzik, an Austrian painter who had absorbed Impressionism’s style and who had spent most of his professional life in Paris. During this visit, Rosso devised a new strategy to curate his art-historical trajectory for an international audience. Absent the possibility of creating a solo exhibition in his own pavilion à la Manet, Courbet, and Rodin, Rosso used his reproductions of ancient and Renaissance sculptures to create an installation for Meier-Graefe, by which he presented his intellectual and artistic itinerary: When I first visited his [Rosso’s] studio, and he saw the amazement his works arouse, he built up a little bit of art-history in the form of a singular still-life. He place[d] on a table a very fine bronze copy, made by himself, of the large head of Vitellius in the Vatican, beside

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it a wax after Michelangelo’s small group of the Madonna and Child at Berlin, then a torso of Rodin’s John the Baptist, and finally a work of his own, the Head of a Child. This he could not stand up, as it had no base; he was therefore obliged to keep it in his hand.92

Rosso’s sweeping adoption of the art of the past and his inclusion of a work by Rodin in his own history is noteworthy. By this gesture, he began to adopt actions that would later become practices of modern artists who acted as their own monographers, through the appropriation of other artists’ works. The best-known example is Marcel Duchamp, whose Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase, 1935–41) was a smallish suitcase in which the artist placed miniature reproductions of his works, which included his altered reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.93 V I E N N A , 19 03

The expanding Central European interest in French Impressionism led Meier-Graefe to include Rosso in the landmark 1903 edition of the Vienna Secession exhibition, entitled Entwicklung des Impressionismus in Malerei und Plastik (The Development of Impressionism in Painting and Sculpture). This show situated Rosso among the originators of modern art.94 It was organized by Meier-Graefe and Bernatzik through a powerful alliance that consisted of the Secessionists, who formed a public exhibition society, as well as dealers and collectors. As Jensen describes it, Secessionists saw themselves as the heirs of Impressionism and as the representatives of a pan-European impressionist Weltanschauung.95 Since 1897, the Secessionists had set the standard for modernist culture in Vienna, and they became the main funnel for market distribution. The 1903 edition was the first major exhibition of Impressionism in Central Europe, and it set forth the tenets of modern art, creating a sweeping linear history that culminated in French Impressionism. In the same year, Rodin would be canonized in Central Europe through an essay published in Germany by the sociologist Georg Simmel entitled “Die Großstäde und das Geistesleben” (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903).96 Although the 1903 edition of the Secession was devoted to Impressionist painters, numerous non-French artists were considered to be somehow associated with that history. The catalogue indicates that Rosso was placed among a dozen sculptors, mostly French, of extremely diverse styles. The past was represented by Jean Antoine Houdon, JeanJacques Caffieri, François Rude, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, while the living sculptors exhibited, in addition to Rosso, were Rodin, Constantin Meunier, Jules Desbois, Alexandre Charpentier, François-Rupert Carabin, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, Camille Lefèvre, Pierre Félix Fix-Masseau, Gaston Toussaint, and the Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland. Rosso exhibited four sculptures: a wax Kinderkopf (which was likely the work known today as Bambino ebreo), a bronze Kind in der Sonne, a bronze Der Buchmacher, and a bronze Frauenporträt (likely Madame Noblet). Again he presented nothing from his Mila­­nese period. Additionally, despite the show’s noted theme of Impressionism, the German

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titles he gave for his works indicate that Rosso refrained from using the word “impression” and was perhaps wary about an association with Impressionist painting. The Secession exhibition illustrates how, by 1903, internationalism had reshuffled the cards of European art. Meier-Graefe, a German critic, created a Viennese show that embedded the Italian-born Rosso within a broader trans-European history of French Impressionism. Rosso was the only Italian-born modern sculptor included in the show. This confirms the fact that nineteenth-century Italian art played no role in the narrative of modernism traced by Meier-Graefe and that Rosso had gained access to that narrative through internationalization.97 Rosso’s point of origin now was noted as Paris, indicating how the boundaries of national identity for émigrés were continually shifting. In another critical move with respect to his earlier grouping with Italians at the Exposition Universelle, Rosso now was being billed among the most important French and European sculptors of the time.98 To a certain extent, Rosso believed he was part of this history, boasting to his friend, the poet Jehan Rictus, that “in this dozen of names they chose there was naturally mine.” 99 Yet in the same letter he expressed his painful awareness of his status as an outsider and his Italian roots: “[I am here] to take advantage . . . of whomever has been able to be interested in me and come to know [my works]. . . . I come here with two works that I brought with me—my calling cards. Like the ancient Genoese goldsmiths did on their voyages. Visiting with their merchandise. You can see how I live and that many people never see me complain believe I am happy and completely in a good mood and completely at ease.” 100 The Vienna Secession’s forceful reshaping of French Impressionism into the transnational “origin” of modern art was codified the following year by Meier-Graefe, whose first edition of the seminal Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst (translated into English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics) included a nine-page chapter entitled “Medardo Rosso.” The book is considered to have constituted the fruition and institutional defense of modernist art, for, as Jensen notes, thanks to MeierGraefe, Impressionism was now de-nationalized to signify modernism. A fact that has been left out of Rosso’s biographies is Meier-Graefe’s elimination of the chapter on Rosso from subsequent editions. Rosso was retained in a revised chapter called “Impressionism in Sculpture.” 101 In this chapter, Meier-Graefe expressed his critical viewpoint on the rapprochement between painting and sculpture, which in his opinion ultimately weakened sculpture. Nonetheless, later developments in sculpture did not confirm Meier-Graefe’s judgment. Rosso’s intuitions about sculptural form and materials on the verge of dissolution would later find fuller engagement in the ideas of countless artists of our time, from Joseph Beuys and Arte Povera’s interest in transformative materials to Wolfgang Laib’s beeswax sculptures Pollen (1978) and A Wax Room for a Mountain (for Parkett No. 39) (1994), Anish Kapoor’s Svayambh (Self-Generated, 2007), and Urs Fischer’s dissolving replicas of The Rape of the Sabine (2011). Although Meier-Graefe made substantial changes in various volumes, his repositioning of Rosso deserves further analysis. It may have been related both to Meier-Graefe’s

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shifting construction of the international history of modern art and to his uncertainty about Rosso’s lasting importance within this narrative. This shifting by Meier-Graefe also shows a recurring pattern I have traced throughout this chapter: the powerful impression made upon a viewer after an initial encounter with Rosso’s art, which would not develop into sustained support. The reasons are partly explained by Rosso’s difficult personality, but another part has to do with Rosso’s refusal to provide the solid, heroic, nationally defined vision of modern sculpture for which the public continued to yearn, despite increasing internationalization and growing fluidity of categories. His antiheroic subjects, with their small size, fragile materials, fragmented states, and limited production, all projected a conflict with public expectations about what sculpture should be. Perhaps this is the source of what the French poet Jehan Rictus would note as Rosso’s recurrent tendency to “fall back into oblivion.” 102 As the American critic Hilton Kramer would put it many decades later, Rosso’s reputation, much like his art, “regularly goes into eclipse.” 103

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In 1903 Rosso became a founding member of the Salon d’Automne, a new exhibition established in Paris by the Belgian architect Frantz Jourdain, and joined by a group of artists, architects, and poets. Following the path opened by other independent salons, the Salon d’Automne was conceived as part of the ongoing reaction against the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon, although the choice of holding it in autumn was made in order not to create a direct conflict with the official Salon, which was held in the spring and summer. Unlike the Salon des Indépendants, which had a jury-less policy and was accused of mediocrity, the Salon d’Automne had a jury but was not part of the academy, the state, or the official art establishment. One novelty of the Salon d’Automne was that foreign art now was openly welcomed, and the grouping was ostensibly by school rather than by nationality. However, the latter innovation proved to be somewhat unrealistic, for artistic schools continued to be highly dependent on perceived national styles. Nonetheless, the Salon d’Automne instantly became a new exhibition venue for avant-garde and decorative arts and a focal place to show developments and innovations in twentieth-century art. In 1905, the (mostly French) Fauves would debut there, as would the (mostly French) Cubists in 1910. Despite the fact that Rosso was among the founders of the Salon d’Automne, he had his usual difficulties exhibiting in the 1904 edition at the Grand Palais. One biographical account of 1906, published two years after the Salon, says that he refused the special gallery that he was offered by the jury.104 The critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote that Rosso had been invited personally by the jury, but another review of the time, by Gustave Babin, noted that the Italian sculptor (of Russian descent) Paul (Paolo) Trouberzkoy was the only sculptor to have received a personal invitation.105 Barr claims that officials did not honor Rosso’s request for a separate salle (gallery), as he had wished, and that he chose a room

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adjacent to his Milanese compatriot Troubetzkoy in order to show his superiority over Troubetzkoy.106 This placement led to the old nationalistic reframing of Rosso as Italian despite his French citizenship. Some critics referred to them as “two foreigners,” with Rodin noted as the only true French artist (“the nationalists will say . . . we have Rodin in France”).107 The Rosso literature contains several erroneous reports about the number of sculptures he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne: six, fourteen, seventeen, and twenty have been claimed. A further erroneous report is that the works are listed by name in the catalogue.108 My examination of numerous surviving copies of the original catalogue reveals no information about the names or number of works. Rosso’s contribution is described generically as “Impressions (Bronze and wax).” 109 To be sure, in Rosso’s correspondence with collectors, he claimed that “my ensemble of works” was exhibited in the Salon. But the researcher must be cautious about information presented in Rosso’s letters, for they involved a good measure of self-promotion and aspirational references, and they cannot be taken for fact when external evidence is lacking. Given the absence of a specific list, it is not possible to know how many works Rosso actually exhibited. What we can know with certainty about Rosso’s works in the show is what we glean from exhibition reviews and from several photographs of Rosso’s installations that have survived. The photographs show twelve sculptures, as well as three photographs and two drawings (which were perhaps photographs of drawings) made by Rosso, spread throughout four of the nineteen rooms in the Grand Palais. However, on October 14, the day before the opening, the press described only one room with works by Rosso, which suggests that he continued to infiltrate other rooms by installing more of his works as the show progressed. An installation photograph of the room described in the press at the opening, which was hung with six paintings that might be watercolor landscapes by the French painter Georges Rouault, shows that Rosso exhibited three sculptures in that room (fig. 73). He chose to install a Milanese work—La Portinaia (The Concierge, 1883– 84)—as well as two Parisian portraits—Henri Rouart and Madame Noblet (ca. 1897– 98)—in front of Rouault’s paintings. This form of installation was consonant with the Salon d’Automne’s new practice of displaying sculptures scattered among paintings, rather than in separate rooms. In a second room, Rosso made a far more elaborate installation, probably at a later date, since it was not noted by the press in the first weeks of the show. One of the surviving photographs shows that he placed four more of his sculptures in the space (fig. 74). Two were modern works: Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84), which he titled here Chair a [sic] plaisir,110 and Enfant au soleil. Additionally he included two reproductions of sculptures from the past: a small figure group of Michelangelo’s Madonna Medici, which Rosso unexpectedly titled Pietà Michel-ange and placed next to his Carne altrui, as well as a work he called Empereur Éthiopien installed in a vitrine. Another installation shot, which may be of another part of the same room, shows that he installed two more sculptures: Grande rieuse (1891–92) in the form of a cropped head with no base and Après la

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FIG. 73 Medardo Rosso, installation at Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904. FIG. 74 Medardo Rosso, installation at Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904.

visite, each encased in a vitrine (with his Pietà Michel-ange now placed next to Après la visite) (fig. 75a). A third photograph of this space shows another sculpture, Bambino ebreo (fig. 75b). On November 2, the British journalist Frances Keyzer noted only Grande rieuse and Après la visite in this room, suggesting that Rosso might have added the other sculptures after that date.111 These installation shots of the second (or second and third) room also show three photographs by Rosso hanging on the wall behind his sculptures: Portrait of Dr. Fles and two fragments of Impression d’omnibus, as well as two photographs of drawings by Rosso. The context for Rosso’s installation of photographs, photos of drawings, and sculptures in this room is worth noting. The 1904 edition of the Salon d’Automne was the first to include photography as an art form, and this room was devoted to the official entries by the photographers Eugène Druet, Stephen Haweis, and Henry Coles, which depicted Rodin’s sculptures.112 Rosso might have made his photographic installation sometime after the opening. On October 31, 1904, Louis Vauxcelles wrote, in Gil Blas, that Rosso had asked the commissioners for permission to install his own works near these photos of Rodin’s sculptures so that the public could judge him by comparison.113 Another photo shows that, at some point during the show, Rosso had placed his Enfant à la bouchée de pain (Child in the Soup Kitchen, ca. 1892–97) in a third room, Salle IX, the gallery dedicated to a major retrospective of Paul Cézanne (fig. 76). Rosso’s work is visible in front of a version of Cézanne’s Baigneuses (Bathers, ca. 1880, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts) in another photograph of the room taken by the dealer Ambroise Vollard. The installation is corroborated by Keyzer, who wrote in the Manchester Guardian on November 2, 1904: “With the boldness that characterises him, he [Rosso] has carried ‘L’Enfant à la bouchée de Pain’ into the room that is devoted to Cézanne’s paintings, for he [Rosso] courts comparison between sculpture and painting.” 114 Keyzer’s articles also describe a work by Rosso in a fourth room. This was identified as Femme à la voilette, which he placed in the gallery of the retrospective of Auguste Renoir. She wrote, “[a] remarkable production, too, is the ‘Woman with a Veil,’ which he [Rosso] has placed next [to] the paintings of Renoire [sic], an impression of a woman seen through the folds of her veil—a work that lives, that breathes, that holds you.” 115 A photograph of this installation confirms that Rosso placed his Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette next to Renoir’s Confidence (Secret, 1878, private collection?, listed as no. 7 in the exhibition catalogue) and a painting known today as Portrait of a Woman in Black (1875–77, Norton Simon Museum). Rosso did not explain these outlandish and subversive acts of infiltration that would typify his approach to exhibitions and later become commonplace in modern and contemporary art.116 In an interview with Keyzer, he rather mysteriously told her that these unusual arrangements were by “the hand of Nemesis,” seeming therefore to allude to the placements as a form of divine justice.117 In other cases, he gave a boastful evaluation of his experience at the Salon d’Automne. To the German collector Harald Gutherz, Rosso described the show as his homecoming in France:

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FIGS. 75A, 75B Medardo Rosso, installation at Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904.

FIG. 76 Medardo Rosso, Enfant à la bouchée de pain installed in the Salle Cézanne, Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904.

I have just had an exhibition at the salon d’authomme champselisse [sic]. They invited me specially and to put my ensemble of works and me up to today to make known my work to everyone, which has been useful to many others bought by celebrities. I accepted. They also asked me to put two of my works in the collection of works by Cezanne [sic] and Renoir. That was the most beautiful proof that I am right. That my sculpture goes well with [their painting].118

Not only did Rosso infiltrate French art as a form of protest, but he also refused to shake Rodin’s hand at the show.119 This was the last time Rosso exhibited in France, except for one work, Ecce puer (1906), which he showed at the Salon d’Automne of 1906. One noteworthy aspect of Rosso’s installation at the Salon d’Automne was that he put his sculpture Enfant au soleil on a ledge just behind his reproduction of an ancient head of an “Ethiopian Emperor” that was identified in the late-nineteenth century as Memnon, a figure from Greek mythology, son of Tithonus and Eos, goddess of dawn, who was 2 0 2      •       C h a p t e r E i g h t

FIG. 77 Medardo Rosso, Memnon, ca. 1902. Photo: Medardo Rosso.

killed by Achilles in the last year of the Trojan War (fig. 77).120 At some point in ancient history, two quartzite statues in Egypt became known as the Colossi of Memnon. One of the sixty-foot high, thousand-ton statues contained fissures due to damage from an earthquake in 27 BC. Eerie wailing sounds were said to emanate from it at the first rays of dawn. These sounds were caused by the heating of the rock. Because of the rock’s black color, the ancients interpreted these sounds as a recollection of the myth of the black Memnon saluting his mother, Eos, goddess of dawn. In the nineteenth century, partly due to a renewed interest in Egypt, the myth of the wailing Memnon became a foundational metaphor for modern European poetry.121 In particular, the idea of the sun or light animating a stone surface and making the stone “speak” poetically appealed to artists, philosophers, composers, and writers.122 For Rosso, too, the visual re-evocation of the myth of Memnon and its nineteenthcentury revival was part of his appropriation of works of the past that functioned like his

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placement and disruption of objects from one installation to another, from one room to another, from one medium to another, from one historical period to another. It reflects Rosso’s constant openness to movement. In the myth of Memnon, Rosso may have discovered an ancient poetic metaphor for his own artistic project, embedded in the idea of the effect of light as it shines upon the exposed sculptural surface, which causes the stone to become expressive. Just as Aurora’s first ray of daylight empowers her son’s statue to live and sing again, the “monument exposed to the sun . . . exchanges song for the gift of light,” as the literary theorist Philippe Hamon has noted.123 It is not by chance, I think, that at the Salon d’Automne Rosso placed his sculpture Enfant au soleil on a ledge just behind his copy of Memnon. The child in the sun suggests the artist’s interest in the optical effect of sunlight as it shines upon a child’s face, as well as the relationship between light and its animating effect on a sculptural surface. The ancient myth of Memnon thus provides a root metaphor for Rosso’s ever-shifting personal understanding of the “impression” in the definition of modern sculpture. Rosso received mixed reviews at the Salon d’Automne. The French writer Gustave Babin wrote a negative review in the Echo de Paris on October 14, 1904: “Room XIV— Gives exile to the sculptural ‘impressions’ of M. Médardo Rosso about which one could discuss an entire system—and condemn it.” 124 The most important reviewing in Paris was by the French critic Louis Vauxcelles, who wrote a favorable review. Vauxcelles was a prominent figure in fin-de-siècle Paris, and from 1904 onward became the art critic for the daily newspaper Gil Blas with his column “Notes d’art.” He would coin the label “Fauves” in 1905 and is best known for inventing the term “Cubism” to describe the works of George Braque in 1908. The Louis Vauxcelles Archive in Paris shows that his wide-ranging interests included sculpture.125 Reporting on the opening of the exhibition on October 15 at the Grand Palais, Vauxcelles wrote, on the front page of Gil Blas, that Rosso and Troubetzkoy were the two highlights of the sculpture exhibition.126 He mentioned them again on October 21 as two masters sacrificed on the altar of Rodin.127 Ten days later, after visiting Rosso’s studio, Vauxcelles dedicated his entire column to Rosso. Vauxcelles’s article is the first to indicate an understanding of the complexity and subversiveness of Rosso’s sculptural project, calling Rosso’s art “revolutionary.” 128 The fascination with Rosso that Vauxcelles experienced after seeing Rosso’s art at the Salon d’Automne was recalled by the art critic in an unpublished manuscript written after Rosso’s death in 1928. Vauxcelles remembered that, like other noteworthy French literary figures and journalists of the time, he became enraptured by Rosso upon seeing his work: “We were seduced, Charles Morice, Camille de Sainte Croix [sic], André Ibels, and others.” 129 Rosso had aimed to “deny the fundamental and traditional principles of sculpture.” 130 The Salon d’Automne generated noteworthy transnational interest and a special appreciation for Rosso in London. In addition to Keyzer’s articles in the Manchester Guardian, the Onlooker, and the King, the British society journalist Lady Colin Campbell

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(née Gertrude Elizabeth Blood) published a rave review in the World of London on October 25. While she was critical of Cézanne and of the Salon d’Automne, about Rosso she wrote: Among the sculpture scattered through the rooms are some most interesting works. Those which have attracted most attention, and about which artistic circles in Paris are humming, are the “Impressions” in bronze and wax of Signor Medardo Rosso, an Italian sculptor who has come to the front with a bound. His works will probably be considered incomplete by most people; but it grows upon one in an extraordinary manner. The artist in some mysterious ways forces the beholder to collaborate with him, as it were, in interpreting and completing the “impression” he means to convey; and these different studies of women and children, half blended with the marble, bronze, or wax out of which they seem to grow as one gazes, are full of a strangely subtle beauty.131

Likewise, the young Italian painter and journalist Ardengo Soffici, in Paris for the first time, published a glowing review in the October–November issue of L’Europe Artiste in French under the pseudonym Stéphane Cloud. Soffici framed Rosso in nationalistic terms. In Rosso’s works, he found “all the fresh and appealing liveliness of his beautiful race,” calling him “the greatest sculptor of modern Italy and one of the greatest of the contemporary world.” 132 After 1910 Soffici would become an instrumental figure in launching Rosso’s career in Italy. T H E A F T E R L I F E O F T H E S A L O N D ’A U TO M N E I N S TA L L AT I O N

There are two respects in which Rosso’s exhibition at the Salon d’Automne can be said to have had an afterlife. The first is in the effect on the young Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, an effect that has been noted in passing but has been little discussed in the literature on either artist. Brancusi’s encounter with Rosso’s work at the Salon d’Automne of 1904 can serve as an illustration of artistic intersection through international exchanges brought about by migration. Brancusi had arrived in Paris from Romania in July of that year, and scholars of modernist art unanimously acknowledge that his earliest sculptures reflect a direct interest in the works exhibited by Rosso at the Salon d’Automne. Brancusi’s female head buried in a mass of matter titled Le Sommeil (Sleep, 1908, fig. 78a), modeled shortly after the Salon, closely resembles Rosso’s Carne altrui. Brancusi’s head of a child called Le Supplice (Torment, 1906–7, fig. 78b) contains further echoes of Rosso and Enfant malade. The art historian Rosalind Krauss believes that where the sculptural forms focus on a private inner reach explicitly buried beneath the surface of the body, Torment revolves around the structural contrast between exterior and interior, between what is open to inspection and can therefore be seen, and what is closed to examination and is consequently “visible” to the sculptural “subject” only. . . . It is into that physical compression of form that the exterior surfaces of the right half of the body

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FIG. 78A Constantin Brancusi, Le Sommeil, 1908. Marble, 26 × 43.5 × 32.2 cm. National Museum of Art of Romania. Brancusi: © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2016.

disappear, echoing the Rosso-like insistence on the essential privacy of the self. . . . In Torment, Brancusi had shifted the terms of his employment of an internal structure from Maillol’s idealist practice to the more psychological interests of Rosso.133

The other respect in which Rosso’s exhibition at the Salon d’Automne can be said to have had an afterlife is in his use of the installation photographs after the show—a radical gesture for the time. The photographs were used as a conceptual extension of his artistic project and as a way to enhance the international circulation of his oeuvre and ideas. This usage speaks to Rosso’s experimentation with questions of authorship and originality, as well as reproduction in multiple media that I have highlighted as a salient feature of his art from the start of his career. In later years, the use of installation photographs became a common practice of modern art. Rosso did not take the installation photos himself. Keyzer noted in another article she published in London’s the King on December 3, 1904, after the Salon had closed, that they comprised a series of “surreptitious . . . snapshots” of the installation made by Rosso’s “friends.” 134 Rosso immediately appropriated the shots for his own artistic purposes,

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FIG. 78B Constantin Brancusi, Le Supplice, 1906–7. Plaster, 37 × 27 × 23 cm. Musée National d’ Art Moderne, Paris. Brancusi: © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2016.

manipulating them by enlarging and reducing them, cropping and reframing them, then distributing them as postcards sometimes covered with his signature and exhortations (fig. 79 and fig. 29). In some versions, he further reworked the installation shots by pasting in other works that were not in the room, superimposing them onto the installation shots. In the installation photos, Rosso proposed a new relationship between sculpture and photography: he harnessed one inherently multiple medium to comment on another. In distributing the prints, he further extended the process of multiplication, disseminating, for many years to come, copies of a photograph that depicted a mixture of sculptures and photographs of sculptures. Other scholars have noted that Rosso’s purpose in appropriating and distributing these installation photographs was to make his artistic project clear. But I can find no specific comparisons or contrasts in the relationships and juxtapositions visible in the

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FIG. 79 Medardo Rosso, photomontage of the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904.

photos, just as I see no obvious organizing principle, nor any narrative or hierarchy being evoked. In these rooms, Rosso set up various relationships between his own works in different media and from different periods, as well as works by other artists. In presenting the installations as photographs, he robbed the works of their diversity in tactile qualities, erasing their differences of size and material, and dislocating their unique temporal and spatial locations. He thus made works of different times and spaces coexist in a single photo. Rosso further located and dislocated authorship in the postcards he made from the show by inscribing his own reproduction of Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna with the word “Michelangelo” across the photograph at its base, as if to distinguish it from his own works, which he dated and labeled “M. Rosso” on the photographs. In contrast, he left the Druet photos unlabeled, crediting neither the sculptor nor the photographer. Furthermore, his small reproduction of the work by Michelangelo is not identified as a reproduction, so that distinctions between original and reproduction are continually elicited and effaced. He also inexplicably renamed Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child as “Pietà,” despite the fact that it was obvious that this well-known work was not a Pietà. In sum, the installation shots speak to Rosso’s sense of the openness of sculpture and photography to mobility and fluidity.

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V I E N N A , 19 0 5

Rosso returned to Vienna in 1905 for a one-person exhibition at Artaria & Co., an art and antiquities gallery.135 Little is known of Artaria’s art dealership, which exhibited the Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha in 1897 and the Austrian painter Felician von Myrbach in 1898. Now, eight of Rosso’s casts of ancient art, spanning all epochs, from Egyptian to ancient Greek, ancient Roman, Gothic, and Renaissance, were listed for sale alongside fourteen of his modern works. The Rosso literature mentions only thirteen because it omits a second Gavroche, added to the printed list in Rosso’s hand.136 An odd inclusion in the show was the Torso by Rodin, given as a gift to Rosso. The reasons for including it are not clear. Rosso received notable Viennese press coverage, including several important reviews by the Austro-Hungarian Ludwig Hevesi, the chief apologist for Secession.137 Rosso sold works from this show to several important Viennese collectors whose history remains to be studied.138 As part of the construction of his legacy, Rosso transformed the Artaria catalogue into a novel form of international self-promotion. Capitalizing on serial reproduction, he published the names of collections and institutions around Europe that owned different casts of the same work by him. He included the “surreptitious snapshots” of his recent Salon d’Automne infiltration, now billed as a “large collective exhibition.” 139 To this, he added glowing reviews by prestigious critics from around Europe and the United States, including a bit from Meier-Graefe’s new volume. The catalogue advertised Claris’s Impressionist enquête for sale. Rosso would later amplify this strategy in another lavish catalogue at his exhibition at the Cremetti Gallery in London in December 1906, creating what Barr praised as “a gigantic publicity release.” 140 The Cremetti catalogue would be the first to include drawings by Rosso, which have not yet been studied systematically. Although it is common nowadays, Rosso’s novel use of exhibition catalogues was revolutionary for its time.

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In 1905, as the Fauves debuted at the Salon d’Automne and French critics hailed Impressionism as dead, a major Impressionist show was mounted at the Grafton Galleries in London by the French dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Rosso did not participate in this show, yet this was the broader context for the development of Impressionism’s legacy, as well as for Rosso’s presence in London. The press reviews about the 1904 Salon d’Automne that had appeared in such varied British newspapers as the Manchester Guardian and the World Society Journal likely stimulated interest in Rosso in London. The details of how Rosso came to be commissioned by the industrialist and art collector Emile Mond and his wife Angela to make a portrait of their four- or five-year-old son Alfred William, sometime between February and October 1906, are not clear.141 Upon completion, the family rejected the work, claiming it did

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FIG. 80 Medardo Rosso, Ecce puer, 1906.

not resemble their child.142 Rosso later retitled the young Mond’s portrait Ecce puer (Behold the Child, fig. 80), and his patroness Etha Fles described it as “a vision of purity in a banal world.” 143 After a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a British critic dubbed it “a moment’s monument.” 144 The tragic story of Alfred William, the subject of Rosso’s portrait, has been neglected in the literature. Alfred’s father, Emile, was the nephew of Ludwig Mond, a German Jewish chemist who established Brunner, Mond and Co., a major chemical industry in Britain. Ludwig became a prominent British citizen in 1880 and, as a noted art collector, he bequeathed an important group of Italian paintings to the National Gallery in London in 1910 or 1911. Emile Moritz Schweich, born in 1865 in Cologne, went to work with his famous uncle and adopted his last name for reasons of family prestige. Together with his wife, Angela—a socialite, author, and avid art patron who maintained an important

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cultural presence in London—Emile reinforced his access to British high society by securing a fashionable Hyde Park Square West 2 address (at number 22) and a lavish country estate, called Greyfriars, located in Storrington, West Sussex.145 In keeping with the need to guarantee British social status through education, Emile and Angela Mond sent their eldest son, Francis Leopold (born in 1895)—who clearly was the hero of the family—to King’s College at Cambridge University. During his military service, Francis was killed in an aviation accident overseas in 1918, when he was only twenty-two years old. Francis’s parents spent the following years consumed by this loss. Angela made desperate attempts to find and identify his remains. Alfred, the subject of Rosso’s portrait, was younger than Francis.146 He was born on August 11, 1901, and was admitted to the upper-crust Charterhouse, followed by admission to Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge in 1918, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1922.147 He dutifully became a chemical technician in his father’s and uncle’s business, married Betty Phillips in 1926, and settled with his wife at 29 Cheyne Place in affluent Chelsea. Alfred suffered from anxiety attacks and a “weak heart.” 148 On September 12, 1928, at age twenty-seven, he committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree on the family’s estate, while out walking his Great Dane after a family luncheon. Newspapers reported father Emile as saying that Alfred was “over-worked and did not want to return to the office. He told him the mass of figures he carried in his head was driving him mad.” 149 Alfred’s name does not appear in his father’s obituaries, family biographies, or genealogical records. His erasure is in marked contrast to his parents’ attempts to memorialize his dead brother Francis, to whom monuments were erected, both in Storrington and at the site of his presumed death in Bouzencourt, France, and in whose name a scholarship was endowed at Cambridge University. While Rosso could not know, in 1906, of Alfred’s impending tragic end, his sculpture carries with it a trace of the five-year-old boy’s emotional and physical fragility. In retrospect, Rosso seems to have been particularly attuned to little Alfred’s psychological suffering. It is difficult not to compare this work to the somber child in Rosso’s Bambino ebreo, a supposed portrait of the young Oscar Ruben Rothschild, another Jewish boy who also would commit suicide in his twenties. I believe that Rosso, upon seeing Alfred William, could have recognized in Alfred his own sense of alienation. The haunting yet moving Ecce puer is barely glimpsed, scarcely recorded. Family legend has it that the child was seen by the sculptor from behind a parted curtain, while other scholars say that Alfred was seen at the first ray of morning light.150 These accounts sound more mythologized than real, for they ignore the fact—never commented upon by others—that, normally, the child would have been required to sit before the artist who had been commissioned to paint his portrait. Perhaps, rather than being a true account of something that actually happened, these strange stories are part of the greater legend of Rosso “glimpsing” things that quickly appear and disappear. Ecce puer is considered Rosso’s masterpiece. Numerous scholars have discussed its importance. Barr deemed it “an uncanny transmission of life” and saw in it Rosso’s

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nostalgia for childhood and his love for children, although a “retrogression” with respect to his more abstract works of the 1890s, such as Madame X.151 Caramel opined that the work represented Rosso’s “moral aspirations” to give form to an idea, associating it with the Symbolist climate of the time.152 Lista endowed Ecce puer with religious tones, comparing it to the Shroud of Turin.153 Mola and Vittucci believed that Rosso sought in Ecce puer “the ghost of form . . . a bit alien . . . in the process of being born . . . the direct meeting with the image that comes forth and pushes from within the form.” They felt that the work connects back to the “whirling rationale of the [Italian] seicento.” 154 Only a few scholars have commented on Ecce puer’s modernity. Noting similarities with early sculptures by Brancusi, Krauss suggested that its interest lies in the work’s abstraction. To her, the child appears physically fragmented and emotionally isolated within his own world of surprise or fear. . . . [It is the] visual melee of drapery, shadow, and expression [that creates] a momentary fusion of timidity and curiosity. . . . In that fleeting moment Rosso learned what the ambivalent set of feelings looked like. With Ecce puer! Rosso expresses both that knowledge and the act of its coalescing. The child’s features are veined by the folds of curtain which groove the wax surface of the sculpture, so that the solidity of the flesh is irretrievably softened by a depiction of the speed with which the apparition formed and disappeared before the artist’s eyes. Thus the surface that obscures and shrouds the image of the child simultaneously carries the meaning of the boy’s expression. Ecce Puer! begins and ends in this surface; nothing is implied beyond it.155

The critic Max Kozloff provided an emotional, sensorial, and psychological view of Ecce puer, describing it as Rosso’s desire “to unwill the corporeality of sculpture”: The blank, cream colored wax has a Mallarméan impact that anesthetizes the tactile sense, and vibrates more as a perception of the emotions, than it exists as an object having weight and substance separate from one’s body. It keeps one at a distance, and freezes the moment before it is possible to return to earthly existence, and the near at hand . . . the thought, let alone the experience of this work, is like a species of hypnosis, whose duration I can never dispel. I seem unable to recapture its materiality.156

In the late twentieth century, the Arte Povera artist Giovanni Anselmo described Rosso’s work as “a sculpture that denies and cancels itself”—a form of vibrating matter that appeared like a burning flame, “as if [it] had a beating heart.” 157 In my opinion, the lasting trace left by Ecce puer resides in the numerous ways in which Rosso destabilized the continuity between image and idea, subject and form. He could have carried the work toward greater abstraction, as in Madame X (ca. 1896, plate 18), or fragmentation, as he did in many of his other sculptures. Instead, he created a series of disjunctions within the sculpture that he left unresolved. Although Rosso spoke

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of the desire to dematerialize sculpture, the surface of Ecce puer is highly worked and striking in its materiality. This materiality cannot be escaped, which is what deters me from an overly spiritualized or metaphorical interpretation. This aspect of Rosso’s work would become fascinating to artists as diverse as Tony Cragg and Giuseppe Penone, two contemporary artists who are interested in Rosso’s treatment of sculpture’s skin as a membrane “situated at the interface between the exterior and the interior of the body . . . working and reworking the surface to make a skin that one sees as the skin of a face. . . . texture, tension, muscles, nervousness.” 158 Rosso treads lightly, yet insistently, in the space between the sculptural object and figural representation. The face is only an imprint of a face, leaving little of substance. The larger-than-life head makes a powerful statement as a head, but it can no longer be measured against that of Alfred Mond. Rosso’s approach intuits not so much the stylized forms of Brancusi but rather the ideas expressed in the polyhedric head by Giacometti titled Le Cube (1934). The philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman describes Le Cube as an object that is constructed upon a “voided face . . . that makes of sculpture no longer a colossus with clay feet but a volume erected on a lack, the contour of an absence, a loss— the loss of a face.” 159 In Rosso’s sculpture, matter and form draw attention to dematerialization and loss of form. The figure is disappearing, and what remains is the memory of its gravity. It is the first sculpture, so far as I know, that attempts, through its full presence, to speak about emptiness and absence. Ecce puer brings to fruition Rosso’s lifelong search for how to be present while absent. It brings us back to his earliest monument to Garibaldi without the figure of Garibaldi, to the gaping hole that represented death in La Riconoscenza (Gratitude, 1883, see figs. 16, 17), to the funerary monument to Filippo Filippi (plate 8) that did not present Filippi but stood for him in his absence. Or, conversely, it may recall the physically present, yet psychologically absent, bus riders in Impression d’omnibus (Impression of an Omnibus, 1884–87, plate 6). Ecce puer seems to move away from its creator and its audience in a more subtle manner than the figures in his Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit (Impression of a Boulevard, Paris at Night, ca. 1896–99). All of these represent the work’s resistance to being fully grasped and Rosso’s preoccupation with the different ways in which this paradox can be expressed. The troubled fate of Ecce puer, when Rosso returned to Paris, encapsulates the themes of his life and career. He continued to feel unappreciated in France.160 French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s acceptance of a plaster cast of Ecce puer and a wax of Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette for the Luxembourg Museum seemed like a long-overdue official French endorsement.161 But the French state did not support Rosso’s recognition. It is not clear from Rosso’s correspondence if this was due to disinterest in Rosso on the part of Clemenceau’s undersecretary, Henri Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz. Despite Rosso’s French citizenship, Ecce puer, exhibited at the Luxembourg Museum from 1908, was put into storage in 1920, to be installed in a future museum dedicated to the “School of Foreigners,” which would never be constructed.162

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R O S S O ’ S P L A C E I N T H E H I S T O RY O F S C U L P T U R E

Rosso’s insistently itinerant approach led him to play an elusive, undefinable role in the history of modern sculpture from start to finish. His extreme refusal to accept categorization by nationality or artistic movement might account for the public’s inability to classify his contribution. Ultimately, even the most enlightened and cosmopolitan-minded critics found it difficult to establish a lasting place for him within the nascent pan-European history of modern art. Meier-Graefe called him “the Mephistopheles” of sculpture; and, many years after Rosso’s death, New York Times critic Stuart Preston stated that “if the House of Beauty has many mansions, Rosso occupies its haunted wing.” 163 While critics recognized Rosso’s brilliance and a fascinating quality in his art, none was able to delineate its coordinates. This inability is poignantly expressed in an article on Rosso in 1918 by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire: The death of Rodin did not cause art critics to speak again about Medardo Rosso who is now, beyond a doubt, the greatest living sculptor. The injustice of which this prodigious sculptor has always been a victim is not about to be repaired. Meanwhile, Medardo Rosso works in silence in Paris. In the quiet of his studio he evokes the aspect of those Renaissance artists who were both sculptors and casters, masters and workmen at the same time, doing everything themselves. Medardo Rosso has not submitted new works to the judgment of the public for a long time. He is thinking of modeling the figure of a horse.164

Perhaps today, Rosso’s contribution can be more fully appreciated, thanks to a new understanding of the significance of artistic border crossing for individual artists and the formation of avant-garde art in the modern age. As I have endeavored to show in this book, Rosso’s case illustrates the wide range of the migration phenomenon that would mark the prevailing international character of the avant-garde. His final years of peregrinations around Europe point to the significance of cultural and artistic circuits, dialogues, and collaborations that cannot be adequately defined by prevailing dichotomies such as “center–periphery.” His example challenges the soundness of methodological frameworks that rely on concepts such as artistic influences or an assimilation of a preexisting style. Rosso’s ideas continue to survive, if only through significant allusive glimpses, in the work of later artists. In earlier chapters, I have quoted the direct interest in Rosso expressed by the most important twentieth-century sculptors. These quotes are worth repeating at the close of this book. The French Surrealist painter André Masson recalled the following: “I would always retain a moving admiration for him [Rosso], and by chance during a conversation, many years later, with Giacometti [sic], I learned that we both felt the same sentiment.” 165 The British sculptor Henry Moore declared that “I have often felt that only Carpeaux, Rodin and Medardo Rosso, in the whole second half of the nineteenth century, really understood the purposes and the principles of sculpture. . . . Rodin

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and Medardo Rosso cleared the way [for modern sculpture].” 166 The Italian Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro rooted his own theoretical writings in Rosso’s precocious interest in the origins of modern sculpture.167 A declared sense of affinity leads Marisa Merz to recapture Rosso’s intimate wax heads in her contemporary forms.168 Today, the British artist Tony Cragg identifies Rosso as his conceptual point of departure and as an enduring influence on his dynamic objects.169 Rosso’s once-precocious experiments with process, rarely noted and often criticized in his time, are now perfectly consistent with contemporary art practice, informing, for example, the Syrian American Diana Al-Hadid’s working methods and museum installations, to the point that she created a two-person show entitled Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso.170 The American artist Erin Shirreff appropriates and rephrases Rosso’s idiosyncratic photographs in her gallery exhibitions. On a private level, Rosso’s works continue to be admired in the homes of descendants of his patrons and friends. His works function today, as they did during his lifetime, as intimate objects that invite personal relationships with the viewer. In our age of individualism and the apparently infinite means of self-presentation and promotion offered by the Internet and other technologies, each of Rosso’s sculptures reminds us of the value of the individual. For this reason, his art can still surprise: nestled into its environment, nonhierarchical, emotionally rich, and contingent.

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AFTERWORD

After a twenty-one-year absence from his country of origin, in 1910 Rosso participated in his first exhibition in Italy, titled La prima mostra dell’impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso (The First French Impressionist Exhibition and Sculptures of Medardo Rosso). The aim of the show, organized by Ardengo Soffici and held in Florence, was to introduce Italians to French Impressionism. However, what was meant to be Rosso’s triumphant homecoming—now as a cosmopolitan artist and seen through the lens of Impressionism—elicited instead ferocious criticism that Rosso had suppressed his Italian roots. Between 1910 and 1914, Rosso continued to maintain Paris as his home base, but he traveled back to Italy for numerous exhibitions there. He stayed in Italy during World War I (whether intentionally or not is not clear). After the war ended in 1918, he went back to Paris but decided finally to return to Italy permanently in that same year. The story of Rosso’s reappearance in Italy in the final decades of his life, at a time when Italy was making an uneasy transition into modernity, is one that remains to be written. That story will need to take account of many factors, besides Rosso’s wish to reunite with his son, who lived in Italy: the existence of a momentous but short-lived thawing of political relations between Italy and France; the emergence of a new generation of savvy Italian cultural mediators who sojourned regularly across the Alps; Italy’s belated acceptance of French Impressionism, which facilitated Rosso’s reemergence on the Italian scene; a new, if limited, market for Impressionist art in Italy; and critical acclaim for Rosso from such internationally minded Futurists as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini. At the same time, the implications

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of Rosso’s return within a growing nationalist climate will need to be taken into account. In addition to the nationalistic factors, Rosso’s well-known intransigent resistance to categorization impeded any easy absorption into modern Italian art. His case demonstrates the shifting, historically determined meaning of the term “avant-garde” and Rosso’s enduring sense of his own difference and autonomy with respect to the Futurists’ enterprise. What remains to be understood is the role played by interactions between Rosso’s supporters and detractors in his late years. In an increasingly rigidly nationalistic European environment, Rosso befriended Benito Mussolini’s lover, Margherita Sarfatti, who reframed Rosso’s art within the regime’s Novecento Italiano movement. However, this was another category that Rosso did not accept easily. Indeed, “Return to Order” sculptor Arturo Martini would attack Rosso’s permeable “impressions” as weak and alien to the virile Fascist image of Mussolini’s Italian popolo. From 1910 until his death in 1928, Rosso rarely exhibited again outside Italy, and his international reputation all but disappeared. After his death, whatever remained of his legacy in Italian museums was due to the tireless Etha Fles, who divided her large collection of the sculptor’s work among the national museums of Rome, Venice, Turin, and Florence. 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, and who also organized a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This show brought Rosso’s art to the attention of postwar American artists, such as Jasper Johns, and scholars, such as Jack Burnham, Jeffrey Taylor, and Rosalind Krauss. 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.” This tale, too, has yet to be told.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904), 1:294, published in English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics (London: W. Heinemann, 1908), 2:23.

1. L AY I N G T H E F O U N D AT I O N S F O R A N A N T I H E R O I C APPROACH TO MODERN SCULPTURE

1. Stato nominativo ed alfabetico dei nati nell’anno 1858 nella città e territorio di Torino, Ufficio anagrafe, Turin. Rosso’s name appears as entry no. 2734 in the register, misspelled as “Rossi.” See also Certificato anagrafico storico di Rosso Domenico, Settore Servizi al Cittadino, Ufficio anagrafe, Milan; and Certificato anagrafico storico di Rosso Medardo, Settore Servizi al Cittadino, Ufficio anagrafe, Milan. 2. Atto di nascita e battesimo della Parrocchia San Salvatore, Archivio Arcivescovile, Turin. Rosso’s name appears as entry no. 129 in the register. It is unclear why Luigia has two given maiden names on Medardo’s baptismal certificate. 3. See for example Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat., ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 47; and Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 369. 4. See Gilles Pécout, “Fare l’Italia: 1770–1871,” in Il lungo Risorgimento: La nascita dell’Italia contemporanea (1770–1922), ed. Gilles Pécout and Roberto Balzani (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1999), 3–194.

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5. See Gilles Pécout, “Le città d’Italia e l’Unità nazionale,” Carta d’Italia 3, no. 5 (2011): 12–16. 6. See Umberto Levra, Fare gli italiani: Memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento (Turin: Comitato di Torino dell’Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento italiano, 1992). 7. Vamba was the pseudonym of Luigi Bertelli (1858–1920). See Roberto Balzani, “Nati troppo tardi: Illusioni e frustrazioni dei giovani del post-Risorgimento,” in Il mondo giovanile in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento, ed. Angelo Varni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 69–85. 8. Ernesto Ragionieri, “La storia politica e sociale,” in Dall’Unità a oggi, vol. 4, part 3, of Storia d’Italia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 1667–743. 9. Giuseppe De Lorenzo, La prima organizzazione di classe dei ferrovieri (Rome: Editrice Cooperativa, 1977), 32. 10. Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 13 (1962): 240. 11. Andrea Giuntini, Il Paese che si muove: Le ferrovie in Italia fra ’800 e ’900 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001), 132–34. 12. Dora Marucco, Mutualismo e il sistema politico: Il caso italiano, 1862–1904 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1981); and Arnaldo Cherubini, Beneficenza e solidarietà: Assistenza pubblica e mutualismo operaio, 1860–1900 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991). 13. DOMENICO ROSSO / Cavaliere mauriziano / Ufficiale della Corona d’Italia / Ispettore generale / Delle Ferrovie del Mediterraneo / Funzionario distinto / Per intelligenza ed onestà / Nelle Amministrazioni governative / Alta Italia e Mediterranea / 1849 – 1887 / Ebbe contrastata / Poi spezzata la carriera / Da superiori iniqui / Gli fu vindice il tempo / che quasi a tanta ingiustizia / Volle che la vittima sopravvisse / Ai fattori della sua rovina / 1827–1901. Luciano Nicastro, “Per la biografia di Medardo Rosso,” L’Ambrosiano, August 31, 1938. 14. See Catherine Brice, “Métaphore familiale et monarchie constitutionelle: L’incertaine figure du roi ‘père’ (France et Italie au XIX siècle),” in Fraternité: Pour une histoire du concept, ed. Gilles Bertrand, Catherine Brice, and Gilles Montègre (Grenoble: CRHIPA, 2012), 157–87. 15. Giovanni Vigo, “Gli italiani alla conquista dell’alfabeto,” in Fare gli italiani: Scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea, vol. 1 of La nascita dello Stato nazionale, ed. Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 37–66. See also Marino Raicich, “Itinerari della scuola classica dell’Ottocento,” in Fare gli italiani, 131–70. 16. See Matteo Morandi, La scuola secondaria in Italia: Ordinamento e programmi dal 1859 ad oggi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2014). 17. Roberto Balzani, “I giovani del Quarantotto: Profilo di una generazione,” Contemporanea 3, no. 3 (2000): 403–16. See also Alberto Maria Banti and Paul Ginsborg, “Per una nuova storia del Risorgimento,” in Il Risorgimento, vol. 22 of Storia d’Italia, ed. Alberto Maria Banti and Paul Ginsborg (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), xxiii–xli. 18. Edmondo De Amicis, Cuore (Milan: Treves, 1886). 19. Paolo Colombo, “A margine di Cuore: Note sul rapporto fra storia e narrazione,” in Patrioti si diventa: Luoghi e linguaggi di pedagogia patriottica nell’Italia unita, ed. Arianna Arisi Rota and Matteo Morandi (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2009), 204. See also Gilles

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20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

Pécout, “Fare gli italiani: 1860–1922,” in Il lungo Risorgimento, 197–246; and Antonio Faeti, “Cuore,” in I luoghi della memoria: Personaggi e date dell’Italia unita, ed. Mario Isnengi (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 101–13. Gilles Pécout, “Fare gli italiani,” 222. Apertura del Collegio di San Carlo di Ciriè, November 4, 1859, Archivio storico, San Carlo Canavese. The registers of the Collegio suggest that the Rosso family may have received a discount on fees. Giovanni Lista asserts, incorrectly, that Rosso attended the Collegio di San Carlo in Milan and that he took drawing classes there. Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 9. Antonino Bertolotti, Passeggiate nel Canavese (Ivrea: Curbis, 1867), 79. “Premi e menzioni onorevoli distribuiti agli alunni del Collegio-Convitto San Carlo presso Ciriè il giorno 19 Marzo 1873,” Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Cited in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 57. Certificato anagrafico storico di Rosso Domenico, Settore Servizi al Cittadino, Ufficio anagrafe, Milan. Luciano Caramel (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 47), Giovanni Lista (Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste, 9), and Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 369) erroneously claim that Rosso’s family moved to Milan in 1870. Lista adds that the family lived in Genoa but provides no documentary evidence. Certificato anagrafico storico di Rosso Domenico, Settore Servizi al Cittadino, Ufficio anagrafe, Milan. Domenico lived at that address until he returned to Turin in 1886 following his wife’s death. Rubrica della 1° Categoria, Classe 1858, n° 848, Rosso Medardo, Distretto militare di Milano, Ruoli matricolari, Archivio di Stato, Milan. There is no evidence that Medardo served instead of his older brother, as Giovanni Lista claims (Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste, 10). Each man born in 1858 was assigned a number; Medardo’s was 610. Libretto personale militare di Rosso Medardo, I Reggimento Genio, 2a Brigata Zappatori, 4a Compagnia, n. matricola 12303, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. While Rosso’s files do not note his military promotions, his military registration card records two, as noted by Luciano Caramel (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 47, 57). Libretto personale militare di Rosso Medardo, I Reggimento Genio, 2a Brigata Zappatori, 4a Compagnia, n. matricola 12303, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Medardo Rosso, “Concepimento-limite-infinito,” L’Ambrosiano, January 12, 1926. Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani, and Jennifer Burns, eds., The Printed Media in Fin-de-siècle Italy (Oxford: Legenda, 2011). Christophe Charle, Le siècle de la presse, 1830–1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 10. Specifically, a number of the photos say “Tip. Lombardi” underneath the image. A few of these also have added in a tiny area on the photo itself: “Stab, TURATI–MILANO.” Another photo has a different name: “Pagliano e Ricordi Milano Piazza del Carmine, 4.” The photograph was sent by Rosso in a letter dated April 27, 1883, to Baldassare Surdi, artistic director of the Giornale illustrato della Esposizione di Belle Arti in Roma, to thank him for having published a large reproduction of Rosso’s Birichino on April 22, 1883. The letter and photograph are thought to be preserved, together with another photograph of an early sculpture by Rosso entitled La Riconoscenza (Gratitude, 1883) (see chapter 2, pp. 43–54) in the collection of Mrs. Agnes Surdi, Rome, but I have not been

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34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

able to locate this collection. The photograph was first reproduced in Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 18. Guido Lopez, Esposizione Nazionale di Milano: Documenti e immagini 100 anni dopo (Milan: Comune di Milano, 1981), previously published as La gran fiera di un secolo fa (Milan: Nuove edizioni, 1979). See also Ilaria M. P. Barzaghi, Milano 1881: Tanto lusso e tanta folla; Rappresentazione della modernità e modernizzazione popolare (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2009). Scholars have not studied the art exhibition because few documents relating to its genesis have survived. Rosso’s name does not appear among the exhibitors. Fasc. Istruzione pubblica, “Esposizioni,” “Esposizione Industriale Italiana Milano 1881,” and “Esposizioni addizionali Anno 1881,” Cartella 6, Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana, Milan. See “Esposizione Nazionale in Milano, Anno 1881,” CARPI F II° 9, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, for a list of the jury members but nothing related to their selection. Giovanna Rosa, Il mito della capitale morale: Letteratura e pubblicistica a Milano fra Otto e Novecento (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1982). Cited in Guido Lopez, Esposizione Nazionale di Milano, 9–10. No documentary evidence is supplied, but Lopez claims this was the recurring theme in the commissioners’ reports. Ibid. Catalogo ufficiale della Esposizione Nazionale del 1881 in Milano: Belle arti, exh. cat. (Milan: Sonzogno, 1881). The catalogue entry reads: “ROSSO MEDARDO, Caporale litografico del Genio, ora stanziato a Pavia.” See Il libro d’oro per chi visita la famosa Indisposizione di Belle Arti, exh. cat. (Milan: Tipografia Nazionale, 1881), 46. For a full account, see Sharon Hecker, “L’esordio milanese di Medardo Rosso,” Bolletino dell’Accademia degli Euteleti 65 (1998): 185–201. This proves that Rosso was already modeling sculpture while serving in the army. The claim that Rosso learned to sculpt during or after his military service was first advanced in Les Archives biographiques contemporaines (Paris: n.p., 1906), 69–71. A portrait bust of the Pavian painter Pacifico Buzio, attributed to Rosso during his military period, remains unstudied. The Famiglia Artistica has no archives, making it difficult to assess Rosso’s involvement. See Carlo Montalbetti, Indisposizione di belle arti: Una stagione della scapigliatura artistica milanese (Rome: Pierre Marteau Editore, 1988); La Famiglia Artistica milanese nel quarantennale della sua fondazione 1873–1913, exh. cat. (Milan: Alfieri and Lacroix, 1913); Luigi Ronchi, ed., La Famiglia Artistica Milanese nel Centenario (Milan: Strenna dell’Istituto “Gaetano Pini,” 1972); and Monica Amari, ed., Il riso esiste: Dunque c’è; La Famiglia Artistica, arte e ironia nella Milano di fine Ottocento, exh. cat. (Milan: Palazzo della Permanente, 1989). I thank Annamaria Isacco and Paolo Thea for these bibliographic references. See Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 1968– 2016), 10:436–37. A selection of Bignami’s papers are conserved in Fondo Vespasiano Bignami, Civica Biblioteca d’arte, Milan. See Vespiano Bignami, “Club, società, ritrovi,” in Mediolanum (Milan: F. Vallardi, 1881), 11:125–26, for Bignami’s perspective on the Milanese cultural scene in 1881.

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43. See Sharon Hecker, “Medardo Rosso’s First Commission,” Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1125 (1996): 817–22. Curletti’s name appears on membership lists of the Famiglia Artistica. 44. “testina leggiera in terra cruda.” Il libro d’oro per chi visita la famosa Indisposizione di Belle Arti, 46. The exhibition establishes the date of Rosso’s first publicly exhibited work, predating by a year what had previously been regarded as his first exhibition. 45. “Questo infelice, dopo aver sputato i polmoni e le clavicole, si ostina a voler cavar fumo da uno zigaro della Regìa. Passegger che qui passi, abbi pietà. Ignora l’imbecil quello che fa!” Ibid. 46. Allucinato is an adjective, a state of being (meaning hallucinated, haunted, or dazzled). 47. Paolo Valera, Milano sconosciuta (Milan: Ambrosoli, 1880); Lodovico Corio, “La plebe di Milano,” Vita nuova (a series of articles from 1876–77); and Cesare Correnti et al., Milano e i suoi dintorni (Milan: Civelli, 1881). There are clear parallels to French physiognomies in this later Italian tradition. On French physiognomies, see Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 48. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 56n7. 49. “tranquillo e sereno, sebbene sempre allucinato.” Luigi Gualdo, “Allucinazione,” in Novelle (Turin: V. Bona, 1868), reprinted in Romanzi e novelle, ed. Carlo Bo (Florence: Sansoni, 1959), 192–206. Citations refer to the Sansoni edition. 50. The word was spelled in each of these ways during this period, with the meaning remaining the same. See Bruno Pianta, “La lingera di galleria,” in Mondo popolare in Lombardia: Brescia e il suo territori, ed. Roberto Leydi and Bruno Pianta (Milan: Silvana Arte, 1976), 75–129. 51. “disillusi ventenni . . . eleganti oziosi dalle bocche profumate di sigari e di assenzio.” Cited in Corrado Marsan, “Le Belle Arti educatrici,” in Guido Lopez, Esposizione nazionale di Milano, 56. 52. For an analogous interpretation of a self-portrait by Edvard Munch, see Patricia G. Berman, “Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette: Smoking and the Bohemian Persona,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (1993): 627–46. 53. “aprirsi all’Europa, guardare agli autori che per primi avevano cercato di reagire, magari varcando la soglia dell’Ignoto e dell’Arcano, alle contraddizioni e ai conflitti della modernità. Nasce da quest’ansia sperimentale, in cui si mescolano motivi di autentico scoramento e punti di rivolta velleitaria, il culto che per gli scrittori della Scapigliatura professano per Hugo, Baudelaire, Nerval, Gautier, Murger, Musset, Richter, Hoffman [sic], Poe.” Giovanna Rosa, La narrativa degli Scapigliati (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 25. 54. On Gualdo and Zola, see Paolo Tortonese, ed., Cameroni e Zola: Lettere (Paris: Champion, 1987), 77, 78, 81, 84, 137, 175; and Pierre de Montera, Luigi Gualdo (1844–1898): Son milieu et ses amitiés milanaises et parisiennes (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1983), 89–95. For references to Gualdo see Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1896; repr., Paris: Robert Laffont, 1956), 3:136, 1200, 1250, 1270 (citations refer to the Laffont edition). 55. Luigi Gualdo, “La Duchessa di Castiglione Colonna,” L’Illustrazione italiana, January 4, 1880, 14. Gualdo’s mention of the death of Carpeaux confirms that the artist’s name was familiar to the members of the Milanese intelligentsia.

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56. See Daniela Sannino, “Portrait de l’artiste en passeur: Luigi Gualdo, mediatore e critico letterario tra Italia e Francia” (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, 2009). Gualdo was described in 1881 by Roberto Sacchetti as “un parigino a Milano e un italiano a Parigi” (a Parisian in Milan and an Italian in Paris). Roberto Sacchetti, “La vita letteraria,” in Milano, 1881 (Milan: Ottino, 1881), xii. On Gualdo and French art and literature, see Pierre de Montera, Luigi Gualdo (1844–1898); René Ternois, Zola et ses amis italiens (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1967); and Carlo Bo’s introduction to Romanzi e novelle, xi–xxx. Gualdo’s cosmopolitanism led him to be the first inspiration for the protagonist of Paul Bourget’s novel Cosmopolis (Paris: Lemerre, 1893). On Guando and Bourget, see Daniela Sannino, “Portrait de l’artiste en passeur,” 18. 57. Carteggio Medardo Rosso–Felice Cameroni (1889 giugno–1892), Biblioteca d’arte— Biblioteca archeologica—Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive—CASVA, Milan (referred to hereafter as “Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence). See L31, L35, L46. All three letters are undated but were probably written at the end of July 1889. L46 is published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 93–94, while L31 and L35 are both unpublished. 58. Daniela Sannino, “Portrait de l’artiste en passeur,” 15, and throughout this dissertation. 59. Paolo Tortonese and Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, Les arts de l’hallucination (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2001), n.p. 60. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 10. 61. “Rosso . . . a incarnare i nuovi valori della modernità celebrata da Baudelaire e dagli impressionisti.” Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), 14. 62. “la sua fortuna in italia è immediata, ma circoscritta geograficamente all’ambito lombardo e più propriamente milanese . . . e letterariamente all’ambito della Scapigliatura . . . col 1880 oramai, Baudelaire è largamente acquisito . . . quattro anni dopo viene inserito nella popolare collana ‘Biblioteca Univerale’ dell’Editore Sonzogno una seria di pubblicazioni di larga divulgazione in fascicoli postali del prezzo di 25 centesimi l’uno.” Giuseppe Bernardelli, Baudelaire nelle traduzioni italiane (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1972; repr., Milan: Educatt, 2015), 8, 12–13. Citations refer to the Educatt edition. 63. Pia Falciola, La littérature française dans la presse vériste italienne (Florence: Libreria commissionaria Sansoni; Paris: Librairie M. Didier, 1977), 73. 64. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 153–55. 65. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 58 66. Charles Baudelaire, “Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse,” in Salon de 1846 (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1846), reprinted in Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 185. 67. Charles Baudelaire, “Le publique moderne et la photographie,” in Salon de 1859 (Paris: n.p., 1859); “De l’essence du rire”; and “Quelques caricaturistes français,” all reprinted in Curiosités esthétiques, 254–63, 359–87, and 389–419, respectively. 68. Rosso was not literally a “caporale litografico,” as Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci claim (Medardo Rosso, 369). 69. Diego Martelli, “L’Esposizione delle opere di Daumier,” Gazzetta d’Italia, April 28, 1878.

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70. Lista, for example, erroneously claims that Rosso did not know Daumier’s work in Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928 (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 38. 71. “microscopico Parigi della Lombardia.” Cletto Arrighi, La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio (Milan: Sonzogno, 1861; repr., Milan: G. Farinelli, 1978), 147. Citations refer to the Farinelli edition. 72. See Carlo Bonardi, “Reminiscenze e imitazioni nella letteratura italiana durante la seconda metà del secolo XIX,” La critica, May 10, 1910, 205–10; Gaetano Mariani, Storia della Scapigliatura (Rome: Sciascia, 1967), 59–108; and Giovanna Rosa, La narrativa degli Scapigliati, 5–6. 73. While much has been written on Cameroni’s championship of French literature in Italy, his knowledge of French art is rarely discussed. One consideration is Paola Mola Kirchmayr, “Gli anni della formazione di Medardo Rosso alla luce di un epistolario inedito,” in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 45n71. In the 1870s, Cameroni’s articles show his familiarity with the work of Courbet, Daumier, Manet, and Meissonier. See Felice Cameroni, Interventi critici sulla letteratura italiana, ed. Glauco Viazzi (Naples: Guida, 1974), 187. In 1881 he noted that Maupassant wrote with “il pennello di un’impressionista” (the brush of an Impressionist; ibid., 136), that Zola was the “Courbet della letteratura” (Courbet of literature; ibid., 42), and that Huysmans wrote “alla Manet” (in the style of Manet; ibid., 128). Although Cameroni did not write art criticism, he reported on the Salons and other major exhibitions. Rosso also knew the work of such Italian artists in Paris as Giuseppe De Nittis (L26, dated January 1890, in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 100). 74. “cervello del mondo, spina dorsale della civiltà, aorta della vita moderna.” Cameroni in a letter to Filippo Turati, published in La Nuova farfalla, July 16, 1882. Quoted in Paolo Tortonese, Cameroni e Zola, 23. 75. The Goncourts mention him in their Journal des Goncourt, 3:1058, 1100. See Paolo Tortonese, Cameroni e Zola, 39ff. 76. In letters to Zola, Cameroni refers to reading such journals as La revue, Gil Blas, La revue moderne, Revue des deux mondes, La revue indépendante, La revue contemporaine, Le cri du peuple, Le temps, and Le Voltaire. Many works by major French writers of the period were originally published serially in these journals. Cameroni had intimate knowledge of the French cultural scene in general. Giovanni Verga was also well acquainted with Zola, and Luigi Capuana dedicated his Giacinta to the French author. Paolo Tortonese, Cameroni e Zola, 77; and Guido Davico Bonino, “Introduzione: Un romanzo, tre romanzi,” in Luigi Capuana, Giacinta, ed. Marina Paglieri (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1984), xii–xvii. See also Ernesto Citro, Felice Cameroni: Lettere a Vittorio Pica, 1883–1903 (Pisa: ETS, 1990). 77. See for example Paola Mola Kirchmayr, “Gli anni della formazione di Medardo Rosso alla luce di un epistolario inedito,” 29. 78. On Cameroni’s ambivalence about Baudelaire and his personal and professional differences with Gualdo, see Daniela Sannino, “Portrait de l’artiste en passeur,” 378ff. 79. Kate Flint, “Blood and Milk: Painting and the State in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy,” in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 110.

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80. One noteworthy exception was the Neapolitan painter Michele Cammarano, who came into contact with the Macchiaioli and in 1870 traveled to Paris to meet Courbet. Michele Biancale quotes an author named “Stella,” writing in La Stampa of 1868, in Michele Cammarano (Rome: Arti Grafiche Bertarelli, 1936), 50. 81. “elevarci al sublime.” Il Secolo, September 22, 1869, cited without naming the author or the article in Paola Martinelli and Alessandra Pino, “Il realismo sociale nelle mostre milanesi dal 1865 al 1915,” in Arte e socialità in Italia realismo al 1865–1915, exh. cat. (Milan: Regione Lombardia. Assessorato agli enti locali e alla cultura, 1979), 235. 82. Rosso probably also exhibited works in the windows of what is erroneously termed the “Vercesi Gallery” (Les Archives biographiques contemporaines, 69–71). Pasquale Vercesi’s store of “oggetti di belle arti” (crystal, glass, and porcelain) was at the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele at no. 65. Gaetano Savallo, Guida di Milano (Milan: Tipografia Editrice Lombarda, 1883), 483, 511. Milanese artists such as Giovanni Segantini and Emilio Longoni exhibited works for sale in the display windows of this and other stores, as well as in cafés and restaurants in the Galleria. 83. This issue is not addressed in studies of ottocento art such as Albert Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in NineteenthCentury Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); or Norma Broude, The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 84. Anne Pingeot examined the frequent appearance of Italian sculpture in French exhibitions in “La scultura italiana vista da Parigi,” in Italie, 1880–1910: Arte alla prova della modernità, exh. cat., ed. Gianna Piantoni and Anne Pingeot (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2000), 52; published in French as Italies, 1880–1910: L’art italien à l’épreuve de la modernité (Paris: Édition de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001). 85. Andrea Lefèvre, Luigi Viardot, and Luigi Chirtani, Le meraviglie delle arti (Milan: Treves, 1881); and Luigi Chirtani, L’arte attraverso i secoli (Milan: Treves, 1878). See also Luigi Viardot, Le meraviglie della pittura straniera, trans. Luigi Chirtani (Milan: Treves, 1875); and Luigi Viardot, Le meraviglie della scultura, trans. Luigi Chirtani (Milan: Treves, 1874). Chirtani describes his Italian versions as a “free translation with notes and additions” to Viardot’s 1868–69 publications Les merveilles de la peinture (Paris: L. Hachette, 1868–69) and Les merveilles de la sculpture (Paris: L. Hachette, 1869). 86. Federico Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896 (Bari: Laterza, 1951), 1:33–36. 87. Christopher Duggan, Creare la nazione: Vita di Francesco Crispi (Bari: Laterza, 2000). 88. “l’Italia dell’Ottocento, occupata a creare la propria unità politica, aveva altro da fare che far conoscere i suoi artisti, i quali, senza avere la statura dei giganti che li avevano preceduti, pur tuttavia esistevano, lavoravano, studiavano e lottavano, per far brillare nel loro secolo qualche scintilla di ciò che era stata la luce del sole.” Mario Mariani, “L’art Italien du XIXe et du XXe siècle au Jeu de Paume,” Dante (1935): 256, quoted in Anne Pingeot, “La scultura italiana vista da Parigi,” 47. 89. See Francesca Dini and Piero Dini, Diego Martelli, 1839–1886 (Turin: Allemandi, 1996). 90. See Sergio Rebora, Vittore Grubicy de Dragon (Rome: Jandi Sapi, 1995). Rosso corresponded with Alberto Grubicy from Paris in 1900.

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TO PAGES 21—22

91. Kate Flint, “Blood and Milk,” 110. 92. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 10. 93. Eva Tea, L’Accademia di belle arti a Brera-Milano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1941), 102. Under a special ruling, Rosso did not have to pay tuition for the classes he attended at the Scuola del Nudo and was not considered a regular student but a libero frequentatore (or an uditore) in the Scuola di Anatomia. Both were part of the first year of preparatory academic training. See “Art. 67 statuto 13 29 ott. 1879,” in Archivio dell’Accademia di Brera, TEA GV4, Scuola e Alunni, atti vari, 1875–1895, Informazioni sugli allievi Rosso Medardo e Franzoni Filippo, Milan, March 31, 1883. 94. See Reale Accademia di Belle Arti in Milano: Esposizione 1882: Catalogo ufficiale (Milan: A. Lombardi, 1882), 58. The works are numbered 650, 651, and 653, and listed respectively as Dopo una scappata (testa in bronzo), A zonzo (testa in terra cotta bronzata), and L’avanguardia (testa in terra cotta bronzata). A zonzo might have been a reworked (or earlier) version of L’Allucinato of 1881. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci assert that In esplorazione was Rosso’s first work, citing unexplained stylistic similarities to the Gothic churches of Pavia (Medardo Rosso, 46). There is no evidence to support their claim (Medardo Rosso, 48) that Rosso sold this work to Count Armand Doria, the Parisian collector of French Realist and Impressionist art. Neither Rosso’s name nor the work appears in Doria’s records. Rosso’s address in the catalogue is given as Via Solferino 12. 95. Rosso spelled it Locch (or Lock in his correspondence with Cameroni). In France it was called Impression d’un fumeur (Impression of a Smoker) (Les Archives biographiques contemporaines, 69–71). Giovanni Lista gives the title Voyou, but that sculpture was probably not El Locch (Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste, 19). This title appeared once (P. H., “Le Salon du Théâtre d’Application,” Le Radical, November 22, 1893, 2) but accompanied by the description of a figure “dont le masque gouaille” (with a grimacing masque). There is no evidence that El Locch was exhibited in the exhibition reviewed by P. H. The description of Voyou was probably actually talking about Dopo una scappata, later known as Il Birichino and Gavroche. Camille de Sainte-Croix (“Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 [March 1896]: 380–81) called the Gavroche a “voyou puéril et profond” (puerile and profound hooligan). Mino Borghi (Medardo Rosso [Milan: Il Milione, 1950], 62), and Margaret Scolari Barr (Medardo Rosso, 66) indicate that El Locch was also known as Il Vagabondo, but I have found no source to confirm this title. In his letters to Cameroni from Paris, Rosso mentions numerous casts he made of this subject. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L4 (dated August 25, 1889), L34 (undated), L39 (undated), and L45 (undated). L34, L39, and L45 are published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 96–101. 96. Caramel dated El Locch between 1881 and 1882 but thought that the influence of the academy, where Rosso was enrolled in 1882–83, could be seen in the work. Luciano Caramel, “La prima attività di Medardo Rosso e i suoi rapporti con l’ambiente milanese,” Arte Lombarda 6 (1961): 271; see also Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 122. Ettore Cozzani dated the work to 1881, during Rosso’s time in the military. Ettore Cozzani, Medardo Rosso (Milan: L’Eroica, 1931), 49. On the basis of Borghi’s calculations, however, most scholars agree on a date of 1882 (Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso, 16). No evidence supports Borghi’s claim that the model for the head was the Milanese sculptor

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Antonio Rescaldini (Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso, 62). Mola and Vittucci disagree with my hypothesis (Sharon Hecker, “L’esordio milanese di Medardo Rosso,” 186–87) that L’Allucinato is an earlier verson of El Locch. They argue that the description of L’Allucinato in the Indisposizione catalogue as a man smoking a “state cigar” does not correspond perfectly to that of El Locch. They also point to the fact that El Locch has a torso while L’Allucinato is described in the catalogue as a “testina.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 56. However, known works from the Indisposizione often barely correspond to their titles and descriptions in the catalogue. Bignami and the organizers who wrote the catalogue invented many titles and descriptions to suggest humor in otherwise neutral or serious objects. Even artists’ names are represented in the catalogue in comical versions, like “Leopardo da Vinci” and “Michelangelo da Scarafaggio,” to suit the tone of the Indisposizione. Both L’Allucinato and El Locch are images of smokers. The removable pipe could have replaced the cigar, and a larger work with a torso could have been cast using the head alone. Rosso also constantly changed the titles of his works: he retitled each of his first three works every time they were exhibited in the early 1880s. Finally, there is no documentation to support Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci’s claim that Rosso’s sophisticated modeling of El Locch was “unthinkable” in 1881 since we have no knowledge of the kind of training he had received up to that date (Medardo Rosso, 56). 97. The pipe, visible in an early photograph, may have been a real object or a pipe cast in bronze that Rosso periodically removed and reinstalled. Rosso wrote to Cameroni from Paris: “I bronzi come ti dico mi sono arrivati e non aspetto che la pipa al lock che si sono dimenticati mandarmi. Così ultimati li porterò al signore che già ti dissi vendetti il bersagliere” (The bronzes [as] I am telling you about arrived and all I am waiting for is the pipe for the lock [sic] that they forgot to send me. So that when they are done I will take them to the man to whom I already told you I sold the bersagliere [sic]). Rosso– Cameroni Correspondence, L4, August 25, 1889, unpublished. In another letter to Cameroni he wrote: “Dunque pel fine mese contavo consegnare quei lavori Lock [sic] Biricchino [sic] al Signore che m’ha comperato il Bersagliere. Ora invece sono belli preparati ma non posso farne niente ancora perche il fonditore me li ha mandati senza la pipa al lock che non ricevevo che a qualche giorno posso dire in fin di settimana” (Well, for the end of the month I was counting on delivering those works Lock [sic] and Biricchino [sic] to the gentleman who bought the bersagliere [sic] from me. Now however they are all ready to go but I can’t do anything yet because the founder sent them to me without the pipe for the lock [sic] that I did not receive and in a few days I can say [it is] the end of the week). Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L50, undated, unpublished. Thus, as late as 1889 Rosso was still using the pipe in the sculpture and considered it an important element. This statement contradicts Luciano Caramel’s assertion that the pipe was an “elemento aneddotico impensabile già nell’83” (anecdotal element that was already unthinkable in ’83) (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 122). 98. Lodovico Corio, “La plebe di Milano,” Vita nuova (a series of articles from 1876–77), 36–60. But the word appears earlier in Milanese dialect. See “Locch” in Francesco Cherubini, Vocabolario milanese-italiano (Milan: Stamperia Reale, 1814), 1:214. 99. Paola Martinelli and Alessandra Pino, “Il realismo sociale nelle mostre milanesi dal 1865 al 1915,” 235.

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100. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 41. 101. See Jerrold Seigel, “From Bohemia to the Avant-Garde: Dissolving the Boundaries,” in On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled, ed. César Graña and Marigay Graña (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 796–806. 102. See Patricia G. Berman, “Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette,” 627–46. 103. See note 73. 104. Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani, In marcia! (Milan: l’Amministrazione della Plebe, 1879); reprinted in Alle origini della propaganda socialista: Gli opuscoli de “La Plebe” 1879–1881, ed. Mario Spagnoletti (Lecce: Piero Laicata Editore, 1992), 35–36. 105. La Redazione, “Rivista Internazionale del Socialismo: Programma,” Rivista Internazionale del Socialismo, no. 1 (1880): 2. 106. See Claudio Giovannini, La cultura della “Plebe”. Miti, ideologie, linguaggio della sinistra in un giornale d’opposizione dell’Italia liberale (1868–1883) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1984). 107. Paintings like Michele Cammarano’s Roma, 19 settembre (Rome, September 19, 1870) and I bersaglieri alla presa di Porta Pia (The Bersaglieri at the Capture of Porta Pia, 1871) show one battling bersagliere wearing a fez, while the others don the proper feathered metal helmet. The artist seems to have added the fez for visual effect rather than historical accuracy.

2. MONUMENTS WITHOUT IDOLS

1. The word and concept belonged to the French political vocabulary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his contemporaries. It became commonplace in popular French poetry, politics, and the arts after 1840. In 1860 Victor Hugo used the expression “uomo della libertà, uomo dell’umanità” (man of liberty, man of humanity) specifically to describe Giuseppe Garibaldi. See Tiziana Olivari, La biblioteca di Garibaldi a Caprera (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2014), 37. The concept of umanità was used in different ways in the Republican, Garibaldian, and internationalist discourses of post-unification Italy. Ernesto Teodoro Moneta defines Garibaldi as a “moderno cavaliere dell’Umanità” (modern knight of Humanity) in Giuseppe Garibaldi: Due secoli di interpretazioni, ed. Lauro Rossi (Rome: Gangemi, 2010), 268. On Rosso’s internationalism, see chapters 3 and 4 of this book. 2. “Rappresenta, o, a dir meglio, dovrebbe rappresentare Garibaldi su uno scoglio in riva al mare in atto di raccoglimento, con espressione fortemente pensosa, meditante alcuna ardita sua impresa; il genio dell’umanità libratosi a volo sopra l’eroe fa brillare sul capo di lui una stella.” “Relazione: All’onorevole Comitato esecutivo per il monumento a Garibaldi da erigersi a Pavia,” Ufficio tecnico comunale, b. 56 fasc. 1, 3, Archivio storico civico, Pavia; and Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso (Milan: Il Milione, 1950), 16. Borghi mentions a project by Rosso for Pavia, but his description does not match that in the original documents and confuses the work with another project. Giovanni Lista refers correctly to the project mentioned here but without citing original documents and describes neither the project nor its outcome. Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 11. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci do

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

not mention Rosso’s Garibaldi competitions at all in their catalogue raisonné Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009). “la persona del generale non si atteggia fortemente pensosa ma più tosto cupa, truce e oppressa.” Relazione sul Concorso per il Monumento da Erigersi al Generale Giuseppe Garibaldi (Milan: Tipografia Luigi di Giacomo Pirola, 1884), 3–4. Giovanna Massobrio, ed., L’Italia per Garibaldi, exh. cat. (Milan: Sugar Co., 1982); and Maurizio Corgnati, Gianlorenzo Mellini, and Francesco Poli, eds., Il lauro e il bronzo: La scultura celebrative in Italia, 1800–1900, exh. cat. (Moncalieri: Ilte, 1990). Rosso denigrated monuments as presse-papiers (paperweights). See Medardo Rosso, “Lettera al direttore del ‘Veneto,’ ” Il Popolo, October 22, 1921. On contradictions between Rosso’s words and his art, see Sharon Hecker, “Icarus Fell Here,” in Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. (New York: Peter Freeman, 2008), 40. See Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Lucy Riall, “Eroi maschili, viriltà e forme della guerra,” in Il Risorgimento, vol. 22 of Storia d’Italia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 253–88; and Ilaria Porciani, “Stato e nazione: l’immagine debole dell’Italia,” in Fare gli italiani: Scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea, vol. 1 of La nascita dello Stato nazionale, ed. Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 385–428. Nancy Scott, “Vincenzo Vela” (PhD diss., New York University, 1978), 2:350–71. Relazione sul Concorso per il Monumento da Erigersi al Generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, 3–4. Victor Pannelier, Inv. Ph. 1020, Musée Rodin, Paris. “Je ‘l’attends impatiemment à l’exécution de cette porte monumentale en bronze dans laquelle il veut incarner le poême du Dante.” Paul Leroi, “Salon de 1882,” L’Art: Revue hebdomadaire illustrée 2 (1882): 73–74. On the sale to Ionides, see Anna Tahinci, “Private Patronage: Rodin and His Early British Collectors,” in The Zola of Sculpture: Rodin in Britain, 1880–1917, ed. Claudine Mitchell (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 106. Paul Leroi, “Salon de 1882,” 74. Relazione sul Concorso per il Monumento da Erigersi al Generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, 3–4. “l’impossibilità di condividere nel presente e di trasmettere nel futuro un ideale comune.” Enza Del Tedesco, Il romanzo della nazione: Da Pirandello a Nievo; Cinquant’anni di disincanto (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 21. James Hillman, “Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present,” in Puer Papers (Dallas: Spring, 1979), 3–53. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. R. J. Finneran (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 187. Relazione sul Concorso per il Monumento da Erigersi al Generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, n.p. The last signature is illegible. Fine is also called La Megera in “Un artista piemontese,” La Gazzetta piemontese, October 27, 1885. It is called Ruffiana in Ardengo Soffici, “Medardo Rosso,” La Voce, May 27, 1909, 1, 24. The posthumous name La mezzana is used in Ettore Cozzani, Medardo Rosso (Milan: L’eroica, 1931), tav. 2, n.p. The name from Cozzani was used in the catalogue of the exhibition of Prima Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale, exh. cat. (Rome: Enzo Pinci, 1931), reprinted as XIV Quadriennale di Roma Retrospettive, 1931–1948, exh. cat.

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19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

(Milan: Electa, 2005) 150, entry no. 14, repr., 208. Luciano Caramel uses the name La Ruffiana in Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat., ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 125. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci call it Ruffiana (Medardo Rosso, 66). Esposizione di belle arti in Roma, 1883, exh. cat. (Rome: Tipografia Bodoniana, 1883), 124, 126, 129, 130. No. 18 in the catalogue is described as Eosso Medardo [sic] Dopo una scappata; no. 62 refers to In esplorazione; no. 29 to Un cantante a spasso; and no. 36 to A zonzo. Rosso’s address is still given as Via Solferino 12, Milan, although his region is given as Turin rather than Milan. Luigi Chirtani noted the mistake in the catalogue, where he claimed that Rosso was cited as “Rapo Medardo.” See Luigi Chirtani, “L’Esposizione di Belle Arti a Roma,” L’Illustrazione italiana, February 11, 1883, 87. See Luigi Chirtani, “L’Esposizione di Belle Arti a Roma,” L’Illustrazione italiana, February 11, 1883, 87. The article with an image is reproduced in the Album-Ricordo della Esposizione di belle arti a Roma 1883, exh. cat. (Milan: Treves, 1883), 36. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 13. The claim was repeated throughout the subsequent literature on Rosso. Fred Licht, Winds of Change: The Milanese Avant-Garde, 1860–1900 (Naples, FL: Gilgore Collection, 2003), 90. See Cameroni to Zola, June 25, 1879, in Paolo Tortonese, ed., Cameroni e Zola: Lettere (Paris: Champion, 1987), 76–77. Cameroni also reported on Manet’s achievement of the Légion d’honneur in another letter to Zola, dated January 5, 1882, in ibid., 140. Cameroni to Zola, July 13, 1878, in Paolo Tortonese, Cameroni e Zola, 66. See entries on Chirtani in Angelo De Gubernatis, Dizionario degli artisti italiani viventi (Florence: Matini, 1889–92), 19; and Angelo De Gubernatis, Dizionario biografico degli scrittori contemporanei (Florence: Matini, 1879), 1:50. Camille de Sainte-Croix was the first to state that “toutes ses [Rosso’s] connaissances en histoire de l’Art s’arrêtaient alors à Houdon et à Rude. Là-bas on n’ensegnait pas même le nom de Carpeaux. Si Medardo avait ouï parler de Bonnington, il ignorait complètement Manet et ne pouvait même soupçonner qu’il existât par delà des Alpes un Degas, déjà patriarche en ce domaine conquis de l’Art Impressionniste que le jeune Piémontais fruste et génial concevait personnellement dans son coin d’atelier . . . il ignorait . . . Daumier” (All his [Rosso’s] knowledge of art history stopped at Houdon and Rude. Over there they did not teach Carpeaux’s name. If Medardo had heard about Bonnington, he did not know about Manet at all and could not imagine that beyond the Alps there existed a Degas, already a patriarch in the domain conquered by Impressionist art, which the young, genial, and unsophisticated Piedmontese personally conceived in the corner of his atelier. . . . He was ignorant of . . . Daumier). Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March 1896): 380–81. In 1998 I discussed the need for a closer examination of the artistic relationship between Italy and France. See Sharon Hecker, “L’esordio milanese di Medardo Rosso,” Bolletino dell’Accademia degli Euteleti 65 (1998): 188–91. “roba ‘Drôle,’ che mi pareva meno di un giocattolo, fatta come a voler mettere delle fuggevoli nuvole sopra un tavolo.” Interview in Luigi Ambrosini, “Parole di Medardo Rosso,” La Stampa, July 29, 1923.

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27. “In quel moment [sic] vedo passare una coppia là sul paviment [sic] . . . creduto piatto per il marciare sopra materiale, si alzava, veniva avanti, era come un tono e queste persone si spiegavano per una opposizione su quella tonalità. Questa ombra che si lasciavano dietro la faceva una roba granda [sic]. Io dicevo: ci ho ragione, non so perché. Lascio e scappo a un’altra finestra perché più venivano avanti e più quest’ombra restava sacrificata, non mi faceva effetto. L’ombra parlava più di loro in quel momento col suo tono. Altra finestra e guardi. Dico ho ragione. Se io discendo vado là credo di poter toccare quei colori, di prenderli con la mano come sempre tutti han creduto; ma se faccio per prendere quell’ombra per terra non posso; ed è un tono che esiste come gli altri guidato dalla mia emozione che mi dà tutti quei toni, dunque non prendo nemmeno gli altri toni con la mano, dunque tocco e non tocco.” Ibid. Transcribed with errors in Jole De Sanna, Medardo Rosso o la creazione dello spazio moderno (Milan: Mursia, 1985), 41. 28. “Non si può dividere l’esperienza.” Luigi Ambrosini, “Parole di Medardo Rosso,” La Stampa, July 29, 1923. This might have been a confirmation of Baudelaire’s belief that sculpture’s essential conditions were “l’unité d’impression et la totalité d’effet” (The unity of impression and the totality of effect). Charles Baudelaire, “Sculpture,” Salon de 1859 (Paris: n.p., 1859), reprinted in Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 347. 29. Nancy Locke, “Manet’s Oceanic Feeling,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 4, no. 1 (2005), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring05/64-spring05/spring05article /303-manets-oceanic-feeling. 30. For a full account and a transcription of the original documents, see Sharon Hecker, “Ambivalent Bodies: Medardo Rosso’s Brera Petition,” Burlington Magazine 142, no. 1173 (December 2000): 773–77. Camille de Sainte-Croix provides the earliest description of Rosso at Brera (“Medardo Rosso,” 379). The journalist claimed that the sculptor finished four years of study in a year and a half before being expelled. Sainte-Croix erroneously dated Rosso’s enrollment at Brera to the period before his military service. Mino Borghi corrected the dates of Rosso’s admission (Medardo Rosso, 16–18). Rosso’s matriculation file, cited by Borghi, is missing from Brera’s enrollment dossier of 1882. But, see Rosso’s petition and expulsion documents in Scuola e Alunni, atti vari, 1875–1895, TEA GV4, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. 31. Scuola e Alunni, atti vari. 32. Ibid. 33. See Jole De Sanna, “Non accademismo: Medardo Rosso nella prima occupazione dell’Accademia di Brera,” in La Città di Brera: Belle Arti in Accademia tra Pratica e Ricerca (Milan: Fabbri, 1993), 27. De Sanna relied on Borghi’s information. The Premio Medardo Rosso (Medardo Rosso Award), established at the Brera in 1932 by Rosso’s son, Francesco, with money from the sale of two of the sculptor’s works to Benito Mussolini, seems to have been intended as a riposte to the academy. “Due opere di Medardo Rosso acquistate da Mussolini,” Corriere della Sera, July 17, 1931. Information on the prize is in Carpi B V/5 and Carpi C V/26, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. 34. The president of the academy, Luigi Bisi, made a survey of the practices of other art schools after he received the petition, indicating that he took Rosso’s requests seriously.

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35. Not the 250 reported by Camille de Sainte-Croix (“Medardo Rosso,” 380), Mino Borghi (Medardo Rosso, 17–18), and subsequent scholars. 36. As suggested by Sainte-Croix and in later writings on Rosso. For documents responding to Rosso’s petition, see “Prefettura di Milano Anno 1883,” no. 65, vol. 1, an. 1860–1883, Archivio Generale (Atti Amministrativi), R. Governo Provinciale Prefettura di Milano. See also Repertorio d’Archivio, Categoria 14, Fasc. 8, Palazzo di Brera, Accademia di Belle Arti, no. 12, “Scuola di anatomia. Presso la R. Accademia di Belle Arti: Circa i modelli,” no. 10240–15126, Archivio di Stato, Milan. 37. Luigi Bisi (1814–1886) became a professor of perspective in 1850 and served as president of the academy from 1879 until his death. See Eva Tea, L’Accademia di belle arti a BreraMilano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1941), 103. Bisi directed the funerary art commission in Milan and probably had a hand in the removal of Rosso’s funerary monument, La Riconoscenza, from the cemetery a few months after the sculptor’s expulsion from the academy. 38. H. de Horatiis, “Dopo una scappata: Testa in bronzo di Medardo Rosso,” Giornale illustrato della Esposizione di Belle Arti in Roma, April 22, 1883. Albert Elsen misread the event: “Rosso showed a distaste for working from nude models and was expelled from school for assaulting another student who petitioned for nude feminine models.” Arts Council of Great Britain, ed., Pioneers of Modern Sculpture, exh. cat. (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1973), 22. 39. For a complete account, including original documents, photographs, and sketches, see Sharon Hecker, “Medardo Rosso’s First Commission,” Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1125 (December 1996): 817–22. For documents related to the commission, see Fasc. Famiglia Curletti, Diversi. Portico A. B. Levante. Prono del Famedio, Archivio del Cimitero Monumentale. Settore Servizi Funebri e Cimiteriali, Milan. See also the file under the same title at the Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. 40. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 407–556; and Linda Nochlin, “Death in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Realism (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 57–101. 41. See Michele Petrantoni, Il Monumentale di Milano: Il primo cimitero della libertà (Milan: Electa, 1992). 42. Michel Ragon, L’espace de la mort (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), 104, 155. 43. Giovanni Treccani degli Alfieri, ed., Storia di Milano (Milan: Treccani degli Alfieri, 1962), 15:909; Luigi Gabba, “Lo sviluppo industriale della Lombardia dal 1870 al 1905 studiato negli atti dei concorsi ai premi fondenti presso il R. Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere in Milano,” Rendiconti del R. Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere 2, no. 39 (1906): 735–55; and Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, Palazzo di Brera, La Fondazione Brambilla (Pavia: Tip. successori Fusi, 1941), 113–14. The Curletti family was active in Lombardy’s agricultural industry. It formed the Fabriche Riunite degli Agricoltori Italiani in 1899, and Pietro was a member of the Società Agraria Lombarda. Fasc. 38, Scatola 745, Microfilm no. 274, Archivio della Camera di Commercio, Industria, Artigianato, e Agricoltura, Milan. 44. The architect and engineer Francesco Ruggieri erected the chapel in 1873 in the Cimitero del Gentilino, also known as the Cimitero Ticinese, and dismantled the chapel

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45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

when this small cemetery closed in 1895. Carlo Tedeschi, Origini e vicende dei cimiteri di Milano e del servizio mortuario (Milan: G. Agnelli, 1899), 21–23. The Curletti family tomb is now in the famedio at the Cimitero Monumentale. Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 124. Curletti also bought Rosso’s Innamorati sotto il lampione, a work that dates to the same period (1883). Rosso had given Curletti unlimited rights to reproduce it, permission that he later tried to revoke. Curletti still owned La Riconoscenza in 1900. On Curletti, see Alberto Grubicy to Medardo Rosso, August 24, 1900; September 20, 1900; October 23, 1900; October 29, 1900; and December 20, 1900, Medardo Rosso–Alberto Grubicy Correspondence, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. The weeping mourner in nineteenth-century cemeteries was overwhelmingly female. Although there are also male dolenti (as well as lifelike representations of the deceased or religious images of Christ), the prototypical images rely on the classical representation of la douleur as female and on reconfigurations of Dürer’s female figure of Melancholia. Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Mémoire de marbre: La sculpture funéraire en France, 1804–1914 (Paris: Mairie de Paris, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, 1995), 134–63. A rare example of a funerary figure lying on its stomach is René de Saint-Marceaux’s tomb of Abbot Miroy (1872) in the cemetery at Rheims. However, this monument shows someone who has been shot to death. Michel Vovelle, “Le deuil bourgeois: Du faire-part à la statuaire funéraire,” Le Débat 12 (1981): 60–113. “Ed al pubblico in generale dettava sensi di ribrezzo.” Quoted in Sharon Hecker, “Medardo Rosso’s First Commission,” 822. The dossier is at the Comune di Milano, Archivio Ufficio Servizio Mortuario, in the file “Fasc. Famiglia Curletti. Diversi. Portico A. B. Levante. Prono del Famedio.” A second file, containing duplicate material but missing many important documents, is at the Archivio del Cimitero Monumentale di Milano, under the same heading. The negative response to it explains the conservative appearance of his next sculpture for the tomb of Elisa Rognoni Faini (1888). Scholars believe Rosso made the tomb in this conventional manner because he was in a dire financial position. See Carteggio Medardo Rosso–Felice Cameroni (1889 giugno–1892), Biblioteca d’arte—Biblioteca archeologica—Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive—CASVA, Milan (referred to hereafter as “Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence), L34, undated but probably from November 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 101. However, in the same letter, Rosso wrote that it was “unico lavoro fatto così come vollero li altri perche mi sarei trovato nella condizione di vedermelo protestare come l’altro” (the only work done like other people wanted it because otherwise I would have found myself in the condition of seeing it protested like the other one). To my knowledge it is the only sculpture to have been removed from a Milanese cemetery, although other projects were banned from the outset. See Sharon Hecker, “Back-to-Back: Medardo Rosso, Giovanni Segantini, and the Outsider in Italian Modern Art,” in Orizzonte Nord-Sud: Protagonisti dell’arte europea ai due versanti delle Alpi, 1840–1960, exh. cat., ed. Marco Franciolli and Guido Comis (Milan: Skira, 2015), 170–85.

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54. [signature illegible], “La gentil figura è coperta di una scarsa veste irta di peli come la madre Eva dopo il peccato.” Sharon Hecker, “Medardo Rosso’s First Commission,” 822. 55. “distesa bocconi . . . posizione perduta.” Ibid. 56. “una trovata artistica ispirata alla Zola.” Mario Mariani, “Schizzi d’artisti: Medardo Rosso,” La Commedia umana, November 1, 1885, 10. 57. “Une femme désolée s’est jetée sur la tombe de celui qu’elle aime, elle se roule avec désespoir; sa tête, appuyée contre terre, est cachée dans un de ses bras, elle arrache violemment ses cheveux épars, tout son corps se crispe et se tord de douleur.” Victor Schoelcher, “Salon de 1835: Dernier article,” Revue de Paris (1835): 189–90. 58. Charles Baudelaire, “Sculpture,” in Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 339. 59. Cham, caricature of Auguste Préault’s Hécube, Le Charivari, June 12, 1863, reprinted in Charles W. Millard et al., Auguste Préault: Sculpteur romantique, 1809–1879 (Paris: Gallimard / Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997), 135. Ernest Chesneau, L’art et les artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Didier, 1864), 308. 60. Rosso and Degas precede the examples noted in David J. Getsy, “Fallen Women: The Gender of Horizontality and the Abandonment of the Pedestal by Giacometti and Epstein,” in Display and Displacement: Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern, ed. Alexandra Gerstein (London: Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, 2007), 114–15. 61. Jack Burnham, “Sculpture’s Vanishing Base,” Artforum 6, no. 3 (November 1967): 47–55; Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York: G. Braziller, 1982), 23. 62. Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Mémoire de marbre, 162. The gesture of a wife extending a hand through an architectural division is also used in Henri Chapu’s tomb of Prince Ferdinand d’Orleans installed in the Royal Chapel in Saint-Louis Dreux in 1885. 63. Honoré Daumier, “Le Fantôme,” La Caricature, May 7, 1835. 64. In a letter to Pica dated April 17, 1891, Cameroni gave the critic a list of musts to visit in Paris (“ciò che bisogna vedere in Parigi”) that included the Père Lachaise and Montmartre cemeteries. Felice Cameroni, Lettere a Vittorio Pica, 1883–1903, ed. Ernesto Citro (Pisa: ETS, 1990), 114. 65. See Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 111–47; Linda Nochlin, “Innovation and Tradition in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,” in Essays in Honor of Walter Friedlander, ed. Walter Cahn (New York: Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1965), 119–26; and T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 77–120. See also Thomas A. Kselman, Death and Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 291–302. For passing mention of Scapigliatura literature’s understanding of Courbet, see Gaetano Mariani, Storia della Scapigliatura (Rome: S. Sciascia, 1967), 72, 101, 274, 711–12n12. 66. Présentation de peintures de Gustave Courbet dans le foyer du Théâtre de la Gaîté (Paris, 1881). 67. Luigi Gualdo, “Narcisa,” in Novelle (Turin: V. Bona, 1868), 251–68; and Giovanni Verga, Una peccatrice (Turin: Negro, 1865). 68. Relazione sul Concorso per il Monumento da Erigersi al Generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, 4. Rosso’s project, which does not bear his name, is number 14 in this official record of

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69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78. 79.

the competition. The number can be found in an anonymous article titled “I bozzetti pel monumento a Garibaldi,” La Lombardia, September 1, 1884. This record shows that it was eliminated from the group of twenty proposals for no given reason. “un grido di guerra.” “I bozzetti pel monumento a Garibaldi,” La Lombardia, September 1, 1884. Mino Borghi erroneously cited this article as a review of the competition for the Garibaldi monument in Pavia during Rosso’s military period in 1881 (Medardo Rosso, 11). “un gruppo di dimostranti viene alle mani colle guardie di P. S. e coi carabinieri; un portabandiera s’arrampica su di un fanale e agita un vessillo; tutt’allingiro della gente che s’accapiglia e che ruzzola per terra.” “I bozzetti pel monumento a Garibaldi,” La Lombardia, September 1, 1884. “strano, bizzarro, audacissimo all’assurdo.” Mario Mariani, “Schizzi d’artisti: Medardo Rosso,” La Commedia umana, November 1, 1885, 10. “è ora e tempo di finirla coi convenzionalismi.” Ibid. “[Rosso] ci diceva col suo animo franco e leale di giovane gagliaro ed entusiasta: ma che colonnati, ma che scalee, ma che portici per l’Eroe di tutta un’epopea gloriosa: Garibaldi ridotto alle proporzioni, agli atteggiamenti d’un Don Chisciotte qualunque, goffo od elegante come un pupazzetto medioevale, sarebbe troppo grave insulto per per permetterlo. Il voto ardente de’ suoi ultimi anni era l’Italia libera, ma tutta libera; ecco il monumento veramente degno di Lui; ma che marmi, ma che statue, ma che cavalli e mantelli e bassorilievi!” Ibid. “in braccio alle più strane esagerazioni che mente d’artista sappia immaginare.” “I bozzetti pel monumento a Garibaldi,” La Lombardia, September 1, 1884. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L47, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 40. Mariani claimed that Rosso had been impressed by a demonstration he saw. Mario Mariani, “Schizzi d’artisti: Medardo Rosso,” La Commedia umana, November 1, 1885, 10. Lista suggests that Rosso was inspired by a public riot he saw after news arrived of the hanging of Trieste patriot and irredentist Guglielmo Oberdan, who was found guilty of betrayal by an Austrian tribunal on December 20, 1882. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), 39, 45. Giovanna Ginex believes, however, that the “P. S.” described in the Lombardia article were Austrian forces. See Giovanna Ginex, “La scultura monumentale su temi risorgimentali: Qualche esempio tra ’800 e ’900,” in Il progetto liberal-democratico di Ettore Ferrari: Un percorso tra politica e arte, ed. Anna Maria Isastia (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997), 160. There does not seem to have been a single clash related to the memory of Garibaldi that Rosso could have seen during his lifetime. “qui devient de plus en plus rétrograde; et celle qui valorise l’approchement de l’axe horizontal, sous forme de lignes variables et sinueuses (tendance à caractère romantique et donc plus moderne).” Stamos Metzidakis, “Poétique de la ligne: Autour des colonnes sculptées,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 2 (2006): 206–25. Giovanna Ginex, “La scultura monumentale su temi risorgimentali,” 70. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007).

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80. Luigi Zoja, The Father: Historical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives (East Sussex, England: Brunner-Routledge, 2001), 217. 81. On differences between Germany, France, and Italy in representations of the Fatherland, see Giovanna Ginex “La scultura monumentale su temi risorgimentali,” 169–70. 82. Luigi Zoja, The Father, 224. 83. Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” 384. 84. Giovanna Ginex, “La scultura monumentale su temi risorgimentali,” 160. 85. Robert Campbell, “An Emotive Place Apart,” interview with Maya Lin, AIA Journal 72, no. 5 (1983): 150–51, quoted in Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures (London: Routledge, 1997), 50. 86. Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City, 15, 81. 87. Robert Campbell, “An Emotive Place Apart,” quoted in Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City, 131.

3. “IMPRESSIONIST SCULPTOR”? THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF C AT E G O R I Z I N G R O S S O

1. Rosso modeled his works in clay and then cast them in bronze. He likely began using wax and plaster as final materials after he moved to Paris in 1889. See Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 371. 2. “Il fonde . . . magistralement la sculpture impressioniste.” Edmond Thiaudière, “Au salon: La sculpture—Les bustes, II, Medardo Rosso,” L’Opinion, June 2, 1886, 2. 3. “L’Amore materno,” L’Illustrazione italiana, November 28, 1886, 406, 418. 4. “un forte, arguto talento di osservatore e di impressionista. . . . Lo scultore milanese fa in scultura dell’impressionismo-di quell’impressionismo che in pittura conta tanti valenti e poderosi scultori, tanti da essere ormai una scuola riverita e rispettata.” M., “Medardo Rosso,” L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica Illustrata, August 14, 1887, 158. 5. “uno dei più arrischiati scultori impressionisti.” “L’Inaugurazione del cippo funereo di Filippi nel Cimitero monumentale,” Il Sole, June 26, 1889. 6. M., “Medardo Rosso,” 158. The author also labeled him “uno scapigliato scultore, tenace nella sua artistica scapigliatura” (a Scapigliato sculptor, tenacious in his artistic Scapigliatura). 7. Mario Mariani, “Schizzi d’artisti: Medardo Rosso,” La Commedia umana, November 1, 1885, 11. 8. Ferdinando Fontana, “I nuovi monumenti al Cimitero Monumentale di Milano,” L’Italia, November 2–3, 1889. 9. See for example Paola Mola Kirchmayr, “Gli anni della formazione di Medardo Rosso alla luce di un epistolario inedito,” in Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat., ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 39. 10. Margaret Scolari Barr notes that Rosso “was indeed an Impressionist in so far as his medium would permit. Impatient with the limitations of sculpture, he never tried consciously to emulate the Impressionist painters, yet, like them, he was passionately interested in light and like them, he wanted to fuse his subjects with the air, the sun,

N O T E S T O P A G E S 5 7 — 6 3    

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    2 3 7

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

the haze, the gaslight, and the color in which they were steeped.” Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 9. In his “Manifesto Tecnico della Scultura Futurista,” published on April 11, 1912, Umberto Boccioni lamented that Impressionism had overtaken and limited the sculptor’s otherwise revolutionary ideas. The sculptor Arturo Martini was more critical of Rosso’s “impressionism.” See Nico Stringa, ed., Colloqui sulla scultura, 1944–1945 (Treviso: Canova, 1997), 291. Clement Greenberg accused Rosso of “adulterating his art with Impressionist effects” in “Modernist Sculpture: Its Pictorial Past,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 162. See Ugo Ojetti, “Medardo Rosso, per lettera al Corriere delle Sera,” Corriere della Sera, May 31, 1910. This was rebutted in Ardengo Soffici, “Carte in tavola,” La Voce, July 7, 1910. Benno Tempel, “ ‘Such Absurdity Can Never Deserve the Name of Art’: Impressionism in the Netherlands,” Van Gogh Museum Journal (1999): 112–29, http://www.dbnl.org /tekst/_van012199901_01/_van012199901_01_0011.php. For a contrary opinion, see Annie-Paul Quinsac, La peinture divisionniste italienne (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1972), 155. “questo volume parla ancora della grandezza della pittura italiana, perchè nel narrare le meraviglie delle scuole estere, dimostra l’influenza grandissima delle nostre su tutte le scuole d’oltremonti e d’oltremare.” Luigi (Louis) Viardot, Le meraviglie della pittura straniera, trans. Luigi Chirtani (Milan: Treves, 1875), n.p. Chirtani’s book was what he termed a “free translation with notes and additions” to Luigi Viardot, Les merveilles de la peinture (Paris: L. Hachette, 1868). “trascinato dall’amor proprio nazionale vide in molti pittori francesi un’originalità che non si può lor concedere senza scostarsi dai dettami di una critica imparziale.” Ibid., n.p. “confusione di menti e di pennelli.” Ibid., 291. Viardot’s earlier version does not contain this section. “L’arte moderna francese rappresenta . . . la mancanza di una credenza comune, l’anarchia delle menti e degli animi, che turbano, tormentano, e mettono in pericolo la società.” Ibid., 306. “quanto siamo addietro. . . . Intanto veggo che questa gran qualità l’abbiamo: l’antipatia per tutto ciò che è forestiero e la nessuna meraviglia delle cose che si presentano.” Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Diego Martelli (Turin: Allemandi, 1996), 162. “Nel Cimitero Monumentale: I nuovi monumenti,” Il Pungolo, November 2–3, 1889. “davanti ai quadri di Pissarro . . . non ho ricevuto alcuna impressione da quei dipinti; . . . mi pare degno di un ragazzo senza talento. Con molta fatica mi riesce di trovare un pezzettino accanto ad un altro, ma poi immensa lacuna dove non mi riesce di scorgere altro che il nulla.” Francesco Gioli to Diego Martelli, January 11, 1879, in ibid., 201. “Il signor Pissarro Camillo ha esposto ‘L’approssimarsi della bufera’ ed asserisce che è questo uno ‘studio dal vero’ fatto in Francia . . . ma prego mi sia permesso sospettare che la paura dei fulmini, nell’approssimarsi della bufera, ha forse sconvolto il sistema nervoso al nostro pittore e gli ha confuso le tinte sulla tavolozza. . . . Il sig. Pissarro ha voluto essere originale? In questo caso egli ha raggiunto pienamente il suo intento, ma scommetto che pochissimi gli invidiano questo genere di originalità. Infatti che razza di paesaggio è quello, dove i colori sono scaraventati a quintali tanto da convertire la tela

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TO PAGES 63—65

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

in bassorilievo, dove le tinte si amalgamano, si confondono, si accapigliano in un accozzo tremendo . . . per rappresentarci una natura così brutta, così poco vera, ella è andato in Francia. . . . Ed ella pretende farci credere che quella frittata coi broccoli è uno ‘studio,’ studiato’ dal vero?” Ossian, “Quadri e statue: Esposizione Solenne della Società d’Incoraggiamento di Belle Arti,” Firenze Artistica 7, no. 15–16 (1879), in Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Diego Martelli, 200. “Caro Gianni, sono cascato dalle nuvole quando ho letto il tuo giudizio sulle opere di Pissarro. . . . Che quella pittura non piaccia a Lemon e al Bruzzi, si capisce; . . . ma tu che hai dipinto delle cose bellissime . . . non capisco come non possa trovare nulla nelle opere di Pissarro. . . . Potrei capire l’appunto che fai al colore, come falso . . . quello che è più curioso è che tu parli di linguaggio intellegibile al pubblico.” Diego Martelli to Giovanni Fattori, dated only 1879, in Lettere inedite dei Macchiaioli, ed. Piero Dini (Florence: Il Torchio, 1975), 221–22. “L’impressionismo non è soltanto una rivoluzione nel campo del pensiero, ma è anche una rivoluzione fisiologica nell’occhio umano. Esso è una teoria nuova che dipende da un modo diverso di percepire la sensazione della luce, e di esprimere le impressioni.” Diego Martelli, Gli Impressionisti: Lettura data al Circolo Filologico di Livorno (Pisa: Tipografia Vannucchi, 1880), 23–27. See Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Diego Martelli, 206 and 217n170. Diego Martelli, Gli impressionisti, n.p. Martelli published an earlier reportage as “I Pittori Impressionisti Francesi: Quarta Esposizione,” parts 1 and 2, Roma Artistica 22 (1879): 170; Roma Artistica 23 (1878): 178–79. Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Diego Martelli, 195. “un impressionista, sicuro del suo pennello!” Felice Cameroni, “ ‘La Maison Tellier’ di Guy de Maupassant,” Le novità letterarie francesi, June 5, 1881, 181–82, reprinted in Felice Cameroni, Interventi critici sulla letteratura francese, ed. Glauco Viazzi (Naples: Guida Editori, 1974), 136. Felice Cameroni, “Appendice: Pei visitatori dell’Esposizione di Parigi, Parigi, 30 giugno 1889,” Il Sole, July 5, 1889. “afin que ces bronzes impressionnistes soiant appreciés à Paris” (in order that his Impressionist bronzes become appreciated in Paris). Felice Cameroni to Edmond de Goncourt, in Carteggio Medardo Rosso–Felice Cameroni (1889 giugno–1892), Biblioteca d’arte—Biblioteca archeologica—Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive—CASVA, Milan (referred to hereafter as “Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence”), L7, September 19, 1889, unpublished. There has been no explanation as to why this letter is included in the Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence. “le strane teste impressioniste del nostro Medardo Rosso.” Felice Cameroni, “Appendice: Pei Visitatori all’Esposizione di Parigi,” Il Sole, May 29, 1889. Kate Flint, Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 6. Linda Nochlin, “The Depoliticization of Gustave Courbet: Transformation and Rehabilitation under the Third Republic,” in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in NineteenthCentury France, ed. Michael R. Orwics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 111.

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33. Michael Orwics, “Reinventing Édouard Manet: Rewriting the Face of National Art in the Early Third Republic,” in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-Century France, 122. 34. Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Works and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991; repr., Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 139–40. The reference is to the Getty edition. 35. Ibid., 136. 36. Ibid., 149. 37. See chapter 4, p. 74 and chapter 3 for a full discussion. 38. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci state that the cast in this show was bronze, but the materials are not specified in the catalogue. The authors provide no evidence for their assertion (Medardo Rosso, 76). 39. Rosso never used the title Lo Scaccino. His son Francesco provided the title, after Rosso’s death, for the retrospective at the First Quadriennale exhibition in Rome. See entry no. 9, Prima Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale, exh. cat. (Rome: Enzo Pinci, 1931), 149. Rosso first exhibited the work under the title Se la fusse grappa!. For the original title, see entry no. 11, L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica: Catalogo ufficiale, 2nd ed., exh. cat. (Venice: Emporio, 1887), 57. A photograph of the work was reproduced on the occasion of the show in M., “Medardo Rosso,” 157. Camille de Sainte-Croix titled it L’ivrogne in the article “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March 1896): 385. Rosso also called the work Grapat in a letter to the collector Luigi Bergamo (see Rosso to Luigi Bergamo, undated but thought to be before August 1923, published partially without date or citation of location in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 240). The original letter is lost but a photocopy is preserved in Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Caramel erroneously called it In esplorazione in Luciano Caramel and Carlo Pirovano, Galleria d’Arte Moderna: Opere dell’Ottocento, N–Z (Milan: Electa, 1975), 668. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci renamed the work Sagrestano but cite no documentary evidence for this new title (Medardo Rosso, 74). Despite its first exhibition date of 1887, I agree with Luciano Caramel (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 126 and 128) and Mola and Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 74), who have plausibly dated the work to 1883 on the basis of Rosso’s own statements and the stylistic similarities to Carne altrui and La Portinaia, both made between 1883 and 1884. 40. The caricature is from Daumier’s series of fifty images titled Types Parisiens (Parisian Types) that appeared in Le Charivari between June 1839 and December 1842. 41. Maxime Valsamas, “Collecting Honoré Daumier’s Prints: The Case of Sarah Bernhardt,” unpublished manuscript. 42. Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, October 22, 1882, trans. Johanna van GoghBonger, ed. Robert Harrison, n. 237, http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/11/237.htm. 43. Maxime Valsamas, “Collecting Honoré Daumier’s Prints.” 44. Lista erroneously believes that Daumier was unknown in Italy in the 1880s. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), 126. 45. “individuava [Daumier] come uno degli astri indiscussi dell’arte francese.” Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Diego Martelli, 181. 46. “è fortissimo per il chiaroscuro che forza un po’ troppo abusando degli asfalti e de’ bitumi alla maniera di Decamps [sic], ed è quasi insuperabile nelle analisi delle forme

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TO PAGES 68—70

47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

e del carattere dei movimenti.” Diego Martelli, Gli Impressionisti, 10–11. See Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Diego Martelli, 181 and 210n47. Margaret Scolari Barr believes it was “not a caricature; nothing anecdotal mars the compassionate interpretation of the head” (Medardo Rosso, 23). Copies of these “business cards” have survived in private collections. One was reproduced in the illustrated journal of the 1887 Venice Esposizione Nazionale, with the name Se la fusse grappa!. Thirty years later, Rosso was still distributing copies of the photo. Another copy, preserved in the Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee in Venice, contains his handwritten notations: “fatto anno 1883”; “Espoz Venezia 1886” [sic]; a red-colored stain (paint or red wine); and a dedication “alla mia amica Signora Rosa Rosso” with the date “1914.” See Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 74. For another copy, see Fondo Lamberto Vitali, Raccolta Bertarelli, LV 12071/29, Civico Archivio Fotografico, Milan. See also Willy Dietrich, Una critica tedesca dell’Esposizione artistica veneziana (Florence: Loescher and Seeber, 1888), 31–32. “contiennent un élément mystérieux, durable, éternel, qui les recommande à l’attention des artistes. Chose curieuse et vraiment digne d’attention que l’introduction de cet élément insaisissable du beau jusque dans les oeuvres destinées à représenter à l’homme sa propre laideur morale et physique! . . . Ce spectacle lamentable excite en lui une hilarité immortelle et incorrigible.” Charles Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques,” reprinted in Curiosités esthétiques (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 359–87; Charles Baudelaire, “Quelques caricaturistes français,” Le Présent. Revue Universelle, October 1, 1857; and Charles Baudelaire, “Quelques caricaturistes étrangers,” Le Présent. Revue Universelle, October 1, 1857. Michele Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 4, Hannoosh’s emphasis. The work was first shown at the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica di Venezia (1887). See entry no. 17 in the first edition of the catalogue, L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica: Catalogo ufficiale, exh. cat. (Venice: Emporio, 1887), 51. (The first and second editions were both published in the same year by the same publisher; the second edition included a guide to Venice and advertisements, and thus was slightly larger). In the second edition, Carne altrui is listed as no. 68 on page 59. Rosso gave the bilingual title Carne altruiPoliandre (Flesh of Others-Poliandros) underneath an undated photograph printed by Stabilimento Vittorio Turati in Milan. It was then reprinted on paper by Tipografia Lombardi in Milan and conserved in the Fondo Lamberto Vitali, Raccolta Bertarelli, LV 12071/29, Civico Archivio Fotografico, Milan. It is one of five prints made around the time of the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica di Venezia (1887). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci claim, without evidence, that Rosso had prepared these photographs for a bilingual article by Cameroni that was never published (Medardo Rosso, 72n13). This seems unlikely to me, since four of the prints are attached, suggesting that they were pages of a book or a journal. An 1893 review of Rosso’s exhibition at La Bodinière describes a work as “tête de femme courbée qu’il intitule ‘impression’ ” (bent head of a woman that he titles “impression”), which may or may not have been Carne altrui. See P. H., “Le Salon du Théâtre d’Application,” Le Radical, November 22, 1893, 2. Rosso also titled the work Chair à autrui. Impression. See Medardo Rosso, Paris: Bronzen, Impressionen in Wachs;

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52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Artaria, exh. cat. (Vienna: Kunstsalon Artaria, 1905), 6. “Chair a [sic] plaisir,“ noted in Rosso’s handwriting on a photograph of the Salon d’Automne installation of 1904 (taken or directed by Rosso), was most recently published in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 79. Jean-François Rodriguez cites this title in a list from the exhibition catalogue of Salon d’Automne; however, it does not appear in the catalogue. Jean-François Rodriguez, La réception de l’impressionnisme à Florence en 1910 (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1994), 50. Rosso gave this title for the work at the Venice Biennale of 1914. XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 1914. Catalogo, exh. cat., 3rd ed. (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1914), 86. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci claim, without providing documentary support, that the work was originally titled Dorme (She Sleeps) (Medardo Rosso, 78 and 80n4). On this photograph, see the previous note. See Mary Gibson, “La prostituzione a Milano alla fine dell’Ottocento: Immagine e realtà,” in Donna lombarda (1860–1945), ed. Ada Gigli Marchetti (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992), 563–70; Mary Gibson, Stato e prostituzione in Italia (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1995); Stafano Scioli, “Lo studio della prostituzione nell’Italia positivista: Una ricerca in storia sociale,” in Le maschere della storia: Mescolanze e metamorfosi nel Novecento, ed. Giovanni Greco (Naples: Liguori, 2010), 610–28; Giovanni Greco, Lo scienziato e la prostituta: Due secoli di studi sulla prostituzione (Bari: Dedalo, 1987); and Giorgio Gattei, “Controllo di classi pericolose: La prima regolamentazione prostituzionale in Italia (1860–1888),” in Salute e classi lavoratrici in Italia dall’unità al fascismo, ed. Maria Luisa Betri and Ada Gigli Marchetti (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1982), 763–96. Lucien-V. Meunier, Chair à plaisir (Paris: Rouveyre and G. Blond, 1882), published in Italian as Carne a piacere (Milan: Cesare Cioffi, 1886). See note 51 above. Rosso also gave this title in a list of works he sold to the collector Luigi Bergamo. See note 39 above for information on this list. See Luca della Bianca, “Da Emile Zola a Cletto Arrighi: Nanà a Milano,” Transalpina 16 (2013): 213–21. See Paul Barnaby, “Nana in Milan: Cletto Arrighi and the Italian Reception of Zola,” New Comparison, nos. 35–36 (2003): 163–78. Cletto Arrighi, Nanà a Milano (Milan: G. Ambrosoli, 1880), 32, my translation. Cameroni mentioned Manet in his profile of Zola in La Farfalla, January 18, 1880, 21 (signed “Pessimista”), reprinted in Felice Cameroni, Interventi critici sulla letteratura francese, 248; his 1881 review of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s En Ménage, reprinted in ibid., 117–28; and his 1881 review of Édouard Rod’s Palymyre Veulard, reprinted in ibid., 163–65. According to Mino Borghi, Rosso met Rodin and briefly worked in the studio of Jules Dalou, although no documents have emerged to confirm this trip. Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso (Milan: Il Milione, 1950), 22. Dalou’s biography makes no mention of Rosso, as confirmed to me by John Hunisak. No visa to France has turned up for Rosso either in French or Italian state archives or in the French consulate in Milan, nor has Rosso’s passport been located. See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Carol Armstrong, “To Paint, to

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62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

72.

Point, to Pose: Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe,” in Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, ed. Paul Hayes Tucker (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 25. See Sharon Hecker, “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art,” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 62–67. Luigi Ambrosini, “Parole di Medardo Rosso,” La Stampa, Turin, July 29, 1923, 3. “Rosso dice e ridice a chi vuol sentirlo che fin dal tempo della sua gioventù aveva fatto giuro a se stesso di non por piede in Firenze se non quando fosse stato sicuro di aver messo al mondo un’opera capace di contraddire e confondere lo spirito del nostro rinascimento che odia.” Ardengo Soffici, “L’Impressionismo a Firenze,” La Voce, May 12, 1910, reprinted in Ardengo Soffici, Opere (Florence: Vallecchi, 1959), 1:293. “In Carne altrui è invece la miseria del piacere venduto che si aggrava e poltisce sur [sic] un povero viso di ragazza stanca. Nell’ombra della frangia e dei riccioli che ricopron la fronte, gli occhi si riposan dalle sozzure e dalla vergogna: la bocca triste, ancor umida di baci stranieri, si raggrinza in broncio sul cuscino affondato. Le gote flosce e gonfie di ubriachezza e di sonno si offrono svogliatamente, e ognuno può carezzarle e palparle senza amore. Tu la riconosci amico: è la complice e la vittima delle nostre prime vigliaccherie d’uomini.” Ardengo Soffici, Opere, 1:298–99. For an English translation, see Francesca Bardazzi, ed., Cézanne in Florence, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 2007), 175. Barr imagined Rosso’s prostitute as a “melancholy” figure with “billowing bedclothes” surrounding her face. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 23–25. “Parfois elles trouvent, sans les chercher, des poses d’une audace et d’une noblesse qui enchanteraient le statuaire le plus délicat, si le statuaire moderne avait le courage et l’esprit de ramasser la noblesse partout, même dans la fange.” Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2:1188. Vento in poppa plays on “poppa,” slang for breasts. See Bernardina Sani, ed., Cecioni Scultore, exh. cat. (Florence: Centro Di Edizioni, 1970), nos. 6 and 7. The work was rejected by the jury of the 1894 Esposizioni Riunite di Brera and subsequently mostly destroyed by Ghidoni. On Ghidoni, see Giovanna Ginex, Domenico Ghidoni, 1857–1920: “Bizzarro scultore, pensiero generoso, anima e ribellione” (Brescia: Comune di Ospitaletto e Associazione Artisti Bresciani, 2001). See note 51 above for location of photo. On Turati’s inventions, see “Le Riviste,” in Arte moltiplicata: L’immagine del ’900 italiano nello specchio dei rotocalchi, ed. Barbara Cinelli, Flavio Fergonzi, Maria Grazia Messina, and Antonello Negri (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2013), 327; and [Patrizia Caccia], “Repertorio degli editori milanesi 1900–1945,” in Editori a Milano (1900–1945): Repertorio, ed. Patrizia Caccia (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2013), 34. On “Conte V. Turati” as an early collector of Rosso, see “Medardo Rosso,” Les Archives biographiques contemporaines (Paris, 1907), 69. Vittorio Turati, Stabilimento artistico per le applicazioni della fotografia: Circolare illustrata (Milan, after 1886). See also Turati Vittorio, in Archivio Ditte, Archivio della Camera di Commercio, Industria, Artigianato, e Agricoltura, Milan. For his photographic inventions,

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73.

74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

see Ando Gilardi, Storia sociale della fotografia (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000), 140–41, 202; and Enrico Decleva, “Ulrico Hoepli a Milano: L’attività libraria ed editoriale (1870– 1935),” in Ulrico Hoepli, 1847–1935: Editore e libraio, ed. Enrico Decleva (Milan: Hoepli, 2001), 60. Rosso first gave this title for the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica in Venice in 1887. See entry no. 19 in the first edition of L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica: Catalogo ufficiale, 57. The title La Concierge first appeared in reviews of Rosso’s exhibition at La Bodinière in Paris in 1893. Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 42–50. See also From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, vol. 4 of A History of Private Life, ed. Paul Veyne, Phillippe Ariès, Georges Duby, and Michelle Perrot (general editor), trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1990), 363–66. Vespasiano Bignami, “La Portinara,” in Letteratura dialettale milanese: Itinerario antolo­ gico-critico dalle origini ai nostri giorni, ed. Claudio Beretta (Milan: Hoepli, 2003), 603–5; Paolo Valera, Alla conquista del pane (Milan: Giuseppe Cozzi Editore, 1882); Cletto Arrighi, La scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio (Milan: Sanvito, 1862); and Cletto Arrighi, Nanà a Milano. Carlo Dossi, Note Azzurre. Scelte e ordinate dalla vedova (Milan: Treves, 1912), 46, 156, 253, 305, 311. Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories, 43. Rosso interview in Luigi Ambrosini, Teocrito, Ariosto, minori e minimi (Milan: Corbaccio, 1926), 365–66. For an English translation, see Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 67n36. Loys Delteil, “Locataires et propriétaires,” in Honoré Daumier, vol. 24, part 5, of Le peintre-graveur illustré (XIXe et XXe siècles) (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1926), plates 1594–628. James Rousseau, Physiologie de la portière (Paris: Aubert, 1841). See Paolo Tortonese, ed., Cameroni e Zola: Lettere (Paris: Champion, 1987), 142–43. Cameroni mentions receiving the drafts of Pot-Bouille from Zola and publishing reviews of the work in Il Sole. Rosso gave the original title in 1887 as In Tranvai. M., “Medardo Rosso,” 158. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 94) cite a photograph of the work, which appears to belong to the same series of printed photographs mentioned in note 51 above as labeled by Rosso In tramway-Impressione. However, the authors do not give the whereabouts of the photo. It appears to come from a photograph published by Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, photograph 32. The photograph bears a slightly different title: In tramway—Impressioni. However, it is set with the same font and format as those of note 51 and bears Rosso’s studio address: via Giuseppe Giusti 17. Therefore, it can be dated with certainty to the same period, that is, on or around 1887. Camille de SainteCroix calls the work Impression d’intérieur d’omnibus (Impression of the Interior of an Omnibus) (“Medardo Rosso,” 384). Elsewhere in the article he calls it Intérieur d’omnibus (Interior of an Omnibus) (“Medardo Rosso,” 385 and 391). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci cite a letter from Rosso to Ardengo Soffici, dated June 15, 1909, in which Rosso speaks of “impr. Omnibus” (Medardo Rosso, 94).

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83. “un gruppo dal vero, che da tempo sta lavorando.” Mario Mariani, “Schizzi d’artisti: Medardo Rosso,” La Commedia umana, November 1, 1885, 11. Mariani’s observation suggests that the work was already in process by 1885. This corroborates Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci’s dating of the work to 1884–85 (Medardo Rosso, 92). But elsewhere in the Catalogo ragionato Mola and Vittucci date it earlier, to 1883–84 (Medardo Rosso, 94n5). They base this on dates Rosso added to his published photographs of the works. 84. “Se avrà fatto a tempo, di Rosso Medardo si vedrà una serie di tipi popolari di Porta Garibaldi messi di fronte su una riga sopra una banchetta di tramvia. Il Rosso ha portato in quest’opera il suo modo di intender l’arte a tanta indipendeza, anche dalla realità, nella esculsione di ciò che gli pare doversi trascurare nel lavoro, che la sua banchetta di tram non potrà a meno di suscitargli fiere opposizioni.” Luigi Chirtani, “L’Esposizione di Venezia,” L’Illustrazione italiana, April 3, 1887, 251. 85. “Avea mandato anche un altro gruppo: In tranvai. Ma gli si ruppe, ed egli ne provò a ragione profondo rammarico.” M., “Medardo Rosso,” 158. 86. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci describe the photograph as the “modello ancora in creta” (Medardo Rosso, 92). However, it is not possible to determine from the photograph whether this model was in clay or plaster. Rosso often published the photographs of several single figures in close-up. For an extensive series of these photographs, see Gloria Moure, ed., Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1997), 23–33. The only surviving photo of the ensemble is now preserved in the Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. 87. See John P. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 15–17. 88. The lithograph itself was derived from Jean-Jacques Grandville’s ink drawing Une course d’une omnibus (An Omnibus Ride, 1828). Baltimore businessman and art collector William Walters commissioned a version of it in 1866–68; another version was exhibited in the 1878 retrospective. Exposition des peintures et dessins de H. Daumier, Galeries Durand-Ruel, exh. cat. (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1878), 3125. See also Édouard Gourdon, Physiologie de l’omnibus (1842), cited in Roger-Henri Guerrand, Mœurs citadines: Histoire de la culture urbaine XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1992), 124. Impressionist painters such as Mary Cassatt would take up the subject of the omnibus ride in 1891. 89. There is no proof that Rosso saw this work in progress. But if he had gone to Paris in 1884 (in which case he is believed to have met Rodin through work in Dalou’s studio), then he would have been able to see the maquette in Rodin’s studio. The maquettes were well known to sculptors as well as to members of the Parisian intelligentsia, since Rodin invited visitors to his studio. Rosso also might have received information through the great publicity that Rodin’s sculpture aroused; many who saw and wrote about the work were close to Cameroni. Rosso may have read descriptions from reviews of the sculpture at various stages in French publications in 1885. Rodin also had professional photographs made of the maquettes that could have found their way to Italy. 90. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 94, 96. 91. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L8, September 20, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 99–100. 92. As claimed by Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” 391.

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93. Ibid. 94. Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904), published in English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics (London: W. Heinemann, 1908). 95. Milly Heyd, Mutual Reflections: Jews and Blacks in American Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 139.

4 . I N T E R N AT I O N A L I S M A N D E X P E R I M E N TAT I O N

1. For the case of Italian sculpture, see Matteo Gardonio, “Scultori italiani alle Esposizioni Universali di Parigi (1855–1889): Aspettative, successi e delusioni” (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2008), 98; and, more generally, Gianna Piantoni and Anne Pingeot, eds., Italie, 1880–1910: Arte alla prova della modernità, exh. cat. (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2000), 52, published in French as Italies, 1880–1910: L’art italien à l’épreuve de la modernité, exh. cat. (Paris: Édition de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001). 2. F.-G. Dumas, Catalogue illustré du Salon, exh. cat. (Paris: Librairie d’art L. Baschet, 1885), lxix, entry no. 4174. There were nearly five thousand artworks exhibited in this show. 3. Rosso’s name does not appear in the 1886 Salon catalogue, but his participation is confirmed in Edmond Thiaudière, “Au salon: La sculpture—Les bustes, II, Medardo Rosso,” L’Opinion, June 2, 1886, 2, as well as numerous other reviews. See [no first name] Langely, “La sculpture au Salon de 1886,” Journal des Artistes, May 9, 1886: “un amusant Gavroche de M. Rosso” (an amusing Gavroche by M. Rosso). Another article, listed by Rosso as “Langely” in his scrapbook, is undated and handwritten with the words “Salon 86.” It reads: “Sous l’escalier . . . une très originale esquisse de M. Rosso, une mère et son enfant endormis” (Under the staircase . . . a very original sketch by M. Rosso, a mother and her child asleep). This is from Langely, “La sculpture au Salon de 1886,” Journal des Artistes, June 20, 1886. See also August Daillgny, “Le Salon de 1886,” Journal des Arts, April 30, 1886: “des têtes de bronze bien accentuées par M. Rosso” (well-accentuated heads in bronze by M. Rosso). See also “L’Amore materno,” L’Illustrazione italiana, November 28, 1886, 406, 418. 4. “Une Mère et son Enfant endormis—La vie déborde et la chair palpite dans ce coulage en bronze harmonieux de ligne et d’arrangement.” Joseph Noulens, Artistes Français et Étrangers au Salon de 1886: Annuaire du Salon, exh. cat. (Paris: E. Dentu, 1887), 417. 5. “Gavroche et Mère et son enfant endormis, de M. Rosso, sont deux coulages en bronze que je recommende aux amateurs qui aiment la sculpture vivante et les têtes qui respirant.” “Le Salon,” Le Petit Quotidien, June 30, 1886. 6. Alphonse Germain, “Le Salon de 1886: Au Salon de Sculpture,” Le Coup de Feu, September 1886, 23. 7. “voici un sculpteur italien qui sort joliment des italienneries habituelles. Ce n’est pas un dentellier en marbre, faisant un travail exquis, mais un peu trop mièvre et précieux”; “il fond magistralement la sculpture impressionniste.” Edmond Thiaudière, “Au Salon: La Sculpture—Les bustes, II, Medardo Rosso,” L’Opinion, June 2, 1886, 22. 8. Francesca Canale Cama, La pace dei liberi e dei forti: La rete di pace di Ernesto Teodoro Moneta (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2012), 28.

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9. Carteggio Medardo Rosso–Felice Cameroni (1889 giugno–1892), Biblioteca d’arte— Biblioteca archeologica—Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive—CASVA, Milan (referred to hereafter as “Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence”). See L4, August 25, 1889; L15, December 13, 1889; L39 (undated); L46 (undated). L39 and L46 are published in Luciano Caramel, ed., Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat. (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 98 and 93, respectively. 10. “una incipiente francofobia.” Francesca Canale Cama, La pace dei liberi e dei forti, 28. 11. Moneta’s internationalist outlook attracted cultural figures like Diego Martelli, who in 1889 became close to Moneta’s International Peace Committee. See Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, “Peace and Law in the Italian Tradition, Nobel Lecture, August 25, 1909,” in August Schou, “The Peace Prize,” in Nobel, the Man and His Prizes, ed. Nobel Foundation (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1962), 539. 12. Registro della Massoneria, 1889, Archives of Giuseppe Calabi, Milan, unpublished. The registry indicates that Rosso was among the few rejected that year, and it is probable, given the known criteria for admission, that an existing member did not support his application. On freemasonry in Italy, see Aldo A. Mola, Storia della massoneria italiana dalle origini ai nostri giorni (Milan: Bompiani, 1976); and Vittorio Gnocchini, L’Italia dei liberi muratori (Rome: Erasmo Editore, 2005). 13. See Robert Py, “Le Salon du groupe des artistes indépendants,” Revue Moderne, June 1, 1885, 354: “Bien nature aussi, les deux têtes en bronze de M. Medardo Rosso, qui se font pendant l’une à l’autre: Philémon et Baucis. Je place cependant Baucis au dessus de Philémon qui au point [de] vue de la couleur locale laisse bien un peu à désirer avec sa petit bonnet de paysan Normand” (Very natural are also the two bronze heads by Mr. Medardo Rosso, which are pendants: Philemon and Baucis. I place Baucus above Philemon who, from the viewpoint of local color, leaves something to be desired with her small Norman farmer’s bonnet). This review is marked incorrectly in Rosso’s scrapbook as being by Leon Riotor. Consequently, the name of this author has been mistakenly repeated throughout the Rosso literature. See also F. Hoffmann, “Le Salon des Indépendants,” La Bataille, June 4, 1885, 2: “Je donnerai une mention spéciale aux deux bustes en bronze de Philémon et Baucis, [missing words] fouillés, d’une touche grasse, signés Rosso, et au tableau de M. Lemanceau, le Moulin de la Galette, qui a de bien sérieuses qualitées” (I would give special mention to the two bronze busts Philemon and Baucis . . . excavated with a rough touch, signed Rosso, and the painting by M. Lemanceau, Moulin de la Galette, that have very serious qualities). Caramel misdates this review as August 22, 1886. Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 48. 14. This review is preserved in Rosso’s scrapbook without the name of the journal, signed Un Passant, “Les on—dit,” August 22, 1886, 2: “A l’exposition d’à côté, groupe des artistes indépendants. M. Rosso expose deux bronzes vigoureux et bien vivants: une tête de vieille femme et le buste d’un troupier” (At the exhibition next door, the group of independent artists. Mr. Rosso exhibits two vigorous and very lively bronzes: a head of an old woman and the bust of a trouper). Rosso underlined the word “vivants” in his scrapbook. The review was repeated in Le Reveil National on the same date. The information given in the chronology by Luciano Caramel for Rosso’s exhibition of these works is incorrect (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 48). It is partially corrected by Lista but without

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15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

proper references for the changes. Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 13–14. See also Louis-Pilate de Brinn Gaubast, “L’exposition des artistes indépendants,” Le Decadent, September 18, 1886 (the article is undated but on the top Rosso wrote, “samdi, 18 Sept.bre 86” [corrected from “87”]): “Mais toutes nos préférences sont pour les bustes en bronze de MM. Filleul et Rosso” (But all our preferences go for the bronze busts by Mr. Filleul and Mr. Rosso). “Bronzes d’art et d’ameublement,” Catalogue des objets de curiosité, Hotel Drouot, February 17, 1886, 11: “no. 83–Bronze par M. Medardo Rosso: tête de bersagliere (A figuré au Salon de 1885),” price noted in margin as 52; “no. 84–Têtes de vieillard e de vieille femme: Philémon et Baucis, bronzes par Medardo Rosso,” price noted as 59; “no. 85–Jeune femme et son enfant, bronze par Medardo Rosso,” price noted as 39. The buyer’s name in the margin, noted as “Pesce,” probably referred to an acquaintance named Gaston (Gaetano) Pesce, who is described as “addetto ingegnere all’Ambasciata d’Italia” (engineer of the Italian Embassy [in Paris]” in Gazzetta ufficiale del regno d’Italia, September 7, 1910, 4789. Lista believes that Rosso met Pesce during his military service in Pavia but produces no documentation to support this claim or his assertion that Pesce also served in the same year. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928 (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 44. Lista finds a mention of Pesce in G. Barbesi, L’indicatore della colonia italiana di Parigi (Paris: Tipografia del Risveglio italiano, 1905). Rosso had given Pesce’s address in the Salon catalogue—“chez M. Pesce, 23 rue Tronchet”—perhaps in order to be able to submit his works from a local address. No evidence suggests that Pesce submitted the works to the French Salons or sold them on Rosso’s behalf without Rosso’s knowledge, as is claimed by Alessandro Oldani, “Medardo Rosso, 1858–1928,” in Medardo Rosso La luce e la materia, exh. cat., ed. Paola Zatti (Milan: 24 Ore Cultura, 2015), 115. “L’Amore materno,” L’Illustrazione italiana, November 28, 1886, 406, 418. “O si, paragonate queste teste alle tante che vanno per le sale davanti al pubblico, leccate, cincinschiate, lavorate, e che non dicon nulla e vedrete che vuol dire aver coscienza e intuità d’artista.” Mario Mariani, “Schizzi d’artisti: Medardo Rosso,” La Commedia umana, November 1, 1885, 9. “e rendere così le impressioni come si sentono e come si ricevono.” Ibid., 9–10. See L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica: Catalogo ufficiale, 2nd ed., exh. cat. (Venice: Emporio, 1887), entry nos. 16–19 (Amor materno, Fine, Cantante a spasso, Portinaia); no. 45 (Fine); and no. 68 (Carne altrui). It is not clear whether Fine was exhibited in two versions or whether this was an error in the catalogue. He sold a cast of Cantante a spasso to an unnamed buyer (L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica Illustrata, no. 6, May 7, 1887, 47); Fine to Vittorio Todesco II; two more casts of Cantante a spasso to Cav. Urbani De Ghelthoff and Signor Giuseppe Galvano (L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica Illustrata, no. 8, May 22, 1887, 58); and a Portinaia to an unknown buyer (L’Esposizione Nazionale Artistica Illustrata, no. 27, October 16, 1887, 215). Judging from lists of sales, very few sculptures were sold at this exhibition. On the show, see Antonella E. A. Bestaggini, “The Italian Exhibition of 1888 at Earl’s Court” (master’s thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1990). The quote is from Charles Lowe, Four National Exhibitions in London and Their Organiser (J. R. Whitley) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), 22.

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21. “Catalogue of the Fine Art Section: Class XV: SCULPTURE,” in Regulations, Forms, Catalogue, part 4 of Italian Exhibition, London, 1888: Report (Translation), exh. cat. (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1889), 497. Rosso’s works are listed as no. 1417 (Golden Wedding), no. 1418 (A Scamp) [bronze], no. 1419 (“Oh That It Were Whiskey!”), and no. 1422 (A Street Boy). Charles Balfour bought no. 1418. 22. Mola and Vittucci claim that Rosso exhibited Aetas aurea for the first time at the Esposizione Nazionale Artistica in Venice in 1887. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 98. However, a work by this title does not appear in the exhibition catalogue. It is not clear whether the work listed as Amor materno in the catalogue is the earlier sculpture that bears this title or the later Aetas aurea. In Rosso’s scrapbook he notes an article that he labels as being by Luigi Chirtani. The article is titled “Esposizione di Londra” and was supposedly published in L’illustrazione italiana. It reads: “Il meno accademico di tutti gli scultori viventi è senza dubbio ROSSO MEDARDO di Milano. Egli è uno scultore che a tutti non piacerà, ma che dimostra un genio originale e profondi istinti artistici” (The least academic of all the living sculptors is without a doubt ROSSO MEDARDO of Milan. He is a sculptor who will not be liked by everyone, but who demonstrates an original genius and profound artistic instincts). However, this review is not found in Chirtani’s article in L’Illustrazione italiana nor in other articles about the show in the same newspaper. It might have come from another review that I have not been able to locate. 23. Certificato anagrafico storico di Rosso Domenico, Servizi al Cittadino, Ufficio anagrafe, Milan; and Certificato anagrafico storico di Rosso Medardo, Settore Servizi al Cittadino, Ufficio anagrafe, Milan. 24. Atto di Matrimonio di Medardo Rosso e Luigia Bono, Settore Servizi Civili, Ufficio anagrafe, Milano. The witness is listed as Isidoro Farina, a Neapolitan landscape painter who had moved to Milan in 1885. The couple married in a religious ceremony at the S. S. Trinità Church on Via Giuseppe Giusti 25, Milan. However, on his son’s baptismal record, registered in Sezione Battesimi, V. 12, n. 341, 109, Archivio Storico della Parrocchia di Santa Maria Incoronata, Milan, the date of the wedding is given as April 15, 1885. Luciano Caramel erroneously gives the date of marriage as April 11, 1885 (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 48). 25. Born November 7, 1885, in Milan. Certificato di Nascita di Rosso Francesco Evviva Ribelle, Registro B, Parte 1, Serie Anno 1885, Numero 2532, Ufficio anagrafe, Milan. For Francesco’s baptism on November 22, 1885, at the Church of Santa Maria Incoronata on Corso Garibaldi 116, Milan, see Sezione Battesimi, V. 12, n. 341, 109, Archivio Storico della Parrocchia di Santa Maria Incoronata, Milan. 26. Rosso first mentioned a work by this title in a letter to Cameroni from Paris. Rosso– Cameroni Correspondence, L8, September 20, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 99–100. In later years, Rosso also called Aetas aurea by the French name Age d’or (Golden Age). Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March 1896): 386. He also called it Aetas aurea. Fille et enfant. impression. cire (Golden Age, Woman and Child, Impression). Medardo Rosso, Paris: Bronzen, impressionen in Wachs; Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Artaria, exh. cat. (Vienna: Kunstsalon Artaria, 1905), 6. It is likely that Rosso exhibited Aetas aurea under the title of another work,

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27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

Amor materno (1882) (called here L’amore materno), at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. A drawing of Aetas aurea (with the other title) can be found in Folchetto [Jacopo Caponi], “Sculture di Medardo Rosso,” in Parigi e L’Esposizione Universale del 1889, ed. Folchetto [Jacopo Caponi] et al. (Milan: Treves, 1890), 224. But on pages 22–23 of the same journal, an article by Folchetto [Jacopo Caponi] entitled “L’Arte Italiana all’Esposizione di Parigi,” under the subheading “Amor materno,” gives a discussion of Amor Materno (1882) and reproduces the image on page 20. Folchetto claims that this was the sculpture exhibited at the Exposition Universelle. Perhaps this was an error. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 32. Michael Brenson, “A Century of Sculpture: The Nasher Collection,” https://archive.org /stream/sculptu00nash/sculptu00nash_djvu.txt. “mi impressiona . . . cerco di scuotere per l’impressione le umane passioni.” M., “Medardo Rosso,” L’Esposizione Artistica Nazionale Illustrata—Venezia, August 14, 1887, 158. Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13, Shiff’s emphasis. Rosso bought van Gogh’s painting La diligence de Tarascon (Tarascon Stage Coach, 1888) from Julien (Père) Tanguy by 1895. Ambroise Vollard exhibited it in a posthumous show of van Gogh’s work that year before it was sold to Rosso. Rosso gave the painting to his assistant Milo Beretta (1870–1935), who took it to Montevideo from Paris in 1895. Beretta’s heirs sold it to the American collector Henry Pearlman in June 1950. It is now at the Princeton University Art Museum. In 1904 Rosso installed his sculptures in the Salle Cézanne at the latter’s retrospective at the Salon d’Automne, as if to court a comparison between his art and Cézanne’s (see chapter 8, pp. 202, fig. 76). A cast of the bust is kept in the Museo Medardo Rosso. See Fascicolo Carlo Carabelli, Cimitero Monumentale, Milan: “1886 mese 1 giorno 5, Galleria B. C. Levante, Riparto N. XV, Cella N. 6, esumato dal Cimitero Maggiore. 1985 andato in ossario comune perché non ha rinnovato la concessione dell’ossario” (1886 month 1 day 5, Galleria B. C. Levante, Section N. XV, Cell N. 6, exhumed from the Cimitero Maggiore. 1985 went into the common ossuary because the concession of the ossuary was not renewed). Rosso also made a funerary monument to Elisa Rognoni Faini at Circondante di Levante Giardino 174. See Luciano Caramel, “I ‘ritorni’ di Medardo Rosso e due bronzi giovanili,” Commentari, n.s. 13, (1962): 299–305. Caramel believes that the unsigned preparatory drawing for the Faini Tomb in the file in the Archivio Mortuario is by Rosso, but the artist presented other proposals as photographs. Luigi Chirtani, “Il dí dei morti,” L’Illustrazione italiana, October 31, 1886, 322. Mino Borghi claimed that Carabelli was a “negoziante di gesso fornitore del Rosso” (plaster salesman who was a supplier for Rosso) nicknamed “El gessat.” Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso (Milan: Il Milione, 1950), 65. However, he was actually registered in civic documents as a founder. See entry “Monumento funebre a Carlo Carabelli, 1886,” by Carlo Migliavacca, in Il segno della Scapigliatura: Rinnovamento tra il Canton Ticino e la Lombardia Grande nel secondo Ottocento, exh. cat., ed. Mariangela Agliati Ruggia and Sergio Rebora (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2006), 238–39. I have found that

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35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Carabelli was subjected to a beating after a political demonstration against Austrian authorities in Milan’s Piazza Castello on August 23, 1849. See Carlo Tivaroni, L’Italia degli Italiani (Turin: Roux Frassati, 1895–1897), 1:9. This could provide another window onto Rosso’s political leanings and his associations with founders who had anarchic tendencies. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L18, January 26, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 102–3. Vincenzo Brusco Onnis’s tomb is located at the Mura di Cinta Ponente Giardino 4. For the selection process, see “I funerali di Brusco Onnis,” La Lombardia, February 24, 1888; “La salma di Brusco Onnis,” La Lombardia, February 25, 1888; and “Per Brusco Onnis,” La Lombardia, August 8, 1888. This article mentions several “projects” from among which Rosso’s was chosen. See also “Per Brusco Onnis,” Il Secolo, August 8–9, 1888. Rosso’s agreement with local officials after he was awarded the project is signed and dated with Rosso’s address during his marriage: “Lo scultore Medardo Rosso, Via Andrea Appiani, 11, 9 ott. 1888.” The official request by the president of the committee for the monument is dated to two months later, December 9, 1888. Fasc. Brusco-Onnis, Vincenzo, Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. See Maurice Aghulon, Marianne au combat: L’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). No documentation has emerged for Rosso’s visits to Paris before his move there in 1889. In Mino Borghi’s posthumous biography of Rosso, he contended that Rosso traveled to Paris in 1884, where he supposedly worked in the studio of the French sculptor Jules Dalou and met Rodin (Medardo Rosso, 22). Lista disagrees, claiming that Rosso went to Paris in mid-1886, but provides no support for his claim. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), 69. Luigi Viardot, Le meraviglie della scultura, trans. Luigi Chirtani (Milan: Treves, 1874). “artista modesto quante valente e originale.” “Le commemorazioni e le conferenze di Domenica,” Il Sole, March 25–26, 1889. “La commemorazione delle Cinque Giornate di Milano ed il Ricordo a Brusco Onnis,” L’Italia, March 25–26, 1889. B., “Milano. 25 Marzo. Commemorazione patriottica,” La Lombardia, March 25, 1889. Aurelio Saffi to Medardo Rosso at Via Andrea Appiani 11, June 29, 1889, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. “La commemorazione di ieri,” Il Secolo, March 25–26, 1889. “eccessiva sprezzatura”; “di essere abbozzati soltanto.” Ibid. It is located at Circondante di Levante Giardino 325. Only Barr dedicated a paragraph to the funerary works, and she concluded that the Filippi tomb’s “complicated, somewhat illegible symbolism consisting of wispy inspirational figures and the sheet of a song with words and notes presents echoes of Art Nouveau that, surprisingly enough, are unique in Rosso’s oeuvre.” This, however, seems unlikely—the work precedes by almost a decade the widespread use of “Stile Liberty” motifs on tombs in Italian cemeteries and it can hardly be read as a mere decorative piece. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 28. See also Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 132.

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49. See Francesco Giarelli, Vent’anni di giornalismo, 1868–1888 (Codogno: A. G. Cairo, 1896), quoted in Gaetano Mariani, Storia della Scapigliatura (Caltanisetta and Rome: Sciascia, 1967), 28; and Francesco Cazzamini Mussi, Il giornalismo a Milano dal Quarantotto al Novecento (Como: E. Cavalleri, 1935), 280. For Filippi’s articles up to 1880, see Giuseppe Farinelli, La pubblicistica nel periodo della Scapigliatura: Regesto per soggetti dei giornali e delle riviste esistenti a Milano e relativi al primo ventennio dello Stato unitario, 1860–1880 (Milan: IPL, 1984). 50. See Carlo Schmidl, ed., Dizionario universale dei musicisti (Milan: Sonzogno 1926), 1:5, 542; Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (Turin: UTET, 1986), s.v. “Filippi, Filippo.” See also Martini Ferdinando and Guido Biagi, eds., Il Primo Passo: Note autobiografiche di; A d’Ancona, ecc. (Florence: G. Sansoni, 1922), 91–99. In 1867 Filippi had founded, together with Alessandro Fano, the widely read periodical Mondo Artistico. Fano was a member of the committee that chose Rosso for the monument commission. 51. At an unspecified date, Rosso likely expressed support for Boito’s opera by renaming his La Ruffiana and Il Vecchio and etching names of characters from the opera onto the bases of two plaster casts. One is labeled “El Scior Faust” (Mr. Faust) and is housed at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, while the other is a plaster labeled “Margherita” (Margaret) and is housed at the Museo Medardo Rosso in Barzio. Although Rosso never exhibited the works under these titles, they were probably intended to be companion pieces. 52. Filippo Filippi, La musica a Milano (n.p., 1881), 276. 53. Filippo Filippi, Le Belle Arti a Torino: Lettere sulla IV esposizione nazionale (Milan: G. Ottino, 1880). 54. The terms of the commission and any other possible competitors remain unknown, since the relevant part of the Ricordi family archive was destroyed by the Allied bombing of Milan in 1943. The newspapers and the original photograph in the files of the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan prove that Rosso first presented the work as a clay or plaster model rather than a cast bronze. 55. Paola Mola Kirchmayr asserted this in “Gli anni della formazione di Medardo Rosso alla luce di un epistolario inedito,” in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 36. On Cameroni’s friendship and professional relationship with Filippi, see Felice Cameroni, Interventi critici sulla letteratura italiana, ed. Glauco Viazzi (Naples: Guida, 1974), 60, 64, 93, 188, 215, 223, 277; and Felice Cameroni, Interventi critici sulla letteratura francese, ed. Glauco Viazzi (Naples: Guida, 1974), 12, 33, 186–87, 190–92. 56. Ettore Cozzani, Medardo Rosso (Milan: L’eroica, 1931), 10; Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso, 25. 57. For announcements about the formation of the committee to undertake the subscription for the monument, see “Ricordo a Filippo Filippi,” Corriere della Sera, July 10–11, 1887; and “Alla memoria di Filippo Filippi,” La Perseveranza, July 15, 1887. The collection was taken up until December 1887 and reported daily in La Perseveranza and every two weeks in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano. See “Per Filippo Filippi,” La Lombardia, June 22, 1888, n. 171, for the announcement of a meeting of local newspaper directors in the office of the music publisher Giulio Ricordi to decide on the winning project. 58. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci name but do not identify Folco (Medardo Rosso, 67).

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59. See Folchetto [Jacopo Caponi] et al., Parigi e l’Esposizione Universale del 1889, 22–23, 114, 223–24. 60. No preparatory drawing is found in the file in the archives of the Comune di Milano. Rosso instead submitted a photograph of the model, shot by Fratelli Sala of Milan. See Fasc. Filippo Filippi, Archivio del Cimitero Monumentale. Settore Servizi Funebri e Cimiteriali, Milan. 61. Not, as Luciano Caramel states, “nel corso dell’anno 1889” (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 132). In her biography of Rosso, Etha Fles misdates the work to 1882. Etha Fles, Medardo Rosso: Der Mensch und der Künstler (Freiburg: Walter Heinrich, 1922), 20. Rosso himself had trouble recalling the exact date of his work’s inauguration. See letter from Rosso to Hermann Eissler, September 1903, Fasc. Medardo Rosso, CA 14, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice, unpublished: “Vous savez que quand j’ai fait cela l’on inaugurez à Milan le monument de Filippo Filippi: l’on cherché l’auteur et l’auteur etait [sic] bien loin à Paris dans un lit malade comme vous malheureusement aujourdui mon cher ami” (You know that when I made that they inaugurated in Milan the monument to Filippo Filippi: they looked for the author and the author was far away in Paris in a bed sick like you unfortunately are my dear friend). Rosso probably confused the events: he was hospitalized in October, while the sculpture had been inaugurated in late June, although he might have been referring to the second time the work was reviewed, on the Day of the Dead. 62. “un busto in bronzo, con putti allegorici, e lettere dorate, pure in bronzo, il tutto a seconda del modello esaminato ed accettato dalla Commissione.” “In memoria di F. Filippi,” La Perseveranza, August 31, 1888; “In memoria di Filippo Filippi,” Il Secolo, August 31–September 1, 1888. See also “In memoria di F. Filippi,” Il Sole, August 31– September 1, 1888. This journalist of Il Sole (perhaps Cameroni) added that the work was “riconosciuto dalla Commissione di squisito buon gusto artistico” (recognized by the Commission as being of exquisitely good artistic taste). 63. See for instance “L’inaugurazione di un ricordo a Filippi,” Il Caffè Giornale Gazzetta Nazionale, June 25–26, 1889. 64. “Per Filippo Filippi,” Il Secolo, June 26–27, 1889. 65. Ibid. 66. “L’inaugurazione del cippo funereo di Filippi nel Cimitero monumentale,” Il Sole, June 26, 1889; and “L’inaugurazione del cippo funerario a F. Filippi al Cimitero Monumentale,” L’Italia, June 26–27, 1889. 67. “Il ricordo funebre a Filippo Filippi,” La Lombardia, June 26, 1889. 68. “Lo scoprimento del ricordo a Filippo Filippi,” La Perseveranza, June 26, 1889. 69. “Abbiamo udito sul lavoro del Rosso i più disparati pareri. Per debito di cronisti registriamo che sono gli ammiratori ed i detrattori.” “In memoria di Filippi,” Corriere della Sera, June 26–27, 1889. 70. “E qui i pareri, vuoi sulla rassomiglianza, vuoi sul lavoro complessivo furono piuttosto controversi.” “L’inaugurazione del cippo funerario a F. Filippi al Cimitero Monumentale,” L’Italia, June 26–27, 1889. 71. “Forse il Rosso non è riuscito ad accontentare i più, ma, ad ogni modo, ha dimostrato che non è un artista comune. Il che non è poco.” “L’inaugurazione del cippo funereo di Filippi nel Cimitero monumentale,” Il Sole, June 26, 1889.

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72. Article signed by “g.m.” [probably Gustavo Macchi], “Il Ricordo Funebre a Filippo Filippi,” La Lombardia, June 26, 1889. 73. “bizzarra confusione”; “strana agglomerazione di fiori, di drappi, di emblemi, di carte di musica.” “L’inaugurazione di un ricordo a Filippi,” Il Caffè Giornale Gazzetta Nazionale, June 26–27, 1889. 74. “uno dei più arrischiati scultori impressionisti.” “L’inaugurazione del cippo funereo di Filippi.” Il Sole, June 26, 1889. 75. “l’artista ha posto fortemente la sua impronta artistica, ma, traviato dalla ricerca di un effetto di assieme—di macchia come si dice nel gergo d’arte—e di colore, ha dato troppo poca cura—anzi nessuna—alla tecnica, al dettaglio, e non ci ha presentato che l’abbozzo di un bel lavoro.” “Nel Cimitero Monumentale: I nuovi monumenti,” Il Pungolo, November 2–3, 1889. 76. “Dello scultore Medardo Rosso assolutamente inferiore, e di molto, a quanto egli ha fatto finora, è il busto di Filippo Filippi. Quella testa dimezzata è ben lontana dal ritrarre il capo del notissimo appendicista milanese, capo che aveva appunto per carattere d’esser più grosso del solito. La cosidetta “sprezzatura” (la quale non è altro poi che una parola vuota di senso e, quindi un accademismo al rovescio) vi è spinta fino alla scombiccheratura. Quello non è il volto di Filippo Filippi; non solo; non è un volto.—La decorazione del basamento è anche’essa deplorevole, senza gusto e senza logica. Dei fiori grandi al vero e dei puttini grandi come topi! . . . Lascio poi nella penna un certo mandolino, buttato là ai piedi del monumento; e che fa pensare involontariamente a funzioni organiche le quali, compiute su una tomba, sono sacrilegi.” Ferdinando Fontana, “I nuovi monumenti al Cimitero Monumentale,” L’Italia, November 2–3, 1889. Rosso read this article from Paris. See Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L34, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 101. 77. Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, 17. 78. In an undated letter from Rosso to the critic and writer Giuseppe Prezzolini, which was cited by Margaret Scolari Barr but has since disappeared from Prezzolini’s papers, Rosso prescribed that the photograph of the Filippi monument be enlarged three times and should include the base (Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 69n58). Barr asserts that Rosso gave these instructions on the occasion of the 1910 Impressionist exhibition in Florence, but the catalogue contained no images. Rosso’s instructions may have been for one of Ardengo Soffici’s monographs on the sculptor that had been ordered by Occhini e Bargagli, the directors of the artistic periodical Vita d’Arte, mentioned in a letter from Soffici to Prezzolini dated June 19, 1909. Soffici also mentioned the Filippi monument to Prezzolini on May 5, 1909, in relation to the poetess Vittoria Aganoor Pompily. See Ardengo Soffici, Lettere a Prezzolini, 1908–1920, ed. Annamaria Manetti Piccinini (Florence: Vallecchi, 1988), 14 and 11, respectively. I thank Jean-François Rodriguez for confirming the above information. Yet another possible mention of the work by Rosso is in Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L8, September 20, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 99–100, in which the sculptor told his friend that he showed Edmond de Goncourt a photo of his favorite works, including “un morto.” However, the reference to Filippi is discounted by Caramel because of the word “un morto,” suggesting that Cameroni did not know the work.

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79. G. Dargenty, “Le Salon National,” L’Art: Revue hebdomadaire illustrée 9, no. 4 (1883): 32–39. Had Rosso gone to Paris in 1884, he might have been among those who saw the work in progress. From 1884, Rodin began informally admitting to his atelier numerous French and foreign artists and writers to see the unfinished Porte de l’Enfer; in 1885 and 1886, he actively began to encourage such visitors. The French poet, playwright, and essayist Émile Bergerat, for example, saw the work with the Belgian artist Félicien Rops and several other artists. See Émile Bergerat, Souvenirs d’un enfant de Paris, vols. 1–2 (Paris: Charpentier, 1912), quoted in Frederic V. Grunfeld, Rodin: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 195. Cameroni likely read the two reviews of the Gates of Hell in 1885 and 1886 during his careful daily readings of the French press. He knew the name of the French journalist, novelist, and art critic Octave Mirbeau in these years and could have read the latter’s “Auguste Rodin” article on The Gates of Hell that appeared in France on February 18, 1885. Octave Mirbeau, “Auguste Rodin,” France, February 18, 1885, quoted in Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 219. Although no fan of the French novelist and journalist Félicien Champsaur, Cameroni most likely also read Champsaur’s article “Celui qui revient de l’Enfer: Auguste Rodin” (He Who Returns from Hell: Auguste Rodin), which appeared in the supplement to Le Figaro on January 16, 1886. Cameroni was known to meticulously scour all Le Figaro supplements in particular. Cameroni’s friendship and correspondence with the writer and critic Edmond de Goncourt, who had also seen The Gates of Hell in 1886, would have been another possible route. By 1887 and 1888, awareness of the work increased in progressive circles as The Gates of Hell was being promised for public view in newspapers such as Reveil Matin and Revue de Paris. Curiosity was fanned by the exhibition of some of the figures from the Gates in the Brussels Salon of 1887 and at the Georges Petit Gallery, both in 1886 and 1887. See Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius, 214–25. On the history of The Gates of Hell, see also Albert E. Elsen, The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). Photographs of the work had also been circulating beyond Paris in this period and the Gates of Hell continued to receive attention in intellectual and artistic circles throughout the decade. 80. In the monument to Elisa Rognoni Faini, he used standard epitaph letters but could not resist setting them on the diagonal. 81. See Adolfo Padovan, Epigrafia italiana moderna (Milan: Hoepli Editore, 1913), xv. 82. These compositions have never been gathered and republished. 83. Although there is no question mark at the end of the word, there is an empty space left between it and the final quotation mark, suggesting that it was removed or stolen from the tomb at some point. And while the base of the work cannot be seen in the photograph of the model, the word “Perché?” was mentioned by one critic at the inauguration and was therefore part of the original tomb. Without the question mark, the word’s meaning hovers between “why” and “because.” For such an interpretation see Rossana Bossaglia, “Percorso della scultura tra Ottocento e Novecento,” in Il Monumentale di Milano: Il primo cimitero della libertà, 1866–1992, ed. Michele Petrantoni (Milan: Electa, 1992), 174. The word is taken from Ma Perché? Filippo Filippi, Stornello, Op. 33 (Milan: F. Lucca, n.d.). A second work by Filippi of the same title (Perché? Melodia, in Dodici Poesie tratte

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dal Canzoniere di Enrico Heine, Traduzione di Bernardino Zendrini, poste in musica in chiave di sol con accomp.to di Pianoforte da Dr. Filippo Filippi, op. 30, n. 2), centers on the same theme of abandonment by a lover through death. 84. Although illegible on the tomb, the line was reproduced on a sheet of paper and included in the Fasc. Filippo Filippi, Archivio Mortuario, Milan. I have identified it as from “El ti” (Canzonetta Veneziana dedicata alla Signora A. Levi Mondolfo), in Filippo Filippi, Alghe della Laguna, Canzonette Veneziane, Poesie di Francesco Dall’Ongaro, Op. 32, (Milan: F. Lucca, n.d.). In one of his reviews of a musical production, Cameroni quoted Filippi walking out of the theater saying “la me piase la soa musicheta più del Cos’elo sto ti” ([in Venetian dialect] I like its little music more than What is this tu?). Reprinted in Felice Cameroni, Interventi critici sulla letteratura italiana, 64. 85. Giacomo Puccini was present at the unveiling, according to “L’inaugurazione del cippo funerario a F. Filippi al Cimitero Monumentale,” L’Italia, June 26–27, 1889.

5 . T H E A RT I S T ’ S E X P E R I E N C E O F M I G R AT I O N

1. The exhibition ran from May 6 to October 31, 1889. Rosso’s departure date from Milan is uncertain. For the list of works, see Comitato artistico lombardo, “Esposizione Universale di Parigi, 1889,” May 4, 1889, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Rosso exhibited Birichino, Bacio materno, Fine, Carne altrui, and Portinaia. The list of works given by Giovanni Lista is inaccurate—Rosso exhibited neither El Locch nor the Marchande de légumes. See Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 16. It is not clear whether the Bacio materno was Aetas aurea, as Luciano Caramel claims in Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat., ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 49. For further details, see chapter 4, note 26. 2. Rosso separated from Giuditta Pozzi on April 12, 1889. This is confirmed by a certificate issued by the Court of Milan on December 7, 1900, cited as document D7 by Paola Mola Kirchmayr, “Appendice,” in “Gli anni della formazione di Medardo Rosso alla luce di un epistolario inedito,” in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 49, 57. 3. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Italian Diaspora, 1867–1976,” in The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, ed. Robin Cohen (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 114–22. See also Corrado Bonifazi, Frank Heins, Salvatore Strozza, and Mattia Vitiello, “The Italian Transition from an Emigration to Immigration Country,” IDEA Working Papers, no. 5 (2009): 6, http://www.idea6fp.uw.edu.pl/pliki/WP5_Italy.pdf. 4. Paola Mola Kirchmayr, “Gli anni della formazione di Medardo Rosso alla luce di un epistolario inedito,” 29–46, 92–104. 5. “M’hai affrettata la mia carriera d’alcuni anni.” Carteggio Medardo Rosso–Felice Cameroni (1889 giugno–1892), Biblioteca d’arte—Biblioteca archeologica—Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive—CASVA, Milan (referred to hereafter as “Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence”), L3, August 19, 1889, unpublished. 6. Georges Boulanger was an enormously popular general who entered French politics by promoting an aggressive nationalism against Germany, claiming revenge for the FrancoPrussian War and gaining the nickname of “Général Revanche.” In September of 1889,

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

the Boulangists were suddenly defeated. This defeat provoked what came to be known as the Boulanger crisis, which rocked the French Republic because it undermined the political strength of French conservatives as well as royalists in the last decade of the nineteenth century. On Italian immigration and anarchism, see Kenyon Zimmer, “ ‘The Whole World Is Our Country’: Immigration and Anarchism in the United States, 1885–1940” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2010). Pietro Gori, Senza Patria: Scene sociali dal vero in due atti ed un intermezzo in versi martelliani (Buenos Aires: Libreria Sociológica, 1899), quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, “ ‘The Whole World Is Our Country,’ ” 1. Pietro Gori, “Stornelli d’esilio,” quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, “ ‘The Whole World Is Our Country,’ ” 1. Kenyon Zimmer, “ ‘The Whole World Is Our Country,’ ” 1. Medardo Rosso, “Concepimento-Limite-Infinito,” L’Ambrosiano, January 12, 1926; and Medardo Rosso, “Chi largamente vede, largamente pensa: Ha il gesto,” L’Ambrosiano, January 15, 1926. Jehan Rictus, “Journal quotidien, 1898–1933,” February 12–March 31, 1915, Département de Manuscrits, NaF 16176, entry dated February 22, 1915, 44, Bibliothèque National de France, Paris. See Jean-François Rodriguez, Rictus, Soffici e Apollinaire, paladini dello scultore Medardo Rosso tra Parigi e Firenze: “—Cette nouvelle Affaire Dreyfus artistique” (Prato: Pentalinea, 2003), 66. “sono più nel mio carattere quando sono in lotta con tutti col [sic] esistenza come più sempre.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L51, undated, unpublished. Matteo Gardonio, “Scultori italiani alle Esposizioni Universali di Parigi (1855–89): Aspettative, successi e delusioni” (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2008), 98. Marion Lagrange, Les peintres italiens en quête d’identité, Paris 1855–1909 (Paris: CTHSINHA, 2010). A rare loss of faith appears in Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L21, mid-February 1890, unpublished. Marion Lagrange, Les peintres italiens en quête d’identité, Paris 1855–1909, 45. All of these quotes are drawn from ibid. Felice Cameroni, “Appendice: Pei visitatori dell’Esposizione di Parigi, Parigi, 30 giugno 1889,” Il Sole, July 5, 1889. Fernand Bourgeat, “Paris vivant: À la Galerie Georges Petit,” Le Siècle, June 22, 1889. Cited in Claude Monet—Auguste Rodin: Centenaire de l’exposition de 1889, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1989), 221. “Così potrò dire comincio installarmi—Fin’ora sono come un ucello [sic].” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L18, January 26, 1890, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 102–3. Mola and Vittucci note that Georges Maurevert writes about an atelier on Rue Constance but do not cite a source for this. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 9. It might be from Georges Maurevert, “Medardo Rosso, sculpteur impressioniste,” L’Eclaireur du soir, October 21, 1928.

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23. Richard D. Sonn, “Marginality and Transgression: Anarchy’s Subversive Allure,” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 123. 24. See Carl Levy, “Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 16, no. 3 (2011): 265–78. 25. Richard D. Sonn, “Marginality and Transgression,” 138. 26. See Gabriel P. Weisberg, “Discovering Sites: Enervating Signs for the Spanish Modernistas,” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, 247–72. 27. Rachel Esner, “ ‘Art Knows No Fatherland’: Internationalism and the Reception of German Art in France in the Early Third Republic,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, ed. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (London: German Historical Institute, 2001), 357–74. 28. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, “Introduction: The Mechanics of Internationalism,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism, 19. 29. Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 112–14. 30. Peter Wollen, “The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Arts,” in Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson et al. (London: Routledge, 1994), 191. 31. Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances, 113. 32. Peter Wollen, “The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Arts,” 193–94. 33. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L1, July 31, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 94–96; L31, undated, unpublished; L35, undated, unpublished; and L46, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 93–94. 34. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L46, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 93–94; and L27, October 22, 1890, unpublished. 35. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L34, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 101; L45, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 96–99; L49, undated, unpublished; and L50, undated, unpublished. No trace of such a portrait by Rosso has been found, suggesting that he may never have made it. 36. The Getty’s recent digitalization of Goupil’s ledgers has revealed the wide scope of his enterprise in Paris and throughout Europe. See “Goupil & Cie / Boussod, Valadon & Cie Stock Books,” Getty Research Institute, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/digital_ collections/goupil_cie/. For a case study, see Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 3 (2012): http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn12 /fletcher-helmreich-mapping-the-london-art-market. Rosso mentions Goupil in Rosso– Cameroni Correspondence, L5, dated September 6, 1889, unpublished; as well as in L45, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 96–97; and L49, undated, unpublished. He speaks of a deal falling through in L18, January 26, 1890, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 102–3. In L17, dated January 3, 1890, unpublished, he identifies the bronzes as Birichini. In L21, undated, unpublished, he fears he lost the Goupil deal because he could not deliver bad casts. 37. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L5, September 6, 1889, unpublished; L45, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 96–97; and L49, undated,

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38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

unpublished. On Goupil’s marketing of Italian painters, see Marion Lagrange, Les peintres italiens en quête d’identité, Paris 1855–1909, 262–74. Goupil sold more than fifty of Rossi’s paintings—more than he had of Boldini’s. Gian Pietro Lucini identifies Rossi as author of Cameroni’s “vedute di Parigi,” the painting that hung in his Milan apartment. Gian Pietro Lucini, “Felice Cameroni (Ricordi e confidenze),” La Voce, January 23, 1913, 1. A work described as “small head of a boy” by Rosso is mentioned in a review in “Arts and Crafts,” Daily Chronicle, August 3, 1896. A clipping of the review is in Rosso’s press album. This and another Rosso wax may have been exhibited in the Boussod, Valadon & Cie. Gallery but not in the Pre-Raphaelite show, as claimed in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 371. On Goupil and Italian artists, see Maria Mimita Lamberti, “1870–1915: I mutamenti del mercato e le ricerche degli artisti,” in Il Novecento, vol. 3 of part 2 of Storia dell’arte italiana, ed. Federico Zeri (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 5–173. “per questa primavera da Petit raduno tutti questi lavori e con questi altri faccio un’Esposizione.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L17, January 3, 1890, unpublished. The passage is cited in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 106. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci describe a man noted by Rosso anonymously as “questo signore,” whom they believe must be Petit, as waiting for a cast of a work titled Après la visite (Medardo Rosso, 104). This is not made explicit in Rosso’s letter. David W. Galenson and Robert Jensen, “Careers and Canvases: The Rise of the Market for Modern Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” in Current Issues in 19th-Century Art (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007), 140, 145. Ibid., 153, 158. A wax cast of the Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy, ca. 1892–94), whose provenance is attributed to Faure, is currently in the collection of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. On Faure and Durand-Ruel, see David W. Galenson and Robert Jensen, “Careers and Canvases,” 157. See also Anthea Callen, “Faure and Manet,” Gazette des beaux-arts 6, no. 83 (1974): 157–78. “abbiamo già parlato d’un esposizione al figaro [sic] che farà.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L46, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 93–94. “ho fiducia dell’accoglienza fattami.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L45, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 96–97. Other mentions of Barbedienne occur in L19, January 31, 1890, unpublished; L38, undated, unpublished; L39, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 98–99. Also see L41, undated, unpublished; and L50, undated, unpublished. L39 was first published in Paola Rita Mola, “Medardo Rosso: Due lettere a Felice Cameroni,” E. S. 6 (1977): 121–22. “facilmente farò l’affare con Barbedienne. . . . Giusto se Barbedienne intende levarsi da suoi bronzi candelabri sarà il momento.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L39, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 98–99. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L19, January 31, 1890, unpublished. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L46, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 93–94; L39, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 98–99; and L15, December 13, 1889, unpublished.

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49. He also approached Comte Armand Doria, a collector of French Realist and Impressionist art, in whose collection, however, no Rosso work is found. 50. David W. Galenson and Robert Jensen, “Careers and Canvases,” 139. 51. “[Zola] M’ha accolto benissimo . . . s’è seduto vis a vis lasciandomi me alla luce. . . . È un gran scrutatore cristo ma io ho fatto di non accorgermene tanto ho tirato diritto per la mia via.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L39, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 98–99. 52. Ibid. 53. Merriam-Webster, 10th ed., s.v. “cosmopolitan.” 54. The full quote is “Dimmi ora se invece di vederla come tanti solo io che sempre mi è toccata cosi provarla posso io fare meno di ottenere il verismo nel suo vero lato di sentimento di passione in caratteri che più ti si spiegano mentre invade per tanti l’idea che il vero sia il far la mano o la testa o qualunque cosa sia modellatata [sic] d’una fattura che poi dicono vera. Ma che non ti cercano nemmeno di tentare di darti quell momento di quell impression ottenuta nel primo momento. Bisogna soffrire provare e tanti non fanno che perche hanno ho letto o inteso dire ebbene vedi la maggioranza essendo più con questi è alla portata di capirli meglio a quanto si soffre alle volte veder ciò. adesso [sic] che ho scritto non mi ricordavo che queste cose erano inutili per te che vuoi son qui non posso far niente un po’ di debolezza mi è causa anche di non esser tanto fermo di testa e t’ho annoiato mentre che per me è stato un pò di sfogo e te che so mi capisci mi vuoi bene e hai fiducia in me saprai comprendermi e perdonarmi questo annioamento.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L10, October 9, 1889, unpublished. 55. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L39, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 98–99. 56. Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L18, January 26, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 102. 57. This then led to an error in Rosso’s biographies claiming that Zola actually bought the work. “Una scoltura italiana acquistata da Zola,” La Lombardia, September 1, 1889. For Rosso’s description, see Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L39, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 98–99. For a discussion of Rosso’s meeting with Zola, see Sharon Hecker, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the Cultural Cosmopolitan in Fin-de-siècle Paris,” in Strangers in Paradise: Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914, ed. Susan Waller and Karen Carter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 143–54. 58. Edward Armitage, “The Royal Academy: To the Editor of the Times,” Times, August 30, 1886. Cited in Joy Newton and Monique Fol, “L’esthétique de Zola et de Rodin, ‘le Zola de la sculpture,’ ” Les Cahiers naturalistes 51 (1977): 75. See also Joy Newton and Monique Fol, “Zola and Rodin,” Les Cahiers naturalistes 53 (1979): 177–85. On Rodin the outsider becoming an insider, see Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 349–61. 59. Quoted in Joy Newton and Monique Fol, “L’esthétique de Zola et de Rodin,” 75, from a letter from Zola to Huysmans in 1883. 60. Quoted in Joy Newton and Monique Fol, “L’esthétique de Zola et de Rodin,” 75, from a letter from Zola to Jacob J. Van Santen Kolff in 1892.

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61. The participation of the French sculptor Alexandre Charpentier in the project might have been an attempt to mitigate these criticisms. Belgian critics retorted, “Qu’importe la nationalité de l’artiste?” (What does the nationality of the artist matter?). See Jean Marcel, “Art et Patriotisme,” L’Art Moderne: Revue critique des arts et de la littérature, no. 35 (1903): 302–3; See also “La Sculpture belge jugée en France,” L’Art Moderne: Revue critique des arts et de la littérature, no. 47 (1902): 386–87. 62. “[Goncourt ha] una bella faccia aperta di un vecchio (molto fina)[,] una faccia che certo non pensa mai a presentarsi diversamente che ti mette subito la volontà di esternarti, che non ti fà [sic] pensare a fare prima il tuo ragionamento per poi parlare e colla paura ancora di non toccar giusto.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L8, September 20, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 99–100. This letter was first published in Paola Rita Mola, “Medardo Rosso: Due lettere a Felice Cameroni,” 122–23. 63. “Ed è stato tutto contento quando a quello di De Nittis domandandomi come lo trovavo dissi che tutto il resto era magnifico ma lui nò che mancava molto d’ossatura e di carattere e lui allora mi disse che era quello che sentiva lui e mi disse comprendere che De Nittis non l’aveva capito ma che come pastello e come pittura era forte assai che avevo ragione che si conosceva l’italiano perché i pittori italiani curano molto l’ambiente.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L8, September 20, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 99–100. This letter was first published in Paola Rita Mola, “Medardo Rosso: Due lettere a Felice Cameroni,” 122–23. The work is in the Archives Municipales, Nancy. 64. “Li ho consegnato poi le mie fotografie e non ti dico il piacere mio vedendo notarmi che li piacevano [sic] tanto l’Aetas Aurea un morto e un tipo d’ortolana quelli che ci tengo veramente.” Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L8, September 20, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 99–100. This letter was first published in Paola Rita Mola, “Medardo Rosso: Due lettere a Felice Cameroni,” 122–23. 65. The history of the work—including the identity of its subject, its date, and its titles—has never been fully examined. Rosso spoke of the child as a boy (“picirillo”) in some of his letters (see Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L32, undated, unpublished) and as a girl (“bambina” and “piccina piccina cosi bella”) in others (L49, undated, unpublished; and L1, July 31, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 94–95, respectively). Lista identifies the subject as Alexis’s second daughter, Marthe, born on January 18, 1889, but provides no documentation. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e Fotografia (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), 96. Although the work has traditionally been dated to 1889, Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci date it to 1890, citing no sources for this change (Medardo Rosso, 114). The date, history, and genesis can be reconstructed through Rosso’s letters to Cameroni. In a letter dated July 31, 1889, erroneously marked “L4” by Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 114) and “L1” by Luciano Caramel (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 94) but unmarked in the original documents, Rosso first mentions the idea for the work. A letter erroneously marked by Mola and Vittucci as “L25” (but L32 in the CASVA archive) provides the beginning of the work. Mola dated the letter to the first week of December 1889, but it is actually undated and could have been written anytime in November or December 1889 after Rosso left the hospital: “ho cominciato

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da giorni un gruppo della moglie dell’alexis [sic] col picirillo” (I started a few days ago a group of the wife of alexis [sic] with the little one). This passage is transcribed with errors in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 114. In another letter incorrectly marked by Mola and Vittucci as “L26” (Medardo Rosso, 114) but which should be L49 per CASVA, Rosso mentions the work again. Mola and Vittucci date the letter to the second week of December, but it is undated: “Alexis con la sua bambina che farò in questi dí.” See also L14 per CASVA Archive, erroneously marked “L17” by Mola and Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 116), from Alexis to Rosso, dated December 2, 1889, in which Alexis notes that the work is already partially completed. In L18, dated January 26, 1890, Rosso reports that he finished the work, that it is cooking in the kiln, and that he would like to cast it in bronze when he has the money to do so. Given these letters and the fact that Rosso modeled the work in late 1889 but only fired it in 1890, I have re-dated the piece to late 1889–90. Mola and Vittucci further claim (Medardo Rosso, 114) that Rosso probably exhibited a plaster cast at La Bodinière in 1893. A review describes a work of this subject but without a title. See P. H., “Le Salon du Théâtre d’Application,” Le Radical, November 22, 1893. However, a press review that mentions this work specifically notes that it was in bronze rather than plaster. “Les expositions: Au Théâtre d’Application,” L’Art Français, November 25, 1893. Mola and Vittucci use an undated studio photograph to date the first cast of the work in wax to 1899–1901. They describe it as “appena fatta” (just made) but provide no support for these claims (Medardo Rosso, 114). Camille de Sainte-Croix is the first to give the work the title Enfant au sein, which remained unvaried in Rosso’s time but for a few exceptions. Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March 1896): 388. A year earlier, Charles Morice had given the title as L’Enfant aux bras de la mère. Charles Morice, “Les passants: Medardo Rosso,” Le Soir, September 25, 1895. Rosso sold a cast in 1914 to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte di Torino under the title Bambino che poppa (Child Nursing). The source is cited in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 272. A version of this title, Bimbo che poppa, was given by Ardengo Soffici, “Medardo Rosso,” La Voce, May 27, 1909. For the Venice Biennale Rosso retitled it Bambino lattante (Child Nursing). XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia: Catalogo, exh. cat., 3rd ed. (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1914), 87. 66. This creative surge was perhaps related to Alexis’s praise that he was superior to Rodin. See Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L1, July 31, 1889, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 94–96, in which Rosso writes to Cameroni that Alexis told him that “in me v’ha più la vita come è che in Rodin” (in me there is more life than in Rodin). Rosso surely knew of Rodin by this date and already saw himself (or was seen by Alexis) as competition to Rodin. For Alexis’s direct praise of Rosso, see also Rosso– Cameroni Correspondence, L14, December 2, 1889, published in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 116: “si vous voulez travailler au buste que vous avez si magistralement ébouché en un séance (il vit, déja!) le moment est propice” (if you want to work on the bust that you have so beautifully sketched in one sitting [it is already alive!] the moment is propitious). Marthe’s birth is recorded in Acte de naissance, 18e arr., V4E 7549, Archives État-civil, Paris. 67. Marthe’s death is registered in “Archives des registres d’État-civil de Triel sur Seine (naissances/mariages/décès), acte du 19 juin 1890,” Archives d’État-civil de la ville de

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68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

Triel-sur-Seine, Archives départementales des Yvelines, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. It is signed by Alexis, Zola, and Paul Legrand. On Marthe’s death, see also http://fr.topictopos.com/autographe-demile-zola-triel-sur-seine. “e ci sono anche le mani ma perché entravano nell’impressione dell’occhio in quel momento.” See Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence, L18, January 26, 1890, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 102–3. This led Caramel to assert that the work “takes up again the problem already posed in the Milanese years of the plastic reconstruction of the optic image (‘the impression’), of the visual continuity objectsurrounding space and thus, implicitly, research into values of light” (riprende il problema già posto negli anni milanesi della ricostruzione plastica dell’immagine ottica (“l’impressione”), della continuità visiva oggetto spazio circostante, e quindi, implicitamente, l’indagine sui valori luministici) (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 133). “Ses bronzes, ou l’on voit de jeunes mères endormies auprès de leur enfant ou leur donnant le sein, sont ennoblis de ce sentiment auguste qui faisait dire à Alfred Stevens: ‘Ce sera toujours là un admirable sujet.’ ” “Les expositions: Au Théâtre d’Application,” L’Art Français, November 25, 1893. The first mention of a headless version is found in Charles Morice, “Les passants: Medardo Rosso,” Le Soir, September 25, 1895. Morice describes Rosso removing the head after making the portrait. A crack at the neck is visible in all studio photographs of the work, but the head is intact. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, however, date the photographs with cropped heads to circa 1910. They also cite a print proof without the head, which they believe was intended for Rosso’s 1923 exhibition at the Bottega di Poesia in Milan (Medardo Rosso, 117–19). I have not found this photo in the Bottega di Poesia catalogue, which does not list this work. See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). Anna Green, French Paintings of Childhood and Adolescence, 1848–1886 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 1–24. Henry Moore and Philip James, Henry Moore on Sculpture (London: Macdonald, 1966), 134, 198. See Philip James, ed., Henry Moore on Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1966), 134, 198. Anne M. Wagner, “Henry Moore’s Mother,” Representations 65 (1999): 101. Ibid., 104. Harry Cooper, “Ecce Rosso!,” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, exh. cat., ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–2. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 114.

6. THE SHIFTING VIEWPOINT OF THE OUTSIDER

1. Although scholars unanimously agree on the date that this work was created, the title has fluctuated. In letters to Cameroni, Rosso called it “figuretta del malato” (little figure of the sick man). See Carteggio Medardo Rosso–Felice Cameroni (1889 giugno–1892), Biblioteca d’arte—Biblioteca archeologica—Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive—CASVA, Milan (referred to in other chapter notes as “Rosso–Cameroni Correspondence”), L18,

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January 26, 1890, published in Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat., ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 102–4. Caramel notes (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 132) that Rosso also called the work “impressione d’un convalescente” (impression of a convalescent) and cites as proof L29, June 3, 1891, unpublished; L34, undated, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 134; and L50, undated, unpublished. This title, however, does not appear in L29 or L50. The first official title, Après la visite, was given by Rosso for his exhibition at La Bodinière in November 1893, where he exhibited the sculpture for the first time. This title appears in two reviews: Kalophile Eremite [Alphonse Germain], “Chroniques, IV. Les arts: Les expositions: La Bodinière,” L’Ermitage, December 1893, 372–73; and “Les expositions: Au Théâtre d’Application,” L’art français, November 25, 1893. Rosso slightly modified the title in subsequent exhibitions. It also appears with some further modifications in various writings on Rosso. Camille de Sainte-Croix calls it Malade d’hôpital in “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March 1896): 386. For the Impressionist show that appeared in Amsterdam, Utrecht, the Hague, and Rotterdam in 1901, Rosso called it Impression d’hôpital. See Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 13 (1962): 223. For his exhibition in Leipzig in 1902, Rosso renamed it Le malade à l’hôpital. See Richard Graul to Medardo Rosso, November 29, 1902, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. For his one-person show at Cremetti Gallery in London in 1906, Rosso called the work Malade à Hôpital. See Eugene Cremetti Gallery, ed., Medardo Rosso: Impressions, exh. cat. (Paris: Herbert Clarke, 1906), 12. Louis Piérard noted its title as Malade à l’hôpital in “Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso,” Société Nouvelle 15, no. 33 (1909): 59; reprinted in Louis Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso (Paris: Société Nouvelle, 1909), 7. The title was translated into Italian by Ardengo Soffici as Malato all’ospedale in “Medardo Rosso,” La Voce, May 27, 1909, 100. As Luciano Caramel points out, Rosso’s letters to Cameroni indicate that Rosso had sent his plaster model from Paris to Italy to have this work cast in bronze by a foundry in Turin a few months after he made it (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 132). In L18, Rosso lamented that the “figuretta del malato” was still at the foundry in Turin. Therefore, the first cast of this subject was not produced personally by Rosso. 2. The title of Enfant malade remains generally unvaried, but the date of its creation is uncertain. The work was probably not made during Rosso’s hospital period in 1889, as has been traditionally claimed, since he did not mention it to Cameroni among the works he made there. In this case, a deliberate omission would have been extremely unusual. Since Rosso was eager to prove to Cameroni that he was making objects to sell in order to pay off his debt to the journalist, he made a special effort in his letters to mention all the works he created and was having cast during this difficult financial period. It is also unlikely that the work was exhibited at the Bodinière in 1893, as no critic mentions it by name or describes it. Because of the sharp diagonal slant, a tendency that seemed to have emerged in the mid-1890s in Rosso’s sculptures and drawings, I am inclined to date the work to 1893–95, as do Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci in Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 146, rather than 1889, as does Luciano Caramel (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 133–34). The first mention of the work

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by this title is in Charles Morice, “Les passants: Medardo Rosso,” Le Soir, September 25, 1895, which is the last possible date of its creation. Rosso gives the work’s date as 1895 for his exhibition in Florence—see Prima mostra italiana dell’impressionismo, exh. cat. (Florence: Lyceum Club, 1910), 14—but as 1893 in the catalogue of the 1914 Venice Biennale, XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 1914. Catalogo, exh. cat., 3rd ed. (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1914), 87. For an extensive examination of the dating of this work, see Sharon Hecker, “An Enfant Malade by Medardo Rosso from the Collection of Louis Vauxcelles,” Burlington Magazine 152, no. 1292 (2010): 731–33. 3. The creation date of this work is uncertain. Luciano Caramel believed that Rosso first exhibited it at La Bodinière in 1893 under the title Impression (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 138). Caramel gleans this title from a review by P. H., “Le Salon du Théâtre d’Application,” Le Radical, November 22, 1893. However, the work given this title is not described in the article, making it impossible to determine which subject it actually is. Caramel further suggests that another sculpture described by P. H. as “tête de femme courbée” (woman with a bent head) might be this work, but Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci refute this, saying that it must be Carne altrui (Medardo Rosso, 162). Mola and Vittucci title the work Vers le soir. Femme à la Voilette but do not cite a source. Camille de Sainte-Croix calls it La femme sortant de l’Eglise (“Medardo Rosso,” 388) and elsewhere in the same article Femme à la Voilette (391). Other titles include La Femme et la Violette [sic] (Charles Morice, “Les passants: Medardo Rosso,” Le Soir, September 25, 1895); La Femme à la voilette (Edmond Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture [Paris: Nouvelle Revue, 1902], 91); Femme à la voilette. Impression du [sic] Boulevard. Cire. (Medardo Rosso, Paris: Bronzen, Impressionen in Wachs; Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Artaria, exh. cat. [Vienna: Kunstsalon Artaria, 1905], 6); and Impression.—Vers le Soir au Boulevard.—Rosso. Femme à la Voilette.—1893–94 (Eugene Cremetti Gallery, Medardo Rosso: Impressions, 24). The French state bought a wax version titled Femme voilée. See “Arrêté, République Française,” dated September 24, 1907, as well as “Note d’ordonnancement pour la comptabilité” and handwritten receipt of payment, both dated October 19, 1907, registered as “Musée de Lyon, Rhone,” Medardo Rosso, Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris. The work’s date and title shift again in the publication on Rosso by Louis Piérard, who calls it Impression de Boulevard (Femme à la voilette), 1892 (Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.) At the 1911 Esposizione Nazionale in Rome, Rosso retitled it Verso sera. (Impressione di boulevard) (Esposizione Internazionale di Roma: Mostra di Belle Arti, exh. cat. [Bergamo: Istituto d’arti Grafiche, 1911], 11). In 1913 he again changed it to La Velata (Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Secessione, exh. cat. [Rome: Tipografia dell’Unione, 1913], n.p.). See Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 166n6, for citations of documents related to this exhibition. In 1914, Rosso called it Sul “Boulevard” verso sera—Donna Velata (XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 87). See also Etha Fles to Nino Barbantini, November 3, 1914, Archivio della Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice. However, in a later exhibition in Venice, Rosso again retitled it La Signora della Veletta; Impressione di Boulevard (1894) (see no. 625 in Catalogo della Galleria Internazionale d’arte moderna della Città di Venezia, exh. cat. [Venice: Società Anonima Veneziana Industrie Grafiche, 1921], 23). On his photograph of the work, Rosso wrote “Impressione di Boulevard / (detta la donna Velata) /

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(1897).” This photograph was first published in Paola Mola, Rosso: Trasferimenti (Milan: Skira, 2006), 77. The photograph’s location is not specified, and it is unclear why Mola and Vittucci date this photo to 1908. In a 1920 letter from Rosso to Georges Clemenceau, the sculptor calls it Impression de Boulevard, but in Milan he again retitled it L’impression de Boulevard (Femme voilée) (see Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. [Milan: Bottega di Poesia, 1923], 11). The work was retitled posthumously Dama dalla Veletta o Impressione di boulevard (see Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso [Milan: Il Milione, 1950], 67). Luciano Caramel gave the title as Impression de Boulevard. La Femme à la Voilette (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 138). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci have abbreviated the title to Femme à la Voilette (Medardo Rosso, 162). They cite two casts of this work as being in wax (Medardo Rosso, 312, 313) and believe that both were at the Cremetti show. They also cite two illustrations (tav. 4 and 5) in the catalogue, which actually has only one illustration of the work and no numbering, making it unlikely that Rosso exhibited two wax casts. One of these wax casts was the one bought by the French state, and another bronze was owned by the Noblet family. 4. Rosso exhibited the work only once, at the Venice Biennale of 1914, under the title La Signora X with a date given by Rosso as 1896 (XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 87). This indicates that Rosso exhibited the sculpture nearly two decades after he made it. The work was subsequently donated under this title and date by Etha Fles to Ca’ Pesaro. See no. 26 in “Verbale di Deliberazione del Consiglio Comunale di Venezia, Convocazione straordinaria. Seduta Pubblica del 19 Febbraio 1915,” 29, Archivio della Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice. Scholars today are in agreement about this date, although Rosso’s son, Francesco, gave the work a much later date—1913—in the monograph published by Mino Borghi, which was based on Francesco’s recollections. This led Barr to wonder which was the correct date. See her letters to Mario Vianello Chiodo, dated December 13, 1959, and May 23, 1960, and his response of June 2, 1960, which are unpublished but preserved in the private archives of Marco Vianello Chiodo, London. A scholarly dispute arose as to whether the work was a portrait of a specific person or not, given the fact that Etha Fles called the work Maschera di Dolores in Medardo Rosso: Der Mensch und der Künstler (Freiburg: Walter Heinrich, 1922), 43. Based on the name “Dolores,” scholars have debated whether the work was a portrait of Dolores Prezzolini, the wife of Giuseppe Prezzolini. See Alessandro De Stefani and Olga Ragusa, “Medardo Rosso e Prezzolini: A proposito di alcune recenti pubblicazioni (II),” Cartevive 6, no. 2 (1995): 23–35. A response can be found in Giovanni Lista, “Medardo Rosso e il Ritratto di Dolores Prezzolini,” Cartevive 6, no. 3 (1995): 17–24. 5. Diego Martelli, “Exposition des Beaux-Arts à Paris 1870,” La Rivista Europea, June 1 and August 1, 1870. Cited in Marion Lagrange, Les peintres italiens en quête d’identité: Paris, 1855–1909 (Paris: CTHS-INHA, 2010), 90. 6. This fact was noted by the artist and activist Francis Jourdain in his memoirs: “Elles sont aujourd’hui bien oubliées, les statuettes que Rosso exposait—rarement—vers 1894” (They are long forgotten today, the statuettes that Rosso exhibited—rarely— around 1894). Francis Jourdain, Sans remords ni rancune: Souvenirs épars d’un vieil homme (Paris: Corrêa, 1953), 304. Mino Borghi believed that Rosso exhibited at the Bodinière

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

twice (Medardo Rosso, 30–31). No proof exists for claims that Rosso exhibited at Galerie George Thomas, as asserted in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 49; and Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928 (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 88. Camille de Sainte-Croix claimed that Thomas, “l’éditeur du boulevard Malesherbes,” bought works from Rosso in the mid-1880s during his years in Milan (“Medardo Rosso,” 383). The reference to an exhibition at Galerie George Thomas originates with Barr, who published a letter of recollections by Louis Rouart, son of Henri Rouart. See Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 30. However, Barr was not convinced of the reliability of this letter. She added five footnotes to sentences in the letter that were either factually inexact or incorrect in Rouart’s “recollections” of his father’s relationship with Rosso. Therefore, the letter cannot be considered a reliable document, even though it has entered the Rosso literature unquestioned. Barr’s hypotheses about a possible relationship between Rosso and Thomas have become standard assertions in the scholarship. “Rosso (Medardo) (Italie), M. H. 1889 (e.u.),” in Explication des ouvrages de peinture et dessins, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants: Exposés au Palais des Champs-Élysées, le 1 mai 1895, exh. cat., 3rd ed. (Paris: Imprimerie et librairie Administratives et Classiques, 1895), 191. “M. H.” stands for “mention honorable” and “e.u.” for Exposition Universelle. He exhibited in a section titled “Sculpteurs Étrangers.” Henri-Gabriel designed the covers of several Bodinière catalogues and invitations. Giovanni Lista cites a dossier conserved at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, which, however, contains no specific information on Rosso or the exhibition. It contains general background material on the theater’s activities and a biography of its founder (Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 76n50). Flammèche, “Notes d’art,” L’Estafette, December 20, 1893, 2. The exchange is also mentioned in a mysterious article supposedly written by Morice and published in the March 1896 edition of the Mercure de France. However, it does not appear in any of the published versions of the journal. This article can be found in Rosso’s scrapbook in the Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci say that Rosso’s sculpture was deposited in Meudon and rediscovered in 1929 by Paul Cruet, the curator of the museum (Medardo Rosso, 278). However, the Musée Rodin has found no record of this, as confirmed by François Blanchetière, conservateur du patrimoine au Musée Rodin. Rosso’s choice of works for the Bodinière show is used by Luciano Caramel (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 138–39) and Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 152, 156–58) to date works such as Bookmaker and Uomo che legge, for example. They contend that these works were most probably not made before 1894 because neither was exhibited at the Bodinière show, which was held in November 1893. There is no reason to assume, however, that Rosso couldn’t have made the works earlier and chosen not to exhibit them. There is ample evidence that Rosso had a practice of withholding new works. Moreover, Rosso did not show all of his works to every critic who came to visit his studio. The precise dating of many of Rosso’s works, therefore, remains unstable. Camille de Sainte-Croix referred to the Gavroche as a “voyou puéril et profond” (“Medardo Rosso,” 381). P. H., “Le Salon du Théâtre d’Application,” Le Radical, November 22, 1893.

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13. “jeunes mères endormies auprès de leur enfants ou leur donant le sein.” “Les Expositions: Au Théâtre d’Application,” L’Art Français, November 25, 1893. 14. “mère, endormie, joue à joue avec un enfantelet.” P. H., “Le Salon du Théâtre d’Application,” Le Radical, November 22, 1893. 15. Kalophile Eremite [Alphonse Germain], “Chroniques, IV. Les arts: Les expositions: La Bodinière,” L’Ermitage, December 1893, 373. 16. P. H., “Le Salon du Théâtre d’Application,” Le Radical, November 22, 1893. 17. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 162, 371. Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 138, 150. 18. Rosso is registered as patient number 9852. His address is given as rue d’Enghien 52, and his civil status is given as single. He was admitted with the complaint of a fever and the diagnosis was given as “orchite” (orchiditis, an inflammation from syphilis). See “Registre des entrées de l’hôpital Lariboisière de l’année 1889,” coté 1Q2/65, Archives de l’Assistance Publique—Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), Paris. 19. “un disegno dal vero.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 104. After making the work, Rosso sent the model from Paris to Turin for casting. Thus the artist did not cast the early bronze versions of this work himself. 20. Barbara Spackman, “The Scene of Convalescence,” in Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 33–104. 21. “voir le monde, être au centre du monde et rester caché au monde.” Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2:692. 22. One rare exception of a work from the early 1890s or before with a title indicating illness is Giovanni Segantini’s Tisi galloppante (Galloping Typhoid, before 1890). This work, however, was painted over by Segantini to show a rosy-cheeked woman lying in bed called Petalo di rosa (Rose Petal, 1891). 23. Carolus-Duran would draw on it for his cropped painting Le convalescent (The Convalescent, 1860), which was originally part of a larger canvas titled La visite au convalescent (The Visit to the Convalescent). 24. “une petite figure d’une facture rapide, comme improvisée.” “Les Expositions: Au Théâtre d’Application,” L’Art Français, November 25, 1893. 25. “avec une désinvolture de croquis.” Kalophile Eremite [Alphonse Germain], “Chroniques, IV. Les arts: Les expositions: La Bodinière,” L’Ermitage, December 1893, 373. 26. On this subject, see Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 27. “un ouvrage du quel vous voyez le depart de bien d’autres.” I have left Rosso’s incorrect French intact. Rosso to Hermann Eissler, September 1903, published in Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 104–5. 28. Nancy Scott, “Vincenzo Vela” (PhD diss., New York University, 1978), 2:370. 29. Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La posterité appartient aux sifflés,” in 1898: Le Balzac de Rodin, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1998), 85–87. 30. Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies, ix.

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31. The title of the work shifts slightly during Rosso’s lifetime and after his death, as does the date. Ugo Ojetti dated the work to 1891 in “Medardo Rosso,” Corriere della Sera, May 31, 1910. Margaret Scolari Barr dated the work to 1890 (Medardo Rosso, 33). Luciano Caramel did as well (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 133). However, both Giovanni Lista (Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia [Milan: 5 Continents, 2003], fig. 53) and Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 108) re-dated the work to 1889. The title Rosso himself gave for the bronze version he exhibited in Leipzig is Petite rieuse (see Richard Graul to Rosso, November 29, 1902, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio). Ugo Ojetti called the work Bambina ridente (“Medardo Rosso”), which Margaret Scolari Barr translated as Little Girl Laughing (Medardo Rosso, 33). Luciano Caramel titled it Bambina che ride (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 133). Giovanni Lista called it Enfant qui rit (Bambina ridente) (Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 297). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci call it Bambina ridente (Medardo Rosso, 108). 32. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 33; Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 108. 33. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 90. 34. Receipt dated June 7, 1913, by Arduino Colasanti, director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna di Roma, Archives of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; and Minuta di verbale di deposito, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. The receipt and minutes list five sculptures given to the museum. Both sources are cited in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 269. This cast, however, is missing from the list given in Rosso’s biography. See Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 374. 35. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 33. 36. Ludmilla Jordanova, “New Worlds for Children in the Eighteenth Century: Problems of Historical Explanation,” History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 1 (1990): 79. 37. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Children and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1830 (London: Virago, 1995), 2. 38. See Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 13. 39. The passage from L24 (March 22, 1890, unpublished) is cited in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 136 (Caramel misdates this letter to March 23, 1890). After Rosso’s death, in an article containing several errors, the critic Emilio Zanzi recalled that back in 1920 Rosso had told him that the work was a portrait of the “little baron Rothschild.” Emilio Zanzi, “Medardo torinese,” Gazzetta del Popolo, December 13, 1929. Zanzi was referring to his own earlier article, “Una ‘facezia’ di Medardo Rosso,” Arte e Vita (Rome), December 1920, 329. Zanzi also wrote that in 1919 Rosso had sent the work to an exhibition of sacred art in Venice and retitled it l’Enfant de Nasareth (The Infant of Nazareth) in order to emphasize that Jesus, too, was Jewish. In 1920 Zanzi wrote, “La cera davvero sublime del Fanciullo ebreo, tipica rappresentazione di una razza esasperata da venti secoli di ghetto, è diventata un . . . San Luigi! La beffa è un po’ esagerata” (The truly sublime wax of the Jewish Boy, a typical representation of a race that has been exasperated by twenty centuries of ghetto, became a . . . Saint Louis! The prank is a bit over the top). Emilio Zanzi, “Una ‘facezia’ di Medardo Rosso.” Zanzi reiterated this claim in the 1929 article, but confused the date of the Venice exhibition

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40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

and the title Rosso used by saying that the Bambino ebreo had actually been renamed Enfant de Nasareth. Emilio Zanzi, “Medardo torinese,” Gazzetta del Popolo, December 13, 1929. This claim has seeped into the literature unquestioned, but my research indicates that the work does not appear in the catalogue of that exhibition. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci note that a bronze S. Luigi by Rosso, which they believe was a Bambino ebreo, was registered in this catalogue (Medardo Rosso, 140, 375). However, this work does not appear in the exhibition catalogue, nor does an Enfant de Nasareth by Rosso appear there. See Catalogo Ufficiale Illustrato: Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Sacra, Venezia 1920 (Venice: G. Zanetti, 1920). For a complete study of this subject, see Sharon Hecker et. al, Medardo Rosso: “Bambino ebreo.” A Critical Study (London: Archetype, 2017). See Rosso to Luigi Bergamo, undated but thought to be before August 1923, original lost. Photocopy in Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. This is an idea that Baudelaire had cherished. He took from the British essayist Thomas De Quincey the idea that childhood sorrow (rather than madness) is the germ of artistic genius and the work of art. See Thomas De Quincey, “The Affliction of Childhood,” in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Black, 1890), 1:28–54. On Baudelaire’s view, see Anna Green, French Paintings of Childhood, 1848–1886 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 28. Carl Levy, “Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 16, no. 3 (2011): 272. For an extensive technical and historical study of this work, see Sharon Hecker et al., Medardo Rosso: “Bambino ebreo.” A Critical Study. Max Kozloff, “The Equivocation of Medardo Rosso,” Art International 7 (1963): 46. Jehan Rictus first presented his poems, Les Soliloques du Pauvre, at the Quat’z’Arts in 1895. See Philippe Oriol, Jehan-Rictus: La vraie vie du poète (Dijon: Éditions Universitaires de Dijon, 2015), 105. Robert Rosenblum, “Fernand Pelez, or the Other Side of the Post-Impressionist Coin,” in Art, the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson, ed. Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1981), 707–18. See also Pierre Rosenberg, “Sans famille,” in Fernand Pelez, 1848–1913: La parade des humbles, exh. cat., ed. Isabelle Collet (Paris: Éditions des Musées de Paris, 2009), 10–11. Anna Green, French Paintings of Childhood, 58. The date and title of this work vacillated during Rosso’s lifetime. Luciano Caramel claims that Rosso gave two dates for the work: 1892 and 1893 (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 137). The date 1892 appears on a copy of the Salon d’Automne photograph Rosso gave to Piérard (Louis Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, 12) and another given to Curt Seidel (Curt Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” L’Artista Moderno, March 10, 1911, 95). Rosso gave another copy of the same photograph to Ludwig Hevesi in March 1905 but marked with the date 1893 (Ludwig Hevesi, “Medardo Rosso,” Kunst und Kunsthandwerk 8 [1905]: 174–84). Rosso also gave 1893 as the date in the catalogue for the 1910 Florence exhibition (Prima mostra italiana dell’impressionismo, 14) and in the 1914 Venice Biennale (XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 87). However, a small brass plaque, presumably from the Salon d’Automne of 1904 and conserved in the Museo Medardo Rosso in Barzio, bears the date “1894–1895.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

believe that this is not the correct date; they re-date the work to around 1897 without citing sources (Medardo Rosso, 188). Giovanni Lista presents an unconvincing argument without evidence that the work was created in 1898 as a form of visual criticism against Rodin’s Balzac (Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 132). The title of the work has undergone numerous variations both by Rosso and by scholars after his death. At the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1904, where Rosso exhibited a wax cast of the work for the first time, encased in a glass vitrine, the brass plaque reads Impression. “Enfant à la bouchée de pain.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci cite the plaque but give the work’s title as Enfant à la bouchée de pain (Medardo Rosso, 188). For the 1905 exhibition at the Artaria & Co. in Vienna, Rosso titled the work Enfant à la bouchée de pain. Impression (Medardo Rosso, Paris: Bronzen, Impressionen in Wachs, n.p.). For the Cremetti show he called it Impression d’enfant à l’asile la bouchée de pain (Eugene Cremetti Gallery, Medardo Rosso: Impressions, n.p.). In Brussels, for Les Independants, Vie Salon Annuel, he called it Impression d’enfant. Au secours des vivres: La bouchée de pain (bronze) (Donald E. Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions, 1900–1916: Selected Catalogue Documentation, exh. cat. [Munich: Prestel, 1974], 341). For the Florence show, Ardengo Soffici titled the work Bimbo alle cucine popolari (Prima mostra italiana dell’impressionismo, 14). Curt Seidel called it Impression d’enfant au secours de la bouchée de pain in “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” L’Artista Moderno, March 10, 1911. In Venice in 1914, he called it Il fanciullo presso l’asilo del Boccone di pane. (XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 87). In Milan in 1923, it became Bambino presso le cucine economiche (Medardo Rosso [Milan: Bottega di Poesia, 1923], 25. Luciano Caramel titled it Bambino alle cucine economiche (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 137). “Rappresenta un bimbo avvolto in uno scialle di lana che l’artista vide in braccio della mamma durante la distribuzione della minestra.” Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso, 67. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 38. F. K. [Frances Keyzer], “Impressionism in Sculpture: A Talk with Medardo Rosso,” Manchester Guardian, November 2, 1904. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 64, 79. Les Archives biographiques contemporaines (Paris: n.p., 1907), 70, gives the date as 1889. Jehan Rictus gave the date as 1892 in “Le sculpteur de la lumière: Un Précurseur: Medardo Rosso,” Comœdia, January 3, 1913, 1. Luciano Caramel, however, dated the work to 1890 (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 135), while Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci give a range from 1890 to the 1910s (Medardo Rosso, 126). For the Florence exhibition Rosso called it Donna ridente (Prima mostra italiana dell’impressionismo, 13). In such cases, his use of the generic title Rieuse or Donna ridente makes it difficult to know which piece he was referring to. At the Venice Biennale of 1914, he listed two works with the same title, Fanciulla che ride, one dated 1889 and the other 1890 (XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 87). In a letter to the collector Luigi Bergamo, Rosso called the work Piccola rieuse (Rosso to Luigi Bergamo, undated, original lost, photocopy in Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio). The letter is partially transcribed in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 240. In an attached list to Bergamo, Rosso also called the work petite rieuse [sic]. Caramel and Mola and Vittucci agree that the work’s title should be Rieuse.

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54. See Rosso to Luigi Bergamo, undated but thought to be before August 1923, published partially in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 128. The original letter is lost but a photocopy is preserved in Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. 55. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 93. Lista believes that Garavaglia was her last name and that she was either Piedmontese or possibly the daughter of Ferruccio Garavaglia, a noted Pavian comedian. However, he cites no proof to support these claims. 56. Postcard of Bianca de Toledo, Foto-AK Atelier Reutlinger, Paris, private collection. 57. In several publications, Rosso dated the work to 1891–92 (Edmond Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture, 71) and 1892 (Louis Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.). The date 1891 is the one traditionally accepted by Rosso scholars (Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 34; and Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 136), except for Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, who give the date 1891–92 to circa 1900 (Medardo Rosso, 132). The title remains constant with only slight variations between Rieuse and La Rieuse. A posthumous addition of the word “Grande” has been given to distinguish this work from the smaller Rieuse of the same name. Indeed, in some exhibitions and writings about Rosso from when he was alive, it is impossible to determine by the title alone whether the Rieuse is Grande rieuse or Petite rieuse. Today, the work is most commonly known as Grande rieuse. Giovanni Lista also cites a photograph by Rosso of the Grande rieuse with the words “Donna ridente” written by the artist under the work (Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, fig. 59). 58. Santillane, “La vie parisienne: Petits salons,” Gil Blas, October 27, 1895. 59. “étonnante Yvette Guilbert, coupée au torse, penchée de trois quarts, le cou tendu, rigide, fixé en sa pose de théâtre, devant son publique, mais comme séparée de lui, s’isolant, se repliant, jouissant par elle-même de ce qu’elle chante pour elle-même, précieuse, minaudière et violente, pointue et câline, pincée, insolente, exquise, d’affétterie spirituelle, invraisemblablement vraie.” Ibid. 60. See Elizabeth K. Menon, “Images of Pleasure and Vice: Women of the Fringe,” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 46–47. 61. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 36. 62. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 168. 63. See note 3 above for titles and dates. 64. Marni Kessler, Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), vii–xxxi. 65. Ibid., 56–58. 66. Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904), published in English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, trans. Florence Simmonds and George W. Chrystal (London: W. Heinemann, 1908), 3:25. 67. Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 10. 68. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 40. 69. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci opine that Rosso gave the date as 1897 in a postcard for the Biennale of 1914, but they do not mention the location of the postcard or reproduce

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it (Medardo Rosso, 196). Rosso gave the year 1898 for the Florence Exhibition (Prima mostra italiana dell’impressionismo, 14). Luciano Caramel says it was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 under the title Portrait de Madame X. However, he believes that it was created between 1896 (when Rosso spoke about Noblet in a letter to Rodin) and 1900 (when Rosso exhibited the work for the first time) (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 141–42). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci give the date as 1897, but in the catalogue entry they date the creation of four variants from as early as 1897 or 1898 to as late as 1920 (Medardo Rosso, 194). 70. Rosso gave this date when Fles donated the work to Ca’ Pesaro, and scholars agree on it. 71. See note 4 above. 72. Max Kozloff, “The Equivocation of Medardo Rosso,” 46–47.

7. S E E I N G A N D B E I N G S E E N : R E I M A G I N I N G T H E E N C O U N T E R A M O N G A RT I S T, A RT W O R K , A N D T H E P U B L I C

1. Richard D. Sonn, “Marginality and Transgression: Anarchy’s Subversive Allure,” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 124. 2. Eugène Rouart, “En souvenir de Medardo Rosso,” L’Archer, n.s., no. 4 (1930): 281–85. I thank Elisabeth Lebon for information regarding the factory. 3. This painting by Degas resides at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. 4. Marilyn R. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 122–26. Brown relies on Rebecca R. DeMuth, “Edgar Degas, Henri Rouart: Art and Industry” (master’s thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1982). Degas mentions the Louisiana Ice Works factory, in front of which he depicts Rouart, in his letters from New Orleans. The New Orleans factory was one story tall with big smokestacks. The Boulevard Voltaire building was three stories tall on a large boulevard and was not located next to a railroad track like the New Orleans factory, which was on Tchoupitoulas Street adjacent to the levee. Rouart’s metal factory was outside Paris in Montluçon. I thank Marilyn R. Brown and Elisabeth Lebon for this information. 5. It is not possible to know with certainty when this portrait was made. Rosso first exhibited it in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle but it was likely made much earlier, probably in late 1889 or early 1890, when the friendship with Rouart began (see chapter 8, fig. 73, p. 199). He wrote the date “1889” in pen on a photograph of the sculpture preserved in the Dresden Museum (no accession number is available), as well as in numerous other sources. There is no mention of the friendship with Rouart in Rosso’s letters from Paris in that year to his friend Felice Cameroni. Rouart gave the beginning date of the friendship as 1889, which is the earliest possible date of the work. Rosso also gave the date 1890 in Jehan Rictus, “Le sculpteur de la lumière. Un Précurseur: Medardo Rosso,” Comœdia, January 3, 1913. 6. Santillane, “La vie parisienne: Petits salons,” Gil Blas, October 27, 1895. The author describes this as being halfway up the hill on Montmartre, on the first turn of rue Caulaincourt, not far from Steinlen’s Cat’s Cottage, which was at number 73. Paola Mola

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

and Fabio Vittucci claim that Rosso actually bought a living/workspace or building (“immobile”) at rue Caulaincourt 50, where he built his own ovens. However, they provide no documentation to support this claim. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 371. Santillane (“La vie parisienne: Petits salons,” Gil Blas, October 27, 1895) speaks of a small “museum” Rosso had on Boulevard des Batignolles but does not give the number. In an undated letter to Rodin, likely from December 1894 or January 1895, Rosso gives his address as Boulevard des Batignolles 94. See Medardo Rosso to Auguste Rodin, undated, Fonds historiques, Ros-5401, Musée Rodin, Paris. The address on Rosso’s letters after this date is always given as 98–100 Boulevard des Batignolles. My research demonstrates that the owner of numbers 96–98–100–102 at Boulevard des Batignolles was Jacques Gustave Defresne. Rosso is listed as renting from Defresne an atelier with four windows and a water closet with one window: “au fond de la court à droit, atelier F[enêtres] 4, 1300, 1125, Rosso, W. C., F[enêtres] 1.” Under the column “Valeur locative par appartement ou local séparé” are the amounts 1300 and 1460, while under the column “Revenu cadastral imposable” is the number 1125. No specific date is given. See “Ville de Paris– Cadastre de 1876: Boulevard des Batignolles,” Propriété no. 98, cote D1P4/78, liasse 1876, no. 168, Archives de Paris. Rosso continued to live at this address during the first decade of the twentieth century. For confirmation, see the letter dated April 30, 1907, Republique Française, Contrôle Général de la Préfecture de Police, no. 460, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris; and the letter dated May 4, 1907, Republique Française, Contrôle Général de la Préfecture de Police, no. 519, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris. It is not clear, however, when Rosso gave up this studio space or what he left inside it when he moved back to Italy permanently. His son Francesco wrote to Rosso’s friend Mario Vianello Chiodo that he had gone to Paris immediately after Rosso’s death in order to retrieve casts and plaster models from the studio. See letter from Francesco Rosso to Mario Vianello Chiodo, April 5, 1928, Archives of Marco Vianello Chiodo, London. The French sculptor Marcel Renard is known to have been living in this space by 1938 and may have occupied it even earlier after arriving in Paris in 1920. Sharon Hecker, “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art,” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, exh cat., ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 23–68; and Sharon Hecker, “Fleeting Revelations: The Demise of Duration in Medardo Rosso’s Wax Sculpture,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 131–53. Sharon Hecker, “The Modern Italian Sculptor as International Entrepreneur: The Case of Medardo Rosso,” in Art Crossing Borders: The International Art Market in the Age of Nation States, ed. Jan Baetens and Dries Lyna (Leiden: E. J. Brill, forthcoming). Joris-Karl Huysmans, L’art moderne (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1883), 249–82; new materials for sculpture are discussed on page 254. The Neapolitan critic Vittorio Pica noted this in his review of Huysmans’s L’art moderne in “Un critico d’arte,” La Domenica Letteraria, December 23, 1883. Rosso may have read Pica’s review in Milan. On the connotations of wax for Rosso’s sculpture, see Sharon Hecker, “Fleeting Revelations,” 131–53.

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12. On the lost wax technique in nineteenth-century France, see Elisabeth Lebon, FaireFonte au sable-Fonte à cire perdue (Paris: Éditions Ophrys, 2012). 13. See for example Medardo Rosso to Gottfried Eissler, September 1903, in Lettere di Medardo Rosso a Gottfried e Hermann Eissler, file “Medardo Rosso,” CA 14, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice. The collection is unpublished except for three letters, two of which are dated September 1903. The third is undated. All three are published with transcription errors in Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 99–107. 14. For a critical study of the artist’s studio, see Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, and AnneSophie Lehmann, eds., Hiding, Making, Showing Creation: The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). 15. Rosso’s approach builds upon a trope that was already evident in the descriptions of other experimental sculptors, such as those of Auguste Préault: “L’individualité . . . de M. Préault pourrait bien n’être appréciée que par un petit nombre d’adeptes” (the individuality . . . of M. Préault might well only be appreciated by a small number of adepts). See Charles Paul Landon, Annales du Musée et de l’École moderne des beaux-arts (Paris: C. P. Landon, 1833), 184, quoted in Auguste Préault: Sculpteur romantique, 1809–1879, exh. cat. (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 27 (no. 15). Daumier’s private production of paintings was described in similar terms: “[Daumier] réserve la présentation de ses peintures à quelques amis. Au statuaire Préault, en premier, parce qu’il est l’un des plus près de son coeur” (Daumier reserves the presentation of his paintings for a few friends. For the sculptor Préault, in first place, because he [Préault] is one of the closest to his [Daumier’s] heart). Adolphe Tabarant, La vie artistique au temps de Baudelaire (Paris: Mercure de France, 1942), 245. 16. Alex Potts notes this about Rodin’s art, citing a comment by Rilke that Rodin’s sculptures remained “in some real sense attached to the artist.” Alexander Potts, “Dolls and Things: The Reification and Disintegration of Sculpture in Rodin and Rilke,” in Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honor of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians (London: Phaidon, 1994), 368. 17. “Rosso vendant une reproduction à un bourgeois est étonnant à voir. C’est une vrai scène de comédie inoubliable. Il prend l’infortuné Michet, il le tourne le nez dans la muraille lui enjoignant de rester dans cette posture de pénitence jusqu’à ce qu’il lui dise de se retourner. Puis il va à un grand bahut normand qui recèle l’œuvre qu’il veut [lui] vendre. Il [en] ouvre un battant de porte, plonge dans le bahut, en retire un morceau de peluche vert ou noir selon, le dispose, le drape sur une caisse en bois, ou une selle, puis vite court à la fenêtre, fait jouer les rideaux de l’atelier pour l’éclairage, la lumière [sic]. Et si le bourgeois inquiet risque un œil vers ces préparatifs, Rosso véhémentement lui enjoint de ne pas bouger, ce en le tutoyant: ‘Per Cristo, né té [sic] retourné [sic] pas!’. Enfin après une demi-heure d’adjurations et de recommandations, Rosso ayant situé la cire qu’il veut vendre sur le piédestal orné d’une peluche déclare: ‘Et mainténant [sic] régarde!’ Le bourgeois se retourne soulagé et devant tant de précautions déclare—que c’est superbe et généralement achète. S’il était mal convaincu il n’oserait pas le confesser et s’en irait tout de même avec l’objet.” Jehan Rictus, “Journal quotidien, 1898–1933,” April 26, 1899–June 2, 1899, Département de Manuscrits, NaFr 16102, entry dated May 12,

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18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

1899, 41r–41v, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. The text is reproduced, with minor transcription errors, in Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928 (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 152–53. Charles Morice, La littérature de tout à l’heure (Paris: Perrin, 1889). Alphonse Germain was one of the most active Symbolist critics of the 1890s. Germain (under the pseudonym “Kalophile Eremite”) called Rosso “un véritable impressionniste de la sculpture.” See Kalophile Eremite [Alphonse Germaine], “Chroniques, IV. Les arts: Les expositions: La Bodinière,” L’Ermitage, December 1893, 372–73. On Germain, see Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-siècle Parisian Art Criticism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 171–83. “l’impressionniste de la sculpture.” Charles Morice, “Les passants: Medardo Rosso,” Le Soir, September 25, 1895. “La cire, sa matière préferée et la seule, sans doubte, qui se prête aux exigences de cette conception d’art.” Ibid. “tant de têtes de femmes curieuses ou, charmantes.” Ibid. “c’est l’échange des sentiments,—et c’est l’impression que cet échange suscite dans la sensibilité de l’artiste.” Ibid. “le moyen de surprendre et de rendre, dans leur vérité à la fois immédiate et profonde, les impressions de la vie, . . . des relations vitales. . . . Il veut montrer sur un visage l’impression réciproque de l’être lui-même et de ceux qui l’entourent: l’instant de relation, qui transforme, non seulement la physionomie, mais encore les traits eux-mêmes: l’instant de vérité, que la pose ne peut donner.” Ibid. “A mi-côte de Montmartre, au premier tournant de la rue Caulaincourt, non loin du Cate’s [sic] cottage de Steinlen, en plein terrain vague, on peut voir un bicoque en planches accotées à de bizarres baraques, vrai campement de forains. L’habitant de céans est ce rude Mîlanais qu’Auguste Rodin nous fit connaître: Medardo Rosso. Il vit là entre ses cloisons branlantes, devant les vastes fourneaux qu’il a maçonnés lui-même. . . . C’est don soit dans sa fabrique de la rue Caulaincourt, soit dans son petit musée du boulevard des Batignolles qu’il faut visiter ses dernières créations. . . . Rosso ne sculpte pas la matière; il la polit, l’écorche, l’estompe, la patine, et, comme magiquement, l’anime.” Santillane, “La vie parisienne: Petits salons,” Gil Blas, October 27, 1895. “On a aussi parlé de M. Rosso le sculpteur. Ceci est plutôt une petite plaisanterie. M. Rosso est un fondeur adroit, expert aux trucs divers de son état. Mais de ce que M. Rodin eut un jour la courtoisie de répondre à une offre de M. Rosso en lui envoyant un bronze, il ne s’ensuit pas que cette politesse du maître, tambourinée par les naïfs, suffise à prôner cet ouvrier malin qui n’existe, artistiquement parlant, à aucun degré. M. Rosso étonne les bourgeois en leur vendant avec mystère des cires qui ne supportent qu’un seul éclairage, qui sont de mauvaises parodies, tripatouillées et teintées, des lithographies d’Eugène Carrière, et qui n’ont aucune qualité plastique durable. Cet impressionniste de la sculpture est encore un fervent du vague symbolique et de l’imprécis sentimental. Il ne faudrait rien exagérer: dans ces choses où rien n’est fait mais se devine, et où, avec rouerie, le praticien profite du hasard facile de l’esquisse en esquivant tout ce qui est malaisé, il n’y a pas de quoi nous recommencer les boniments de cénacle dont on nous a déjà tant de fois importunés. J’aime mieux finir sur une mention d’artiste qui, lui,

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27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

montre paisiblement aux adroits qu’on peut mêler le charme de l’esquisse à la science d’achévement la plus consommée, et à l’intellectualité la plus fortement systématique: allez voir chez Durand-Ruel les quatre cadres de M. Puvis de Chavannes.” Camille Mauclair, “Choses d’art,” Mercure de France 16 (December 1895): 410–13. “J’ai beaucoup été surpris d’une note du Mercure du mois de décembre, d’un article signé Mauclair. L’avez-vous lu? C’est un ignoble personnage qui n’est jamais entré dans mon atelier et que ça fait trois ans que je ne sors pas ce que j’ai fait . . . qu’est ce que vous en dites? C’est vraiment crapule.” Medardo Rosso to Auguste Rodin, undated, Fonds historiques, Ros-5401, Musée Rodin, Paris. The passage is quoted in Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 91. Giovanni Lista is the only Rosso scholar to have discussed Mauclair’s review (Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 91). Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-siècle Parisian Art Criticism, 151–71; William C. Clark, “Camille Mauclair and the Religion of Art” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1976). Mauclair himself wrote this in his memoirs: “Il me semblait alors essentiel, en signe d’un véritable avancement littéraire, d’être admis à écrire au Mercure de France” (It seemed to me at the time essential, as a sign of a veritable literary advancement, to be admitted to and write for the Mercure de France). Camille Mauclair, Servitude et grandeur littéraires (Paris: Ollendorff, 1922), 39. “l’oublie de la composition et l’erreur de consumer la vie à faire des études et des morceaux—études pour quoi? morceaux de quoi?—qui a mené les peintres à négliger la figure, c’est-à dire à tuer à moitié au moins l’art plastique.” Camille Mauclair, “Expositions récentes,” Mercure de France 51 (March 1894): 266–71, quoted in Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-siècle Parisian Art Criticism, 162. Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-siècle Parisian Art Criticism, 164. Ibid., 151. “Que Mauclair fasse la critique dans la Revue des Deux Mondes ou dans le Journal de la Mode, je comprends, mais dans le Mercure! . . . À chaque numéro, à chaque exposition de peintres, il me cogne. . . . [L]’estime de Degas et autres me suffit. Mais parce qu’à tort et à travers, sans aucune des connaissances voulues pour juger peintures, il dit du mal de tout ce qui a le courage d’une idée, de tout ce qui n’est pas officiel, pas salonier. Mauclair est un Albert Wolff futur. A l’entendre, tout écrivain qui ne sort pas de Normale est un ignorant vaniteux, etc. Mais attention, Mauclair est là qui veille à la sécurité artistique.” Paul Gauguin, Lettres à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue (Paris: Grasset, 1946), 333. “ce sont et ce seront toujours des imbéciles par grâce d’état.” Camille Mauclair, “Lettre sur la peinture,” Mercure de France 55 (July 1894): 270, quoted in Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-siècle Parisian Art Criticism, 165. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 84–91. For an account of Rodin’s attempts to publicly denigrate the reputation of the French sculptor Albert Bartholomé, see Jacques de Caso, “Introduction,” in Albert Bartholomé: Catalogue raisonné, ed. Thérèse Burollet (Paris: Artena, 2016). I thank Dr. Burollet and Dr. de Caso for sharing this information with me in advance of the book’s publication.

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38. “hostilités du clan des rodiniens contre Rosso.” Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 87. 39. Mauclair’s belittlement of the fact that Rodin gave a bronze to Rosso might have derived from personal jealousy. Rodin gifted works to many critics (Geffroy, Mirbeau, RogerMarx), but he gave nothing to Mauclair until several years after the Balzac affair in 1901, even though Mauclair had expressed eagerness to receive a work. See Joy Newton, “Camille Mauclair and Auguste Rodin,” Nottingham French Studies 30, no. 1 (1990): 39–55. 40. This passage is quoted in English translation in Jacques de Caso, David d’Angers: Sculptural Communication in the Age of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 38. 41. “je préfère la façon simple, un peu froide, mais trés-élevée dont nos sculpteurs comprennent la statuaire. En Italie, le principal mérite revient au praticien, chez nous il appartient à l’artiste.” Maxime du Camp, Les beaux-arts à l’Exposition Universelle et aux Salons de 1863–67 (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1867), 344–45, quoted in Nancy J. Scott, Vincenzo Vela (New York: Garland, 1979), 2:361. 42. “trompe-l’oeil; c’est le triomphe du praticien sur le sculpteur, du metier sur l’art, de l’exécution puérile sur la forme et sur l’idée.” A. de Montaiglon, “La Sculpture,” in L’art moderne à l’Exposition de 1878, ed. L. Gonse (Paris: Quintin, 1879), 68. 43. “cette abominable sculpture de l’Italie contemporaine, ces dessus de pendule en stéarine, ces femmes mièvres, érigées d’aprés des dessins de gravure de modes.” Joris-Karl Huysmans, L’art moderne, 252. 44. “voici un sculpteur italien qui sort joliment des italienneries habituelles. Ce n’est pas un dentellier en marbre, faisant un travail exquis, mais un peu trop mièvre et précieux.” Edmond Thiaudière, “Au salon: La sculpture—Les bustes, II, Medardo Rosso,” L’Opinion, June 2, 1886. 45. See signed letter from Charles Morice to Auguste Rodin, January 3, 1896, Fonds historique, Mor-4511, Musée Rodin, Paris, cited but not transcribed in Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 90–91. 46. “vibration ininterrompue”; “clairvoyance supérieure.” Charles Morice, “Medardo Rosso,” Le Grand Journal, March 12, 1896. 47. “quelle science ne faut il pas pour atteindre à cette simplicité?” Ibid. 48. “en plaine harmonie avec celle des poêtes nouveaux.” Ibid. 49. “La chose envolée / Qu’on sent qui fuit, d’une âme en allée, / Vers d’autres cieux, à d’autres amours.” Paul Verlaine, “Art poètique,” Paris moderne: Revue littéraire et artistique 2, no. 31 (1882): 144–45. 50. For its use by Roger-Marx on Monet, see Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and SelfReflection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 233. 51. “à force de maîtrise, oublie et nous fait oublier la matière, la forme même pour nous donner, plus nette, plus intense, plus seule, l’expression! Ne mettre dans l’œuvre que l’essentiel.” Charles Morice, “Medardo Rosso,” Le Grand Journal, March 12, 1896. 52. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 99. The originals are in the Charles Morice Papers, box 5, folder 8, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

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53. “Je note que je suis depuis longtemps sans nouvelles de Cerblanc, Baur, et Rosso.” Entry dated Saturday, July 11, 1896, in Charles Morice, “Petits journaux,” II, June 22–August 26, 1896, Charles Morice Papers, box 2, folder 32, SPC.MSS.LT016, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia. 54. “j’attends.” Entry dated Thursday, November 5, 1896, in Charles Morice, “Petits journaux,” II, August 27–November 18, 1896, Charles Morice Papers, SPC.MSS.LT016, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia. 55. At other times, Rosso expressed his mistrust of critics, whom he once qualified to his Venetian friend Mario Vianello Chiodo as “quei là de sota” (quelli di sotto) (those underneath). Mario Vianello Chiodo to Margaret Scolari Barr, June 2, 1960, Archives of Marco Vianello Chiodo, London. 56. Charles Morice, La peinture en 1905: “L’enquête sur les tendances actuelles des arts plastiques” de Charles Morice, ed. Philippe Dagen (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1986). There is no mention of Rosso in Morice’s biographies. See Paul Delsemme, Un théoricien du symbolisme: Charles Morice (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1958). Lista footnotes Morice’s autobiography (“Quarante ans de journalisme, presse et parlement, souvenirs et anecdotes,” 4 vols., unpublished manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), but this document contains very little information on Morice’s activities as an art critic and makes no mention of Rosso. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 84. 57. Camille de Sainte-Croix was included in the journalist Jules Huret’s Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Survey of the Literary Evolution, 1891), which appeared as a series of articles in L’echo de Paris, where he was praised by the Symbolist poet, novelist, and critic Remy de Gourmont and by the literary figures Paul Margueritte and Jean Ajalbert. See Edmond Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Charpentier, 1891), 48–51, 135, 235; and Camille de Sainte-Croix, Edouard Manet (Paris: H. Fabre, 1909). 58. “aventures intellectuelles, une chasse passionnée aux idées et aux impressions.” Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March 1896): 378. 59. “[l]ui seul peut donner ce que ne donnera jamais le praticien décorateur doublé de son mouleur.” Ibid., 390. 60. “[c]elle qu’ordonna préalablement le cerveau de l’artiste en réglant la composition et la construction sur le sentiment exact des valeurs et de la perspective.” Ibid., 391. 61. “animés d’une pensée.” Ibid., 390. In contrast to the many unsustained relationships between Rosso and his critics, Sainte-Croix remained faithful to Rosso during his Parisian years. 62. The sculpture cannot be dated precisely, which has led to disagreement among scholars. Caramel dates it to 1895–96 based on stylistic reasons. Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858– 1928), exh. cat., ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 140–41. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci date the work to 1896–1897 (Medardo Rosso, 182). They base their later dating on the fact that Morice does not mention the work in his article of 1895. Charles Morice, “Les passants: Medardo Rosso,” Le Soir, September 25, 1895, 2. Morice, however, discusses very few works. Rosso himself gave no dates on his photographs of the work, but he did provide various titles to different authors. On one photo, he wrote “Paris la nuit / Impression de Boulevard / esterieur [sic].” This photo first appeared in Nino Barbantini, Medardo Rosso (Venice:

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63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

Neri Pozza, 1950), plate 26. Camille de Sainte-Croix mentions a work called Coup de Vent that seems to partially match the description of this sculpture, although he claims it was made in Milan (“Medardo Rosso,” 382). The first photograph and exact description of the work only appear in 1902, titled Impression de Boulevard la nuit, Paris, 1898 and owned by “Dr. Noblet, villa de Gesains-sur-Aube [sic].” Edmond Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture: Auguste Rodin et Medardo Rosso (Paris: Nouvelle Revue, 1902), facing page 103. In the body of his essay, Claris describes the work as “une Impression de la place Clichy” (ibid., 22). A photograph of the work appears in the Cremettei Gallery exhibition under the title Rosso-Paris la Nuit-Impression Boulevard extérieur. Eugene Cremetti Gallery, ed., Medardo Rosso: Impressions, exh. cat. (Paris: Herbert Clarke, 1906), 36. A photo also appears on the cover of Louis Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso (Paris: Socièté nouvelle, 1909). But in the same year, Ardengo Soffici titled it Impressione de la Piazza Clichy in “Medardo Rosso,” La Voce, May 27, 1909, 100. Titles in the posthumous literature have continued to shift. An especially odd title is given by Mino Borghi in his monograph, written together with Rosso’s son Francesco. Borghi describes the work as a dancing couple: “Parigi di notte, detta anche Impressione di Boulevard o Coppie danzanti, 1895” (Paris by Night, also called Impression of the Boulevard or Dancing Couple, 1895). Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso (Milan: Il Milione, 1950), 68. The title most commonly adopted today is the one used by Luciano Caramel in Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 141: Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci have recently changed the title to Impression de boulevard, le soir (Paris la nuit) (Medardo Rosso, 182) but no publication during Rosso’s life refers to the work with the words “le soir.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci believe that Rosso formed the work directly in plaster (Medardo Rosso, 192); the photographs do not allow us to know whether it was first made in clay or plaster. Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne. The text first appeared in Le Figaro in three installments on November 26 and 29, and December 3, 1863. It was republished in 1869 in L’Art romantique. See Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 2:695. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 279. “Cher ami / J’ai une piece trois metres pour deux voudrier vous me l’exposer dans votre Pavillon. Je vous serais toujours obbligé.” Medardo Rosso to August Rodin, undated, Fonds historique, Ros-5410, Musée Rodin, Paris, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 104. The letter is undated, but the mention of Rodin’s “Pavilion” confirms that Rosso wrote it during Rodin’s preparation of his Alma Pavilion rather than, as Caramel believes, in 1896. It must be dated between Rodin’s signing of the contract for the pavilion on October 27, 1899, and its opening on June 1, 1900. See Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, ed., Rodin en 1900: L’exposition de l’Alma, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001). Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (1979): 34. Nancy Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion: The Art of Walking in Late-NineteenthCentury Paris,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 4 (2005): 666.

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69. The work’s title has remained constant, except for one early possible mention by Camille de Sainte-Croix of a work called Sportman (“Medardo Rosso,” 388). The fact that the work was never exhibited in the 1890s makes its date of creation uncertain. Luciano Caramel gives the date as 1894 (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 138). The work was dated 1893 in Les Archives biographiques contemporaines (Paris: n.p., 1906), 70. Mola and Vittucci date the work to 1894, citing Rosso’s period of friendship with Henri Rouart and Edgar Degas, who was interested in horseracing (Medardo Rosso, 152). Degas, however, never depicted a bookie. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci date a photograph of the work based on a closet that they believe was not in Rosso’s studio at rue Batignolles, thereby concluding that the photo was taken at rue Cauchois in 1894 (Medardo Rosso, 152). The use of the furniture alone as proof is difficult to confirm. 70. Luciano Caramel titles the work Uomo che legge and cautiously dates it to 1894, but he does not exclude 1895 as a possible date (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 139). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci slightly vary the title of the work, L’uomo che legge, and date it to 1894 based on stylistic reasons (Medardo Rosso, 156). During Rosso’s time, the title Uomo che legge accanto allo specchio was also used (Ugo Ojetti, “Medardo Rosso,” Corriere della Sera, May 31, 1910). Uomo che legge il giornale accanto allo specchio was used as well (Ferdinando Paolieri, “La Prima mostra Italiana dell’Impressionismo nelle sale del Lyceum,” Fieramosca, April 28, 1910). Other slight variations on the title are noted by Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 303). Etha Fles titled the work Portrait de M. X. (homme qui lit) in a letter of November 3, 1914, to museum director Nino Barbantini at the Archivio della Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice. 71. The works, often considered to be portraits, hover between figuration and abstraction, and their subjects can only be inferred from their titles. Although scholars link their iconography to Degas and his horserace scenes, Degas never depicted a bookie or a man reading. 72. Rosso’s thinking about Ratapoil may have begun before he arrived in Paris. A disregard for the vertical axis of gravity was already evident in Milanese sculpture in small works made by Giuseppe Grandi during the 1870s. One wonders, given the corkscrew-like body of Grandi’s Mareshal Ney (Marshal Ney, 1874), whether he too had been inspired by Daumier’s Ratapoil—a visual connection often noted in studies of Grandi. Like Rosso, Grandi could have already seen the many lithographic depictions of Ratapoil in Milan but not the sculpture. 73. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 54. 74. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 73–74. 75. “le corps a quitté le repos, l’âme n’a pas quitté le sommeil. Les pieds sont privés de mouvement. La tête est lourde de songes. D’un pas de somnambule, il marche, et en marchant . . . il crée.” Robert de la Sizeranne, “Les portraits d’hommes aux Salons de 1898,” Revue des Deux Mondes, June 1, 1898, 637. 76. “son rêve inachevé s’avance.” Ibid. 77. “ses yeux semblent regarder en dedans un spectacle qu’il est seul à voir.” Ibid. 78. “les efforts d’intellectualité.” Caran d’Ache, “Devant la statue: Les efforts d’intellectualité,” Psst . . .!, May 28, 1898. Reprinted in Alain Beausire, “À charge et à décharge,” in 1898: Le Balzac de Rodin, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1998), 142 (fig. 51).

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79. “éffort cérébral.” [Un Parisien], “Bavardage,” Le Radical, May 5, 1898, quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” in 1898: Le Balzac de Rodin, 82. 80. “fantôme de plâtre.” Félix Duquesnel, “Àpropos de la statue de Balzac,” Le Petit Journal, May 24, 1898, quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” 78. 81. “au défi du bon sens, en dépit des plus simples notions de la statuaire.” “Expositions des beaux-arts à la galerie des machines à Paris,” Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg, May 13, 1898, quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” 77. 82. “mais c’est un bonhomme de neige! Regardez comme il fond! Et il penche déjà sur le côté: il va tomber.” Jean Villemer, “Au jour le jour: Le vernissage,” Le Figaro, May 1, 1898. 83. “aberration mentale.” Jean Rameau, “La victoire de M. Rodin,” Le Gaulois, May 3, 1898. 84. “c’est fou—C’est Balzac à Charenton, dans une robe de chambre d’hôpital.” Jean Villemer, “Au jour le jour: Le vernissage,” Le Figaro, May 1, 1898. 85. Gaston Leroux, “À Paris, le vernissage,” Le Matin, May 1, 1898, quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” 77. 86. “C’est la foule!” Félix Duquesnel, “Àpropos de la statue de Balzac,” Le Petit Journal, May 24, 1898, quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” 78. 87. “coup de folie inconcevable.” Léon Bloy, quoted by Gustave Guiches in La Nouvelle Revue, March 1, 1936, quoted without the title of the article, which cannot be located, in Alain Beausire, “À charge et à décharge,” 143. 88. Erwin W. Straus, “The Upright Posture,” Psychiatric Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1952): 529–61. 89. Bernard Berenson, The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887– 1924, ed. Rollin van N. Hadley (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 142. 90. “C’est un phoque.” Gaston Leroux, “À Paris, le vernissage,” Le Matin, May 1, 1898; “un crapaud dans un sac.” A. B., Le bien public, May 10, 1898, both quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” 77. It is important to distinguish these caricaturing comments from those associated with the negative aspects of Realism and women in Degas’s bathers described by Anthea Callen in The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 29–31. 91. “Exposition des beaux-arts à la galerie des machines à Paris,” Journal de Petersbourg, May 13, 1898, quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” 77. 92. “dolmen déséquilibré.” Philippe Gille, “Balzac et M. Rodin,” Le Figaro, May 18, 1898, quoted in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” 78. 93. “Je garderai toujours pour lui [Rosso] une admiration émue, et par le hasard d’une conversation, de longues années plus tard, avec Giacometti, j’apprendrai que nous éprouvions ce sentiment l’un et l’autre.” Jean-Paul Clébert, Mythologie d’André Masson (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1971), 16–17, italics in original. 94. See entry Edouard Papet, “Fugitifs,” in Daumier, 1808–1879, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999), 290.

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95. The title was given by Champfleury when the work was first exhibited at the major Daumier retrospective at Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1878. See Exposition des peintures et dessins de H. Daumier: Galeries Durand-Ruel, exh. cat. (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1878), nos. 234 and 235. 96. Arsène Alexandre, H. Daumier: L’homme et l’œuvre (Paris: H. Laurens, 1888), 339. 97. The photographs do not allow us to assess the dates, genesis, or history of Rosso’s “monument.” Based on its name, the work can be related to Rosso’s similarly titled Impression de Boulevard. Femme à la voilette, which was perhaps originally part of the group. In 1896 Sainte-Croix wrote, “un prêtre dont la robe est soulevée par une bourrasque et traité de dos, sans que le devant soit exécutée” (a priest whose robe is raised by a gust of wind is made from the back, without the front being executed), but he called the sculpture Coup de Vent (Gust of Wind) and said it was made in Milan. Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” 382. 98. Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-siècle Parisian Art Criticism, 73. 99. Yveling Rambaud, Silhouettes d’artistes (Paris: Société française d’editions d’art, 1899), 229. 100. The first to note this was Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), 113. 101. “le linee corrispondono cosi a due situazioni psicologiche differenti: la solitudine e lo scambio, l’energia e la tenerezza.” Ibid. 102. Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991; repr., Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 140. The reference is to the Getty edition. 103. Mari Kálmán Meller, “Degas’s Place de la Concorde: Vicomte Lepic and His Daughters,” Burlington Magazine 145, no. 1201 (2003): 274. 104. Nancy Forgione, “Everyday Life in Motion,” 671. 105. Giovanni Lista was the first to make this comparison (Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 80). It was repeated by Anne Pingeot in Italie 1880–1910: Arte alla prova della modernità, exh. cat., ed. Gianna Piantoni and Anne Pingeot (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2000), 186. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci disagree: they believe that there is no comparison to be made between the single viewpoint they see proposed by Rosso in his Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit and the multiple viewpoints shown in Rodin’s Bourgeois de Calais (Medardo Rosso, 186). 106. “chiedendo all’occhio dello spettatore di raccordarli.” Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 113. 107. “un solo ‘orientamento nello spazio.’ ” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 186. 108. Luciano Caramel titles the work Conversazione in Giardino and dates it to ca. 1896 (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 141). Margaret Scolari Barr, who believed that the work was a self-portrait of the artist based on family legend, dated it to this time as well (Medardo Rosso, 40). However, this title was used for the first time only in a posthumous exhibition. See Prima Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale, exh. cat. (Rome: Enzo Pinci, 1931), 50–51. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci retitle it La conversazione, without explanation, and date it later, to ca. 1899, noting the fact that the work is not mentioned by Camille de

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Sainte-Croix in his 1896 article (Medardo Rosso, 200). The photos published in Rosso’s lifetime give the work’s title as Une Conversation and its date as 1892, in Edmond Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture, 119. This is also the date given in Nino Barbantini, Medardo Rosso (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1950), plate xxvii. But Rosso wrote the date “1899” on his photograph of the work preserved in the Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. 109. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 31. 1 10. Fred Licht, “Origins of Modern Sculpture: The Italian Contribution,” in Chiseled with a Brush: Italian Sculpture, 1860–1925, from the Gilgore Collections, exh. cat., ed. Ian Wardropper and Fred Licht (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994), 25. 111. Timothy Mathews, Alberto Giacometti: The Art of Relation (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 6.

8 . O N T H E M O V E : T H E Q U E S T F O R I N T E R N AT I O N A L R E C O G N I T I O N

1. Rosso criticizes what he calls the concept of a “patria limitata” (limited homeland) in “Concepimento-Limite-Infinito,” L’Ambrosiano, January 12, 1926. He conceives of an art that crosses national borders in “Chi largamente vede, largamente pensa: Ha il gesto,” L’Ambrosiano, January 15, 1926. See also notes 4 and 5 below. 2. Sharon Hecker, “Navigating International Networks for Modern Sculpture at the Fin de siècle: The Case of Medardo Rosso,” in Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Grace Brockington and Sarah Victoria Turner (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, forthcoming); and Sharon Hecker, “The Modern Italian Sculptor as International Entrepreneur: The Case of Medardo Rosso,” in Art Crossing Borders: The International Art Market in the Age of Nation States, ed. Jan Baetens and Dries Lyna (Leiden: E. J. Brill, forthcoming). 3. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci cite two different dates for Rosso’s acquisition of his French citizenship: July 1902 (on page 372) and 1904 (on page 373) in the same publication: Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009). Giovanni Lista gives the correct date but without citing a source in Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), 308. Luciano Caramel cites a document that attests to Rosso’s citizenship in Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat., ed. Luciano Caramel (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 52 and 59. For the original document, see n. 1902X 003313, Archives Nationales, Ministère de l’intérieur, Paris. 4. “M. R. era nato il 21/6/1858, a Torino (ma egli non amava dire in che città era nato; non gli piacevano tali precisazioni, sempre per il suo concetto nemico delle classificazioni; a chi insisteva in proposito, preferiva rispondere che era nato in treno, dato che suo padre era funzionario delle ferrovie.” Mario Vianello Chiodo to Margaret Scolari Barr, November 27, 1959, unpublished, Archives of Marco Vianello Chiodo, London. 5. “Rosso est Italien de naissance. Cela n’a pour lui aucune importance: il est prêt à apprendre sans sourciller qu’il est, non Piémontais, mais Chinois ou Papou. Son internationalisme est simple, net, radical et fougueux. Il faut l’entendre parler des frontières et des préventions que les sots ont contre un homme parce qu’il use d’une langue différente de la leur ou bien parce que selon le mot de Flaubert, il figure en vert sur la carte alors

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6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

qu’eux s’y montrent en rouge.” Louis Piérard, “Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso,” Société nouvelle 15, no. 33 (1909): 57; reprinted in Louis Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso (Paris: Société Nouvelle, 1909). Jacques de Caso, “Serial Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, ed. Jean Wasserman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3. Sharon Hecker, “Reflections on Repetition in Rosso’s Art,” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, exh. cat., ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 23–67; Sharon Hecker, “An Enfant Malade by Medardo Rosso from the Collection of Louis Vauxcelles,” Burlington Magazine 152, no. 1292 (2010): 727–35; and Sharon Hecker et al., Medardo Rosso’s Bambino ebreo: A Critical Study (London: Archetype, 2016). Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 67. Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, ed., Rodin en 1900: L’exposition de l’Alma, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001). This information is given without a source in Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 147. The rules of the Exposition did not explicitly state that foreigners could not exhibit in the French Pavilion; however, the reports indicate that a separate procedure existed for foreigners and their national pavilions. See Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris: Rapport général administrative et technique par M. Alfred Picard (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 4:4; Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris: Règlement général (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1897), n.p.; and Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris: Direction générale de l’exploitation (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900), 24. Class 9 included sculptures, medals, and engravings on precious stone. The president of this category was Eugène Guillaume. Rodin is listed as one of the forty members of the jury for this class. See Camera di Commercio Italiana in Parigi to Medardo Rosso, April 15, 1900, unpublished, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. The letter has been annotated by Rosso. The letter lists the following works: 1. testina di bimbo malato, in cera; 2. testa di bimbo, alto-rilievo in bronzo (0.30 × 0.30 × 0.40); 3. testa di donna ridente, alto-rilievo in bronzo (0.90 × 0.80 × 0.70); 4. testa di giovane, bronzo su piedestallo [sic] rotondo; and 5. ritratto di M. Ronard [sic]. “Quel toupé [sic] Jai exposé ce que je croyai—autrement j’aurai tout enlevé. Des nullité a venue a permettre d’exposer dal Ferarrio Boito,” published with minor transcription errors in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 59. Rosso also told this story to Vianello Chiodo, who later related it to Margaret Scolari Barr. See Mario Vianello Chiodo to Margaret Scolari Barr, November 27 1959, unpublished, Archives of Mario Vianello Chiodo, London. For the commissioners of the Italian Pavilion, see “Regio Decreto n. 446, 08/10/1898,” Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, November 5, 1898. See “Regio Decreto n. 363 e n. 366,” Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, October 9, 1899; and “Regio Decreto n. 385,” Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, September 10, 1898. For Boito as president of the “Commissione centrale per l’insegnamento artistico industriale,” see Annalisa Barbera Pesando, Camillo Boito e la Commissione centrale per

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16. 17. 18.

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22.

23.

l’insegnamento artistico-industriale (1884–1908), http://www.accademiadibrera.milano .it/sites/default/files/PESANDO_industriartistica.pdf. Rosso’s exclusion from the catalogue is described in “A l’exposition décennale,” L’Éclair, May 22, 1900. A biographical entry on Rosso notes that it occurred “par une exclusion injustifiable” (due to an unjustifiable exclusion). See Les Archives biographiques contemporaines (Paris: n.p., 1906), 70. Rieuse, Impression d’Enfant au Soleil, Femme à la voilette, Portrait de Femme, and Enfant malade were noted in “A l’exposition décennale,” L’Éclair, May 22, 1900. Luciano Caramel also cites an article by a certain “Romain” titled “Les propos artistiques” and dated August 23, 1900, but he does not note the name of the newspaper (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 51). “testa di bimbo, alto-rilievo in bronzo (0.30 × 0.30 × 0.40).” See note 12 above. “testa di giovane, bronzo su piedestallo [sic] rotondo.” See note 12 above. Maryanne Stevens, “The Exposition Universelle: ‘This Vast Competition of Effort, Realisation and Victories,’ ” in 1900: Art at the Crossroads, exh. cat., ed. Robert Rosenblum, MarryAnne Stevens, and Ann Dumas (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 57. “c’était presque par miracle si, dans la section italienne, le plus grand artiste vivant dont puisse s’honorer l’Italie, Medardo Rosso, avait pu glisser dans un coin quatre de ses œuvres, qui sont, à notre avis, les quatre plus rares merveilles d’art de cette Exposition universelle. C’est avec plaisir que je reviens sur ce fait aujourd’hui pour noter que lorsque la section italienne ouvrira ses portes, les choses auront tout à fait changé par un brusque retour d’opinion. Cinq et non plus quatre des œuvres de Rosso, l’Enfant malade, le Portrait de Madame X . . ., la Rieuse, Au Soleil, le Soir au boulevard, auront déménagé du coin obscur qui leur était assigné pour figurer en place d’honneur, dans le salon où sont placées les toiles de Segantini, le peintre, mort il y a deux ans. Ajoutons que la vigoureuse intervention de deux membres du jury, le député sculpteur Ferrari et le peintre Jacovacci, a puissamment contribué à ce que la section d’art italienne s’honorât par cet acte au lieu de se déshonorer, comme l’ont fait, chez nous, nos jurys français.” Jean Mitron, “Echos du jour: Les lettres et les arts,” La Petite République socialiste, May 19, 1900. See Sharon Hecker, “Back-to-Back: Medardo Rosso, Giovanni Segantini, and the Outsider in Italian Modern Art,” in Orizzonte Nord-Sud: Protagonisti dell’arte europea ai due versanti delle Alpi, 1840–1960, exh. cat., ed. Marco Franciolli and Guido Comis (Milan: Skira, 2015), 170–85. Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904), 1:295, published in English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, trans. Florence Simmonds and George W. Chrystal (London: W. Heinemann, 1908), 2:24. “le Rodin italien, qui depuis 15 ans exerce une influence très grand sur ses compatriotes et même sur les étrangers.” B. D., “A l’Exposition: Les catalogues,” L’indépendant de Paris, July 2, 1900. “A la sculpture, il y a au premier étage une superbe série d’œuvres de Gemito, ce remarquable maître dont je viens d’écrire le nom.” Arsène Alexandre, “Les beaux-arts à l’Exposition: Espagne, Italie,” Le Figaro, July 16, 1900.

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24. “des esquisses souvent curieuses, parfois incomplètement venues.” Ibid. 25. “Est-il encore temps de rappeler aux jurys compétents qu’il serait impardonnable après tant de fautes, de ne pas faire au moins pour l’étranger ce qu’on n’a pas su faire pour la France, en donnant les premières récompenses de sculpture au statuaire belge Jef Lambeaux, dont le Triomphe de la Femme est beau comme un très beau Rubens, et au sculpteur milanais Medardo Rosso, le génial créateur d’une formule d’art qui restera l’une des meilleures gloires de cette fin du dix-neuvième siècle.” Jean Mitron, “Les lettres et les arts,” La Petite République socialiste, June 16, 1900. 26. “Qualora i nostri timori dovessero venire giustificati dai fatti, sarebbe malaccorti coloro che tentano di fare ricadere la colpa dell’insuccesso esclusivamente sugli artisti. Poichè qui, più che nella pittura, ve ne sono alcuni che hanno mostrato dell’audacia, gettandosi senza tentennamenti per vie nuove. Io non voglio citarne che uno—poichè Troubetskoy è passato nella sezione russa—Medardo Rosso, il quale ha saputo farsi largo a Parigi, dove troppi soccombono, e tenere alto il nome del suo paese.” See “L’operato delle giurie artistiche,” Il Tempo, 1900. This review is found among Rosso’s press clippings but without the name of the author or date. I have not been able to locate this journal. 27. “Nella stessa sala del grande artista [Segantini] stanno esposte delle teste modellate da un certo Rosso, ma espresse con tanto sentimento e con tanta poesia e sopra tutto con un occhio così intellettuale nel [sic] interpretare la forma ambientata dal colore che veramente colpisce e sorprende. Ebbene nel vedere il mio entusiasmo davanti a queste buone qualità molti mi guardano con meraviglia altri mi danno del matto.” Archivio del ’900, MART, Fondo Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Gru.I.1.1.55, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. I thank Margherita d’Ayala Valva for this quote. 28. In the Manifesto of Futurist Painters written on February 11, 1910, in Milan, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini condemned the Italian establishment for ignoring Segantini and Rosso: “Domandate a questi sacerdoti del vero culto, a questi depositari delle leggi estetiche, dove siano oggi le opere di Giovanni Segantini. . . . Domandate loro dove sia apprezzata la scultura di Medardo Rosso!” (Ask these priests of the true cult, these guardians of esthetic laws, where are the works of Giovanni Segantini today. . . . Ask them where the sculptures of Medardo Rosso are appreciated!). Umberto Boccioni et al., Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi (Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1910), n.p. In 1912 Boccioni hailed Rosso as genial, poetic, and revolutionary but lamented that Rosso’s artistic project was “too isolated and fragmentary, lacking a synthetic thought that affirmed a law.” Umberto Boccioni, Manifesto tecnico della Scultura Futurista (Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1912), n.p. For a recent English translation of these manifestos, see Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 166–68, 178–84. 29. This is noted erroneously in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 372. 30. The French state bought a bronze statuette titled Léon Tolstoï montant “Délire” (Léon Tolstoi Mounted on “Delire,” 1899) from Paul Troubetzkoy, who exhibited in both the Italian and Russian Pavilions. This statuette was placed in the Luxembourg Museum in 1902. http://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/oeuvres-commentees/recherche /commentaire/commentaire_id/leon-tolstoi-montant-quotdelirequot-425.html.

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31. The history of Rosso’s exhibitions, critics, and collectors in Belgium has yet to be studied systematically. 32. Fles had come under the auspices of the society Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam as one of its charter members. See Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 13 (1962): 223. 33. Benno Tempel, “ ‘Such Absurdity Can Never Deserve the Name of Art’: Impressionism in the Netherlands,” Van Gogh Museum Journal (1999): 118–23, http://www.dbnl.org /tekst/_van012199901_01/_van012199901_01_0011.php. 34. Luciano Caramel gives the dates of the four-show run as January to April (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 51). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci believe that the show traveled until May (Medardo Rosso, 372). The exhibition catalogue cover notes the dates as January to February. It is not clear whether separate catalogues were made for each venue. See Tentoonstelling van schilderijen uit de moderne Fransche school en beeldhouwwerken van M. Rosso, Januari–Februari 1901: Arti et Amicitiae, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Arti et Amicitiae, 1901). 35. See Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” 223n10. Barr notes that Rieuse was added by hand. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci make several amendments to this list without citing an alternative source (Medardo Rosso, 372). 36. The portrait in bronze was likely the bronze cast of Madame Noblet that was owned by the Noblet family. The Impression d’enfant in wax may have been a cast of Bambino ebreo. 37. See Etha Fles, “Fransche kunst in het museum,” Groninger Courant, March 1, 1901. Margaret Scolari Barr quoted from this article in translation but without giving its title (“Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” 224). 38. Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” 223–24. 39. Etha Fles, “Fransche kunst in het museum.” 40. Ibid., 223. 41. Scholars identify Trebini as a founder or partner of the Milanese foundry Mazzantini, where Rosso cast his works. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 261. My research shows that Giovanni Francesco Trebini was actually a businessman and/or engineer, who in 1894 developed a machine for portable iceboxes. See Archivio Ditte, Camera di Commercio di Milano. 42. See Lorenzo Benapiani and Augusto Barattani, Ars: appunti critici illustrati alla mostra della Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente in Milano (Milan: Galli, 1886), 162. Rosso’s troubled relationship with Trebini is recorded in letters to the dealer Alberto Grubicy and to Rosso’s brother Michele, which are partially transcribed in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 56, 64. 43. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, 50. 44. See Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, undated, unpublished. All letters to Treu are preserved in the archives of the Skulpturensammlung at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, without accession numbers, and are unpublished. This letter contradicts Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci’s claim that Rosso repeated the Dutch tour of five works (Medardo Rosso, 372). The list of works returned to Rosso from Dresden (see note 47 below) further contradicts the claim that these were the same works as in the Dutch show.

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45. “C’est [something illegible erased] celle ci 8 oeuvres que j’expose.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 372. 46. “une cire et pas de grandes dimensions.” Ibid. 47. “1. le grand portrait bronze de Mons Rouart; 2. Le grand portrait bronze Madame X [likely the bronze cast of Madame Noblet] 3. Bronze petite figure homme malade à l’hopital (bronze) [sic]; 4. Grande cire femme impression de boulevard.” Medardo Rosso to Paul Hermann, September 6, 1901, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. 48. On Rodin and Germany, see J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Rodin-Studien (Munich: Prestel, 1983), 329–65. Georg Treu’s articles on Rodin include “Auguste Rodin,” Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 2 (1903): 81–86; and “Bei Rodin,” Kunst und Künstler (1904–5): 3–17. 49. Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, July 9, 1901, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. To give a measure of comparison, in 1894 Treu bought a plaster cast of the Age of Bronze for 186.77 marks (230 francs) and in 1904 a plaster cast of Rodin’s Thinker for 2,000 marks. By 1900, Rodin’s casts in noble materials had risen sharply in price: Treu bought Jean-Paul Laurens in bronze for 10,356.85 marks. He paid the same price for a bronze Jean d’Aire and a marble Eva. 50. The transaction is recorded in four letters. One is Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, March 14, 1902, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; the other three (which include two handwritten receipts) are undated and reside in the same archive. Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Kuenstlerakte Medardo Rosso, Vorgang 112, Bl. 1–26; Vorgang 150, Bl. 27–46. 51. The reason for the delayed entrance of the work into the museum’s collection has not been clarified. 52. Rosso sold a gilded bronze Emperor Vitellius and a Head of an Ancient Roman in cement, both said to be copied from ancient busts, to the Victoria and Albert Museum on a visit to London in 1896. See South Kensington Museum to Medardo Rosso, September 26, 1896, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. He also gave an Emperor Vitellius to Rodin as a gift, probably in 1894. Medardo Rosso to Auguste Rodin, undated but likely from 1894, published in Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 104. The Vitellius can no longer be found in the Musée Rodin collection. It is not mentioned by Mola and Vittucci in the catalogue raisonné as one of Rosso’s numerous casts of this work. 53. See Florence Rionnet, L’atelier de moulage du musée du Louvre (1794–1928) (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1996). 54. Mola and Vittucci contend that the work is “senza eccezioni, sempre sulla copia, sul calco, cosí che la trasformazione è nel passaggio da un materiale all’altro, d’altra sostanza e in patine diverse, ma la forma non cambia, resta quella dell’originale, l’opera dall’antico, insomma, è un lavoro sulla superficie e riguarda il volume solo a livello percettivo” (without exception, always on the copy, on the mold, so that the transformation is in the passage from one material to another, from one substance and in different patinas, but the form does not change, the original remains, the work from ancient art, in sum, is a work on the surface and has to do with the volume only on a perceptual level). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 340. See also Paola Mola, “Vergini, fauni e senatori: Sui modelli per le copie dell’antico al Museo Rosso di Barzio,” in Abitare il

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55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

museo: Le case degli scultori, ed. Mario Guderzo (Possagno: Fondazione Canova, 2014), 270. For a different description of Rosso’s process, see Volker Krahn, “Pastiche or Fake? A ‘Donatello’ by Medardo Rosso,” Apollo 566 (2009): 40–47. “Rosso ist typisches Schicksal des ehrgeizigen und unbekümmerten Ausländers in Paris. . . . Für das erste Pariser Brot hatte Rosso die Karre gezogen. Nichts hinderte ihn, sobald er sich rühren konnte, und dafür hatte er Ellbogen, nach seiner Überzeugung zu handeln. Die Konsequenz war die Rettung von der italienischen Mitgift: einer Geschicklichkeit, die ihn zum gefährlichen Fälscher von Werken aller Zeiten und Zonen machen konnte; Rettung vor der billigen Legende.” Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (1915), 3:472. This quote does not appear in the first German edition of 1904 or in the English translation of 1908. Evidently Meier-Graefe made omissions and additions to the second edition. See note 101 below on the editions of his book. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 60; and Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 148–50. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 22. Lista has not secured proof of Rosso’s supposed love of Donatello. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci feel that privately Rosso wrote that these works were “masterpieces” (Medardo Rosso, 335). However, the letter they cite as proof is addressed to collectors such as Gottfried Eissler and might be intended as a sales pitch. Medardo Rosso to Gottfried Eissler, September 1903, unpublished transcription by Alessandro De Stefani, L10, CA14-fasc., “Medardo Rosso,” Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice. Volker Krahn, “Pastiche or Fake?,” 42–43. See Philip Stephan, Paul Verlaine and the Decadence, 1882–90 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), 2–33. On Rictus and Verlaine, see Philippe Oriol, Jehan-Rictus: La vraie vie du poète (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon), 2015. The relationship between Rictus and Verlaine is further suggested by Rictus’s drawing Portrait de Paul Verlaine de profil (1895). See Inv. F-2013–2105, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. The receipt reads “riproduzione da mia mano,” replaced by “riproduzione fatta di mia mano.” Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, undated, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Rosso repeats this as: “Riprodotto e fuso da Medardo Rosso dall’originale del Vaticano a Roma.” Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, undated, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. There is no evidence that the work was in the Vatican collection, as first claimed by Rosso in his letter to Treu (see note 50) and later by Camille de Sainte-Croix in “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March 1896): 389. Sainte-Croix emphasizes that Rosso’s version is not a copy of the work in the Louvre but rather of a work in the Vatican. Paola Mola believes that it is a copy of a version of Vitellius in the Louvre (“Vergini, fauni e senatori,” 271). A Vitellius was once in the Capitoline Museums but is now no longer there. Another Vitellius can be found in the Museo Archeologico di Venezia. It is unclear whether Rosso would have had access to copies of these various casts. Giovanni Lista provides no support for his claims regarding Sutto’s life in Paris or his relationship with Rosso (Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 107, 298–99). Likewise,

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65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

Paola Mola does not provide any references for her claim that Rosso used Sutto as his founder upon arriving in Paris in exchange for recipes for alloys and patinas (“Vergini, Fauni e Senatori,” 273–74). Sutto’s name appears nowhere in official birth or death registers in the town of Acqui. “Exposition Universelle: Au pavillon italien,” Le Petit bleu, June 16, 1900. “Allez voir au palais de cette nation les admirables bronzes de Paul Sutto d’Acqui: le Vieillard, de Houdon; le Sénateur romain, le Cèsar du Louvre, le Mèdecin de Donatello, etc., etc. Sans extravagantes combinaisons de patines, sans trucs vulgaires, par la savante observation de modèle, par la compréhension physionomique de l’œuvre, l’excellent artiste a ressuscité les vieux secrets du bronze antique.” Jean Mitron, “Echos du jour: Petit carnet de l’exposition,” Le Petite République socialiste, June 7, 1900. Another reviewer wrote: “Nous serions heureux qu’on rectifiât les catalogues, et d’y voir figurer le Vieillard de Houdon, le Médecin de Donatello, le César, le Vitellius et le Sénateur romain, reproduction des œuvres exposées au musée du Louvre, que Sutto d’Acqui expose pour la plus grande joie des yeux” (We would be happy if the catalogues were rectified, and to see in them Houdon’s Old Man, Donatello’s Doctor, the Caesar, the Vitellius, and the Roman Senator, reproductions of works in the Louvre Museum, which Sutto d’Acqui exhibits for the greatest joy of our eyes). B. D., “A l’Exposition: Les catalogues,” L’indépendant de Paris, July 2, 1900. Not all of these works, however, are known to have been in the Louvre’s collection. “le nom de l’artiste Sutto d’Acqui, qui avec un talent supérieur, utilise pour la patine de ses œuvres, la méthôde du sculpteur Rosso.” B. D., “A l’Exposition: Les catalogues,” L’indépendant de Paris, July 2, 1900. The business card found in Rosso’s scrapbook reads: “P. SUTTO / FONDEUR D’OBJETS D’ART / CIRES PERDUES / Procédé du Sculpteur ROSSO/ADRESSE A PARIS: 4, Avenue de Villiers.” A similar card is found in the archives of the Musée Rodin, suggesting that Sutto called on Rodin to offer his services as a founder in lost wax. I thank Elisabeth Lebon for bringing it to my attention. See “Corriere di Parigi,” Nuova antologia 88, no. 172 (1900): 362, which describes “le riproduzioni sorprendenti del Sutto d’Acqui” (the surprising reproductions by Sutto d’Acqui) at the Exposition Universelle. Sutto also exhibited at the National Exhibition in Rome in 1911. A robbery of paintings from Sutto’s atelier is reported in “Petits faits,” Le petit Parisien, June 13, 1903. See Classes 92 à 97, vol. 15, Industries diverses, book 1 of Rapport du jury international de l’Exposition universelle de 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 506–7. Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, June 18, 1903 and July 10, 1903, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. This sculpture, never exhibited in Rosso’s lifetime, can no longer be found in the museum’s collection. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci give conflicting accounts of its fate: they say that it was sold (Medardo Rosso, 200) and that it was a gift (Medardo Rosso, 372). The Inventory Register of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden identifies the work as a “geschenk” (gift) in an entry dated March 22, 1902. Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, undated but written from Berlin, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

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73. Luciano Caramel (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 35) and Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 372) date the opening to February. However, the show’s opening date can now be confirmed as Jaunaury 5, 1902. It ran for a month and was not a solo exhibition as biographies have claimed. See Bianca Berdig, “Der Kunsthandel in Berlin: für moderne angewandte Kunst von 1897 bis 1914” (PhD diss, Kunsthistorisches Institut der Freien Universität Berlin, 2012), 503, http://www.diss.fu-berlin.de/diss/servlets /MCRFileNodeServlet/FUDISS_derivate_000000011935/BerdingxBiancaxDiss .x09.08.2012_klein.pdf. The dates are further confirmed by a letter from Keller und Reiner to Rosso. See Keller und Reiner to Rosso, January 24, 1902, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. The show was reviewed in R. D., “Aus dem Berliner Kunstleben,” National Zeitung, January 24, 1902. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci hypothesize that Rosso exhibited thirteen sculptures and seven photographs and that these same works went to Leipzig a few months later, but cite no evidence for this claim (Medardo Rosso, 372). 74. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, 74. 75. Ibid., 68. 76. Medardo Rosso to Walther Rathenau, September 25, 1903, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Luciano Caramel mistakes this for a sale to the Berlin Museum (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 52). Paola Mola believes that the work, now lost, was copied from the antique (Medardo Rosso, 338). However, I believe that it could also have been a bronze version of Rosso’s Bambina che ride, especially given its high price. 77. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci give the sale date of the Bambino ebreo as the “end of July to early September” but cite no source (Medardo Rosso, 292). Osthaus first mentions the acquisition of both Bambino ebreo and Bambino al sole in a newspaper article dated October 19, 1904. Therefore, the date of sale for both works might have been closer to October. See Karl Ernst Osthaus, “Folkwang,” Hagener Zeitung, October 19, 1904. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci further claim that the Enfant au soleil entered the collection of the Folkwang Museum in 1912 (Medardo Rosso, 287). This date is probably mistakenly derived from Kurt Freyer, Moderne Kunst (Hagen: Folkwang Museum, 1912), 9, in which both works are mentioned. However, the museum confirms that the Bambino al sole arrived in Osthaus’s collection in Hagen in 1904 and entered the Folkwang collection in 1922. See also Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus—Leben und Werk (Recklinghausen: Bongers, 1971), 179. I thank Dr. Kornelia Kröber, Archivist at the Osthaus Museum, for this information. 78. Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, undated, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. 79. Von Bode was responsible for the museum’s collection of plaster casts and was an expert in Renaissance bronzes. 80. Volker Krahn, “Pastiche or Fake?,” 40–47. 81. “Jahresberichte/Verein Kunstgewerbemuseum Leipzig,” Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig. See also Olaf Thormann, ed., Die Museumschronik von den Anfängen bis zum Jahr 1929, vol. 2, part 1, of 125 Jahre Museum für Kunsthandwerk Leipzig Grassimuseum (Leipzig: Passage-Verlag, 2003), 67. The opening date is uncertain, but the museum’s exhibits normally lasted for a month. Luciano Caramel believes that it was in autumn (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 53), but Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci claim

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82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

it was June, citing no source (Medardo Rosso, 372). See note 83 below for a review dated September 25, 1902, which suggests that it opened during that month. For Rosso’s description to Treu of his first meeting with Graul, see Medardo Rosso to Georg Treu, undated but written in Leipzig, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Graul returned the works on exhibition to Rosso with a packing list, itemizing thirteen pieces (six bronzes and seven waxes) as well as seven photographs plus four glass vitrines. See Richard Graul to Medardo Rosso, November 29, 1902, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. In 1908, the museum library received Claris’s publication in German as a gift from Rosso. The works were listed as “Bronzen: Strassen-Junge, Lachende Dame, Liegende Frau, l’Enfant au soleil, Liegender Kopf, Kinderkopf in der Sonne. Wachs: Impression de femme, Kind auf der Strasse, le compositeur, Mutter und Kind, ‘Bookmaker,’ Le malade à l’hôpital, Kinderkopf, kranken Kind.” Some seem to have repetitious titles (Kinderkopf in der Sonne and l’Enfant au soleil), and not all of the works are identifiable by their titles. For example, there is no work known as le compositeur. See Richard Graul to Medardo Rosso, November 9, 1902, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. See “Modernes Kunstgewerbe: Impressionistische Sculptur und Decoration,” Illustrirte Zeitung, September 25, 1902. See Richard Graul to Medardo Rosso, August 6, 1903, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Rosso recounts this sale to various other people. See Rosso to Gottfried Eissler, August– September 1903, unpublished transcription by Alessandro de Stefani, CA14-fasc. “Medardo Rosso,” Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice. Rosso also recounts the sale in a letter to Georg Treu, undated but likely from September 1903, unpublished, Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; and a letter to Jehan Rictus, August 11, 1903, unpublished transcription by Alessandro De Stefani, Papiers de Jehan Rictus, Département des Manuscrits, NaFr24571, 189r, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. De l’Impressionnisme en Sculpture: Lettres et opinions de Rodin [et al.] (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue, 1902). On the book’s genesis, see Edmond Claris, Souvenirs de soixante ans de journalisme, 1895–1955 (Paris: José Millas-Martin, 1958), 30–32, 137–39. Despite the claims made in the literature on Rosso, Claris was a political journalist and not an art critic. As he would later recount in his memoirs, this book was his only foray into writing about art. The idea for the book had been suggested to him by Sainte-Croix. Those interviewed are listed as “Auguste Rodin, Gustave Geffroy, Medardo Rosso, Camille de Sainte-Croix, Constantin Meunier, M. Bartholomé, Frémiet, J. Desbois, Félix Charpentier, Camille Claudel, Camille Pissarro, J.-F. Raffaëlli, L.-W. Hawkins, Claude Monet. M. Camille Lemonnier, Octave Uzanne, Armand Dayot, Eugène Müntz, Henri Rouart, Le Docteur Noblet, J. Faure, Arsène Alexandre.” “Les lettres et les arts,” La Petite République socialiste, September 10, 1900. The issue is discussed in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, “1898: La postérité appartient aux sifflés,” in Le Balzac de Rodin, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1998), 86–87. “sculpteur de grand talent.” Camille Pissarro to Théodore Duret, December 16, 1902, published in Correspondence de Camille Pissarro, ed. Janine Bailly-Herzberg (Paris: Valhermeil, 1991), 5:293n1976.

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89. “vous verrez que cela n’est pas banal.” Ibid. 90. Ann Temkin and Anne Umland, Picasso Sculpture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 34–35. 91. See Medardo Rosso to Wilhelm Bernatzik, October 29, 1902, published in Hans Ankwicz von Kleehoven, “Medardo Rosso a Vienna,” La biennale di Venezia 23 (1955): 23–25. The letter appears to have been written shortly after Bernatzik and Meier-Graefe’s visit. It was probably during this period that Meier-Graefe introduced Rosso to the German art historian Woldemar von Seidlitz. See Medardo Rosso to Woldemar von Seidlitz, undated, unpublished, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek Berlin. 92. Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, vol. 2, book 3, page 21. This description suggests that Rosso may still have had in his studio the reproduction of the Vitellius that he was selling to Treu. Alternatively, he may have had another reproduction of the same subject. 93. On the relevance of this practice, see Gabriele Guercio, Art as Existence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 274. 94. The exhibition ran from January 17 to February 28, 1903. Entwicklung des Impressionismus in Malerei und Plastik: XVI Ausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreiches Secession Wien, exh. cat. (Vienna: Wiener Secession, 1903). 95. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, 201. 96. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, ed. Theodor Petermann (Dresden: v. Zahn und Jaensch, 1903), 185–206. 97. Another “Italian” exception was the painter Giovanni Segantini, who had spent most of his career in Switzerland. 98. Rosso was already interested in participating in the Vienna Secession in 1900. See Alberto Grubicy to Medardo Rosso, August 11, 1900, transcribed with some errors in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 46. 99. “dans cette dixaine de nom que l’on a choisi il y avait naturellement le mien.” Medardo Rosso to Jehan Rictus, undated but from Vienna, published in Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994), 85. 100. “Pour profiter ici de qui a pu s’interesser a moi et le connaitre. . . . J’en vien avec deux travaus que j’avais porté avec moi—mes cartes de visite. Comme ils fesait les voyages les anciens orfievres genois. Visitant avec leur marchandise. Vois tu comme je vit et que bien des gens me plaignant jamais me croyent heureux et tout a mon bonheur tout a mon aise.” Ibid. 101. The book was first published in Stuttgart in German in 1904. It was republished in Munich in 1914, 1915, 1920, 1924, 1927, 1966, and 1987. It was translated into English in 1908 (in which the volumes do not seem to have been divided in the same way as they were in the original German) and republished in 1968. The chapter on Rosso is no longer found in the 1914 edition or any subsequent edition. 102. “retombe[r] dans l’oubli.” Rictus noted in his diary that no matter how much support Rosso received from friends and critics, the artist continued to be forgotten. Jehan Rictus, “Journal quotidian, 1898–1933,” October 1, 1913–December 31, 1914, Département de Manuscrits, NaFr 16170, entry dated Dec. 1913, 85r, Bibliothèque Nationale de

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103.

104. 105.

106. 107.

108.

France, Paris. Rictus’s sentiment was echoed in a different context by Giuseppe Prezzolini, who lamented, after Rosso’s death, to his friend Ardengo Soffici: “A dire il vero, più che dubbio è in me certezza, amarissima, che abbiamo perduto il tempo; e che, almeno per mio conto, l’avrei più utilmente e perciò stesso, più moralmente occupato in altre attività. . . . Ed aggiungo che non credo che il tuo libro, neppure oggi, riescirà a convincer gli Italiani che Rosso è un grande artista” (To tell you the truth, more than a doubt I am now certain, bitterly, that we wasted our time; and that, at least on my part, I would have more usefully and for that also more morally occupied it in other activities. . . . And I add that I don’t think your book, not even today, will succeed in convincing the Italians that Rosso is a great artist). See Giuseppe Prezzolini to Ardengo Soffici, September 6, 1929, published in Giuseppe Prezzolini and Ardengo Soffici, Carteggio, vol. 2, 1920–1964, ed. Maria Emaneula Raffi and Mario Richter (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1982), 81. H[ilton] Kramer, “Unsung Master Receives Attention—Again,” New York Observer, November 28, 1989. Emily Genauer also expressed a desire to “understand more readily why the Italian sculptor, Medardo Rosso, . . . was completely forgotten for thirty years . . . and . . . sank into an obscurity so deep that today his name is virtually never mentioned even in most of the new art histories.” See Emily Genauer, “Experiments of the Present Form Our View of the Past,” New York Herald Tribune, December 20, 1959. See entry for Medardo Rosso in Les Archives biographiques contemporaines (Paris: n.p., 1906), 71. Louis Vauxcelles, “Notes d’art: Au Salon d’Automne—Le sculpteur Medardo Rosso,” Gil Blas, October 31, 1904; and Gustave Babin, “Salon d’Automne,” Echo de Paris, October 14, 1904. Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” 232. Barr provides no support for this claim. “deux étrangers, diront les nationalistes. . . . Nous avons Rodin, en France.” Louis Vauxcelles, “Le Salon d’Automne par Louis Vauxcelles: Le Vernissage,” Gil Blas, October 15, 1904. Frances Keyzer noted seeing seven works installed: a portrait in bronze of M. Rouart (from the Rouart collection), Concierge, Patient in the Hospital, a portrait of Mme. Noblet, Rieuse, Child in the Soup Kitchen, and Femme à la Voilette. See Frances Keyzer, “Impressionism in Sculpture: A Talk with Medardo Rosso,” Manchester Guardian, November 2, 1904. Keyzer did not note any of Rosso’s reproductions of ancient or Renaissance art or his photos or drawings. Margaret Scolari Barr listed twenty works, but many of them cannot be found in critics’ reviews or in installation photographs (“Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Mistress,” 232). Luciano Caramel believed that there were six works: Enfant malade, Malade à l’hôpital, Enfant au sein, Mère et son enfant endormie, Gavroche, and Chanteur sans engagement (Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 52). Yet only one of these works appears in the installation photographs. Caramel cites an article by Vauxcelles, but this article describes a studio visit to Rosso rather than the exhibition. Four of the works are not described or seen in the photos of the show. See Louis Vauxcelles, “Notes d’art: Au Salon d’Automne—Le sculpteur Medardo Rosso,” Gil Blas, October 31, 1904. Caramel further cites a list of works in an article by Ardengo Soffici under the pseudonym

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109.

110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115.

Stéphane Cloud, “Le Salon d’Automne: Considérations,” Europe Artiste (October– November 1904): “testa di Pierreuse (Carne altrui), la Rieuse, e busti greci e romani.” See Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 52. However, none of these works appears in Soffici’s article. This is a misreading of a recollection in Ardengo Soffici, Medardo Rosso (Florence: Vallecchi, 1929), 29. In 1994, Jean-François Rodriguez listed seventeen sculptures, citing a list printed in the Salon d’Automne catalogue. However, this list cannot actually be found in the catalogue. The titles listed, in fact, are not consistent with Rosso’s own titles (for example, “Portrait-Monsieur Roget [bronze]”). To the works visible in photographs of the installation, Rodriguez added Enfant (cire), Statuette. Egyptienne (bronze), Statuette Gothique (bronze), Personnage assyrien (bronze), Portrait du Médecin de Donatello (bronze), [Haetas Aurea (cire)]. See Jean-François Rodriguez, La réception de l’impressionnisme à Florence en 1910 (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1994), 50. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci listed fifteen works that were exhibited (Medardo Rosso, 372). They, too, claim that these works appeared in the catalogue, even though it does not list Rosso’s works by name or number. They also note “con qualche variante rispetto all’elenco in catalogo, espone Bambino ebreo, Malato all’ospedale, Grande Rieuse [sola testa], Aetas aurea, Femme à la voilette, Bambino alle cucine economiche e i bronzi Henri Rouart, Madame Noblet, Bambino al sole, Testa di imperatore etiope [Memnone], Carne altrui, Portinaia, Madonna Medici di proprietà von Miller, Statuetta egiziana e Personaggio assiro” (with some variation with respect to the list given in the catalogue, he exhibits Bambino ebreo, Malato all’ospedale, Grande Rieuse [only the head], Aetase aurea, Femme à la voilette, Bambino alle cucine economiche and the bronzes Henri Rouart, Madame Noblet, Bambino al sole, Testa di imperatore etiope [Memnone], Carne altrui, Portinaia, Madonna Medici owned by von Miller, Statuetta egiziana and Personaggio assiro). Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 372. However, numerous works from their list also cannot be found in the installation photographs of the show, and the authors cite no source for their list. He is listed as entry 1824: “Rosso Médardo. Impressions. (bronze et cire).” Société du Salon d’automne, Catalogue de peinture, dessin, sculpture, gravure, architecture et arts décoratifs, exh. cat. (Paris: Evreux, 1904), 161. I have examined copies of the catalogue in London, Paris, and Los Angeles. Rosso wrote this title on one of the installation photographs published in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 79. Frances Keyzer, “Impressionism in Sculpture.” Rodin did not exhibit sculptures in this Salon. Druet’s 1898 photo shows the upper half of the plaster cast of the Balzac and a lesser-known image of Despair on the right. The image of Crouching Woman, which includes The Gates of Hell in the background, is by Stephen Haweis and Henry Coles. At bottom behind Rosso’s case is the Haweis and Coles photo of Rodin’s Douleur resting atop a columnar pedestal in the center. I thank Dr. Hélène Pinet of the Musée Rodin for confirming these photographs. Louis Vauxcelles, “Notes d’art: Au Salon d’Automne—Le sculpteur Medardo Rosso,” Gil Blas, October 31, 1904. Frances Keyzer, “Impressionism in Sculpture.” Ibid.

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116. Rosso would again challenge authority in London in 1906 at the annual exhibition of the International Society for Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers. Claiming once more to have been specially invited, he installed nine works—more than were permitted—leading to the removal of two sculptures (La Femme à la voilette and Concierge) by the hanging committee. This granted him significant press but also a harsh response by Honorary Secretary Francis Howard, who defined Rosso’s action as “merely a matter of breaking windows and yelling horribly to attract attention.” See “Rodin and Rosso,” Observer, February 10, 1907. Although this event bears the imprint of Rosso’s usual behavior, he claimed that the hanging committee’s action was prompted by the society’s president, Rodin. Rodin, for his part, denied this accusation, saying that he was not in London at the time. The minutes of the society show no evidence that Rodin instigated this action. See “Minute Books, International Society for Sculptors, Painters and Gravers,” TGA/738, Tate Gallery Archive, London. 117. Frances Keyzer, “The Parisians of Paris: A Giant’s Struggle,” King, December 3, 1904, 326. 118. “Je viens de faire une exposition au salon d’authomme champselisee. L’on m’a invite specialment et y mettre mon ensemble d’ouvrage e moi jusq’a aujourd’hui faire connaitre par la toute mon oeuvre, le qui avait été d’utilité a bien d’autres celebrité achetée. Ai accepté. Meme l’on m’a prie mettre deux de mes ouvrages, dans la collection aussi des ouvrages a Cezanne et a Renoir. Cela a fait la plus belle preuve que ai raison. Ce que ma sculpture vais bien avec.” Medardo Rosso to Harald Gutherz, late 1904, published in Giorgio Nicodemi, “ ‘Le gamin souriant’ e cinque lettere di Medardo Rosso,” Emporium 83, no. 498 (1936): 300. 119. “Paris Notes,” Onlooker, November 12, 1904. 120. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci believe that Rosso made a copy of a head in marble, patinated in dark brown that had been bought for the Antikensammlung (Collection of Ancient Works) of the Staatliche Museum in Berlin on July 29, 1899. They opine that Rosso’s choice to copy the black Memnon belongs to a “black period,” in which they believe he was inspired to make darker-colored sculptures (Medardo Rosso, 210). 121. David Galand, “Le chant de la statue: Le mythe de Memnon au XIXe siècle,” Loxias 22, no. 5 (2008): http://revel.unice.fr/loxias/?id=2439. 122. Many poets rediscovered the myth and adapted it to probe the identity of poetic expression. These poets included Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Sully Prudhomme, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Théodore de Banville, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The myth was so prevalent that it extended beyond France to British, Hungarian, German, Austrian, and American writers, composers, philosophers, and architects. Franz Schubert composed the song to “Memnon” written by Johann Mayrhofer in 1817. In his poem “The Coliseum” of 1833, Edgar Allan Poe included the line: “As melody from Memnon to the Sun.” Others who incorporated Memnon include Alphonse de Lamartine, Johann Gottfried Herder, Novalis (who wrote, paraphrasing the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis, “The spirit of poetry is the morning light, which makes the statue of Memnon sound”), Jean Paul, Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten, Ernst August Klingemann, Clemens Brentano, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The myth of Memnon recurs also in writings on living

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123.

124.

125.

1 26. 127. 128. 129.

130.

131. 132.

133. 134. 135.

136.

architecture by John Ruskin and Hegel, as well as in the entire Romantic discourse on ruins. It even appeared in Gustave Babin’s 1904 review of the Salon d’Automme. Gustave Babin, “Salon d’Automne,” Echo de Paris, October 14, 1904. Philippe Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 202. “Salle XIV—Donne asile à des ‘impressions’ sculpturales de M. Médardo Rosso sur lesquelles on pourrait discuter tout un systèm—et le condamner.” Gustave Babin, “Salon d’Automne,” Echo de Paris, October 14, 1904. Babin is mistakenly noted by Rosso in his scrapbook as “J. Balin.” For another negative review of Rosso, see Gabriel Boissy, “L’État et les beaux-arts: Le Salon d’Automne,” La Chronique des Livres 8, nos. 19–20 (October 1904): 205. Collections Jacques Doucet, fonds patrimoniaux, archives 80, Louis Vauxcelles, Paris. On Rosso and Vauxcelles, see Sharon Hecker, “An Enfant Malade by Medardo Rosso from the Collection of Louis Vauxcelles,” 727–35. Louis Vauxcelles, “Le Salon d’Automne: Sculpture,” Gil Blas, October 15, 1904. Louis Vauxcelles, “Notes d’art: Au Salon d’Automne,” Gil Blas, October 21, 1904. Louis Vauxcelles, “Notes d’art: Au Salon d’Automne—Le sculpteur Medardo Rosso,” Gil Blas, October 31, 1904. “Nous fûmes seduits, Charles Morice, Camille de Sainte Croix [sic], André Ibels, et d’autres.” Collections Jacques Doucet, fonds patrimoniaux, archives 80, Louis Vauxcelles, Paris. “démentir les lois, les principes fondamentaux et traditionnels de l’art du statuaire.” Louis Vauxcelles, “Le Salon d’Automne, Medardo Rosso et la sculpture impressionniste,” Excelsior, November 3, 1929. Lady Colin Campbell, “The Salon d’Automne,” World, October 25, 1904. “toute la vivacité fraîche et attachante de sa belle race,” “le plus grand sculpteur de l’Italie moderne et un des plus grands du monde contemporain.” Stéphane Cloud [Ardengo Soffici], “Le Salon d’Automne: Considérations,” L’Europe Artiste (October–November 1904): 339. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 88–91. Frances Keyzer, “The Parisians of Paris: A Giant’s Struggle,” King, December 3, 1904, 326. The agreement was signed on May 27, 1903, for January of 1904, but the show was postponed until 1905. See Letter of Agreement, Artaria Archiv, Autographenbox 22, Wienbibliothek, Vienna, cited but not transcribed in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 309. His reproductions from the past were six bronzes (titled Vierge et enfant. Figure de l’époque gothique, Torse [sic]; Petite Bronze de Phidias; Tête de Vitellius. Epoque Romaine; Pietà de Michel-Ange Buonarotti [sic]; Petite figure gothique; Petite figure égyptienne); one wax (David du Vercchio [sic]); and one work without its material stated (Petite tête de faune. Epoque greque). His fourteen modern works were the waxes titled Enfant malade; Petite enfant. Impression; Malade à l’hôpital. Impression; Femme à la voilette. Impression de Boulevard; “Aetas

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137. 138.

1 39. 140. 141. 142.

143. 144. 1 45. 146. 147. 148. 149.

150.

151. 152. 153. 154.

aurea.” Fille et enfant. Impression; Enfant à la bouchée de pain. Impression; Le bookmaker. Impression; and Enfant au soleil. The six bronzes were titled Tête de Rieuse; Rieuse. Impression; Chair à autrui. Impression (1883); La concierge [sic]. Impression (1883); Fragment de Gavroche (no material given but likely the cast in bronze owned by Etha Fles and visible in a photograph of her house in Rome in 1913, preserved in the Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio); and another Gavroche that Rosso added to the list by hand. See Rosso’s annotated copy of Medardo Rosso: Bronzen, Impressionen in Wachs; Ausstellung im Kunstsalon Artaria, exh. cat. (Vienna: Kunstsalon Artaria, 1905), Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Ludwig Hevesi, “Medardo Rosso,” Kunst und Kunsthandwerk 8 (1905): 174–84. These include Hermann and Gottfried Eissler, Erna Brunauer, Baronne Eleonora Bach, and a “Mons. Mendl,” to whom Rosso dedicated a wax Bambino ebreo, now in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. “große Kollektiv-Austellung.” Medardo Rosso: Bronzen, Impressionen in Wachs, n.p. Margaret Scolari Barr believes it was paid for by Fles (“Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” 234). According to the Paddington Birth Registers, Alfred William Schweich, listed by his father’s original surname, was born in September 1901. For a detailed history of the work, see Sharon Hecker, “Ecce Puer,” in Da Hayez a Klimt: Maestri dell’Ottocento e Novecento della Galleria Ricci Oddi, ed. Stefano Fugazza (Milan: Skira, 1997), 147–49. Etha Fles, Medardo Rosso: Der Mensch und der Künstler (Freiburg: Walter Heinrich, 1922), 36. “Our London Correspondence,” Manchester Courier, January 26, 1907. The words are from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “A Sonnet” in the collection The House of Life (1870). The estate is no longer standing. His sister May was born in 1904, and his brother Stephen in 1908. I have not been able to locate a birthdate for another brother named Philip. Evelyn Ansell, Admission to Peterhouse (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 32. “Wood Tragedy: Suicide of Mr. Alfred Mond at Age of 27,” Daily Mirror, September 14, 1928. “Figures Drove Him Mad,” Advertiser, Adelaide, September 15, 1928. See also “Mr. Alfred Mond’s Suicide,” Western Morning News (Devon), September 14, 1928; and “Suicide in the Garden,” Register, September 15, 1928. Margaret Scolari Barr speaks of the family anecdote (Medardo Rosso, 58–59). As proof of the second version of the story, Mola and Vittucci cite Ardengo Soffici, Medardo Rosso, 166. However, here too, the story seems to be anecdotal. See Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 218. Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, 59. Luciano Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 144. Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 176. “cercava quel fantasma della forma . . . un poco aliena . . . nascente . . . l’incontro diretto con l’immagine, che si fa avanti e preme dall’interno della forma”; “il vorticoso razionale del Seicento.” Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 214.

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155. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 32–33. 156. Max Kozloff, “The Equivocation of Medardo Rosso,” Art International 7 (1963): 46–47. 157. Giovanni Anselmo, “Medardo Rosso,” in Medardo Rosso, exh. cat., ed. Gloria Moure (Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galega de Arte Contemporánea, 1996), 228. 158. “située à l’interface de l’extérieur et de l’intérieur du corps . . . en travaillant et retravaillant la surface pour en faire une peau qu’on regarde comme la peau d’un visage. On lit dessus comme on lit sur nos propres peaux: texture, tension des muscles, nervosité.” Patrick Imbert, “Exposition Tony Cragg à Saint-Étienne: Extraits du dossier de presse du Musée d’Art Moderne de Sainte-Étienne,” La lettre du Collège de France 37 (2013): http://lettre-cdf.revues.org/1477. See also Tony Cragg, “Rosso: A Change of Focus,” in Medardo Rosso, ed. Gloria Moure, 237–38. 159. “face évidée . . . qui fait de la sculpture, non pas un colosse aux pieds d’argile, mas un volume érigé sur un manque, le contuour d’un absence, une perte—la perte d’une face.” Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage: Autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Macula, 1993), 12. 160. Rosso also exhibited his work in Brussels at the VIe Salon Annuel of Les Independants [sic] from June 12 through July 4, 1909. Rosso exhibited seventeen works, which are listed incompletely and with errors in Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, who identify eighteen works instead (Medardo Rosso, 373). No copies of the ancient works listed by Mola and Vittucci are found in the catalogue. Two waxes—Femme à la voilette and Concierge—are listed in the catalogue but not by Mola and Vittucci, nor is the word Impression, which Rosso added to each work in the catalogue that is mentioned by them. Mola and Vittucci also list Enfant à la bouchée de pain, while the catalogue gives the title as Impression d’enfant. Au secours des vivres: La bouchée de pain (bronze). Age d’or listed by Mola and Vittucci is in the catalogue as Fille et enfant. Age d’or. Impression. See Donald E. Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions, 1900–1916: Selected Catalogue Documentation, exh. cat., 2 vols. (Munich: Prestel, 1974). The catalogue itself contains two errors: Bambino ebreo is called Enfant. Impression (cire). (Musée d’Hagen), but the Hagen cast was in bronze, and Ecce puer (Musée du Luxembourg) is given as a bronze but was actually a cast in plaster. 161. A wax cast of Aetas aurea was also purchased for the Petit Palais in December 1907. See Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 258. However, the museum’s website says “Achat à l’artiste, 1908.” http://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/oeuvre/aetas-aurea-l-aged-or. 162. Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette was never inventoried and was shipped to the provincial museum of Lyon in 1931. 163. Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, vol. 2, book 3, page 21; Stuart Preston, “Art and Pathos: Medardo Rosso Shown at the Modern Museum,” New York Sunday Times, October 6, 1963. 164. “La mort de Rodin, n’a pas donné l’occasion aux critiques d’Art de réparler de M. Medardo Rosso qui est maintenant sans aucun doute le plus grand sculpteur vivant. L’injustice dont a toujours été victime le prodigieux sculpteur n’est pas près, semble-t-il, d’être réparé. En attendant M. Medardo Rosso travaille dans le silence à Paris. Dans le silence de son atelier, il évoque l’aspect de ses artistes de la Renaissance, sculpteurs

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165.

166. 167.

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fondeurs, maîtres et ouvriers à la fois qui faisaient tout eux-mêmes. Depuis longtemps M. Medardo Rosso n’a pas livré au jugement du public d’œuvres nouvelles. Il médite de modeller la figure d’un cheval.” L’Écolàtre [Guillaume Apollinaire], “Echos et on-dit des lettres et des arts,” L’Europe nouvelle 1, no. 27 (1918): 1299. “Je garderai toujours pour lui [Rosso] une admiration émue, et par le hasard d’une conversation, de longues années plus tard, avec Giacometti, j’apprendrai que nous éprouvions ce sentiment l’un et l’autre.” Jean-Paul Clébert, Mythologie d’André Masson (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1971), 16–17. Henry Moore and Philip James, Henry Moore on Sculpture (London: Macdonald, 1966), 134, 198. See Jole de Sanna, ed., Aptico: Il senso della scultura, exh. cat. (Crusinallo: Alessi d’après, 1976), 108; Luciano Fabro and Jole de Sanna, “Photograph of Medardo Rosso: Interview with Jole de Sanna,” in Medardo Rosso, ed. Gloria Moure, 244–46. Sharon Hecker, “Isolated Fragments? Disentangling the Relationship between Arte Povera and Medardo Rosso,” in Untying the Knot: Postwar Italian Art History Today, ed. Sharon Hecker and Marin Sullivan (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Patrick Imbert, “Exposition Tony Cragg à Saint-Étienne.” Sharon Hecker, “Walking through Walls: Medardo Rosso and Diana Al-Hadid,” in Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso (New York: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2016).

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. abstraction, 6, 118, 120 Rosso and, 84, 93, 104, 118, 133, 134, 137, 212, 281n71 academic art/training, 3, 13, 14, 20, 21, 23, 24, 31, 62, 102, 154, 185, 249n22 Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, 13, 21, 37, 64, 112 Rosso at, 23, 32, 33, 41, 42–43, 76, 227n93, 232n30, 232n33 Rosso’s expulsion from, 3, 31, 43, 232n30, 233nn37–38 Ache, Caran d’, 166 Aetas aurea (Rosso), 4, 92–94, 92, 105, 107, 115, 120, 125, 240–50n26, 249n22, 256n1, 296n108, 300n161 Aire, Jean d’, 82, 289n49 Ajalbert, Jean, 279n57 Albertinum, 185 Alexandre, Arsène, 170–71, 183, 286n23, 293n86 Alexis, Marie-Louise Virginie, 116 Alexis, Marthe, 116, 261nn65–66, 261–62n67 Alexis, Paul, 112, 116, 261–62n65, 262n66, 263n67

Al-Hadid, Diana, 215 alienation, 5, 6, 57, 85, 109, 123, 134, 167, 174, 177, 211 Allucinazione (Gualdo), 15, 16, 112 Ambassadeurs, de, 138, 139 Amore allo studio. Una buona fumata (Bianchi), 24, 24 Amor materno (Rosso), 52, 54, 90, 93, 107, 125, 248n19, 249n22, 250n26 anarchism, 4, 11, 109, 110, 124, 146, 251n34 ancient art. See casts/casting, of ancient art Angers, David d’, 152 Anselmo, Giovanni, 212 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 214, 297n122, 300– 1n164 Après la visite (Rosso), 5, 123, 125–30, 126, 127, 131, 132, 186, 200, 201, 259n40, 264n1 Archivio Medardo Rosso, 88, 240n39, 245n86, 267n9, 272n54, 284n108, 299n136 Ariès, Philippe, 116 Armistice of Villafranca, 22 Armstrong, Carol, 68, 174

323

Arrighi, Cletto La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio, 18, 76, 225n71 Nanà a Milano, 73, 76 Artaria & Co., 209, 271n48, 299n138 Arte Povera, 196, 212, 215 Artforum, 50 Astruc, Zacharie, 16 Auban, Paolo, 98 Aurier, Albert, 170 Austria, 22, 50, 97, 184, 192, 194, 209, 236n76, 251n34, 297n122 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 4, 22, 57, 209 authorship, 190–91, 206, 208 avant-garde, 13, 21, 22, 64, 70, 112, 156, 180, 197, 214, 218 French, 3, 5, 17, 18, 82, 89, 108, 123, 167 Italian, 3, 183 Milanese, 13, 98 Parisian, 70, 114, 155, 177, 194 Rosso and/as, 3, 23, 28, 33, 75, 82, 89, 98, 108, 114, 123, 155, 156, 177, 180, 183, 218 Babin, Gustave, 197, 204, 298n122, 298n124 Babinski, Joseph, 149 Balfour, Charles, 92, 249n21 Balla, Giacomo, 183–84, 217, 287n28 Balzac, Honoré de, 15–16 Rodin’s monument to, 6, 104, 115, 129, 130, 156–57, 164, 165–67, 173, 271n48, 278n39, 296n112 Balzani, Roberto, 8 Bambina che ride (Rosso), 130–32, 131, 137, 269n31, 292n76 Bambino ebreo (Rosso), 132–33, 133, 192, 195, 200, 201, 211, 259n43, 269–70n39, 288n36, 292n77, 296n108, 299n138, 300n160 Banville, Théodore de, 297n122 Barabandy, Richard, 112 Barbaglia, Giuseppe, 37 Barbedienne, Ferdinand, 113, 145 Barbizon School, 21 Barr, Margaret Scolari, 130, 131, 132, 137, 140, 164, 175, 185, 188, 197–98, 209, 211–12, 218, 227n95, 231n21, 237–38n10, 241n47, 243n66, 251n48, 254n78, 266n4, 267n6, 269n31, 283n108, 285n13, 288n35, 288n37, 295n106, 295n108, 299n140, 299n150 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, 180

3 2 4      •       I N D E X

Bartholomé, Paul-Albert, 168–69 Barzaghi, Francesco, 13 Baudelaire, Charles, 16–17, 19, 20, 56, 71–72 Curiosités esthétiques, 17, 18 Le peintre de la vie moderne, 16, 75, 116, 125–26, 280n64 Rosso and, 3, 16–18, 20, 49, 56, 71, 112, 116, 125, 127, 130, 140, 142, 155, 156, 160, 169, 232n28, 270n41 Scapigliatura and, 15, 17, 20, 126 Bayard, Émile Gavroche, 27, 29 Belgium, 115, 180, 183, 184, 192, 197, 255n79, 261n61, 288n31 Benjamin, Walter, 142, 160 Béraud, Jean, 157 Berenson, Bernard, 166 Beretta, Milo, 250n31 Bergamo, Luigi, 132, 137, 240n39, 242n55, 271n53 Bergerat, Émile, 255n79 Berlin, 191, 192–93, 195, 292n76, 297n120 Bernardelli, Giuseppe, 16–17 Bernatzik, Wilhelm, 194, 195, 294n91 Bernhardt, Sarah, 70 Bersagliere (In esplorazione) (Rosso), 23, 27–29, 38, 88, 90, 227n94, 231n19, plate 2 Bertani, Agostino, 11 Bestaggini, Antonella, 91 Beuys, Joseph, 196 Bianchi, Mosè Amore allo studio. Una buona fumata, 24, 24 Bierbaum, Otto Julius, 193 Bignami, Vespasiano, 14, 15, 18, 222n42, 228n96 Bisi, Luigi, 43, 232n34, 233n37 Bloy, Léon, 166 Boccioni, Umberto, 1, 14, 217, 287n28 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 184, 238n11 Bode, Wilhelm von, 193, 292n79 Bodinier, Charles, 124 Boito, Arrigo, 17, 98, 252n51 Boito, Camillo, 182 Boldini, Giovanni, 21, 109, 259n37 Bonaparte, Pierre, 47 Bono, Luigia, 8 Bookmaker (Rosso), 161, 161, 162–67, 267n10, 293n82, 299n136

Borghi, Mino, 98, 137, 227n95, 227–28n96, 229n2, 232n30, 232n33, 233n35, 236n69, 242n60, 250n34, 251n39, 266n4, 266–67n6, 280n62 Bottega di Poesia, 263n70 Boulanger, Georges, 5, 108, 110, 256–57n6 Boulanger-Cavé, Albert, 162, 164 Bourdelle, Antoine, 195 Boussod, Valadon & Cie, 12, 259n38 Braga, Enrico, 37 Brancusi, Constantin, 1, 5, 133, 144, 181, 205, 212, 213 Le sommeil, 205, 206 Le Supplice, 205–6, 207 Braque, Georges, 85, 204 Brenson, Michael, 94

Cabaret des Quat’z’Arts, 135, 270n45 cabaret performers, 123, 137–38 Cabianca, Vincenzo, 110 Caffieri, Jean-Jacques, 195 Cahen, Louis Raphal d’Anvers, 149 Caillebotte, Gustave, 67, 157, 181 Le pont de l’Europe, 67, 140 Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, 160, 160 Cama, Francesco Canale, 88 Camerana, Giovanni, 17 Cameroni, Felice French culture and, 16, 19–20, 40, 51, 66, 107, 110, 111–12, 116, 225n73, 225n76, 231n23, 235n64, 242n59, 255n79 Zola and, 19–20, 27, 40, 66, 78–79, 111–12, 225n73, 225n76, 231n23,

Brentano, Clemens, 297n122 Brera, 38, 45, 243n69 bronze, 36, 37, 46, 171, 191, 278n39, 287n30, 289n49, 292n79 Rosso and, 23, 45, 66, 87, 90, 100, 101, 105, 107, 112, 113, 114, 116, 124, 150, 169, 182, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 193, 205, 239n29, 246n3, 247n13, 247–48n14, 249n21, 258n36, 266n3, 293n81, 295–96n108, 298–99n136 casts/casting/versions in, 5, 43, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 104, 112, 113, 114, 131, 145–46, 147, 148, 182, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 228n97, 237n1, 240n38, 252n54, 262n65, 264n1, 268n19, 269n31, 270n39, 288n36, 289n52, 292n76, 299n136, 300n160 Brown, Marilyn, 146 Brusco Onnis, Lina, 96 Brusco Onnis, Vincenzo, 95, 96, 97 Rosso’s funerary monument to, 27, 95–98, 96, 186, 251n37, plate 7, plate 9 Brussels, 255n79, 271n48, 300n160 Bucci, Anselmo, 110 Burnham, Jack, 50, 218 Bus Riders (Segal), 85, 86 busts, 14, 72, 80, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 95, 100, 140, 186, 222n40, 247nn13–14, 248n14, 250n32, 262n66, 289n52 of Filippi, 101, 102, 104, 186 Butti, Enrico, 46 Buzio, Pacifico, 37, 2220n40

242n59, 244n81 Rosso and, 16, 19, 20, 40–41, 55, 66, 95, 97, 98, 101, 107, 108, 111–12, 241n51, 245n89, 253n62, 254n78, 259n37 Rosso’s correspondence with, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113–14, 125, 132, 224n57, 227n95, 228n97, 249n26, 261– 62n65, 262n66, 263n68 (ch5), 263–64n1 (ch6), 264n2, 273n5 Cammarano, Michele, 226n80, 229n107 Camp, Maxime du, 152–53 Campagnoni, Donata Pesenti, 16 Campbell, Lady Colin, 204–5 Canova, Antonio Funerary Monument to Archduchess Maria Cristina of Austria, 50–51, 51 Cantante a spasso (Rosso), 39–42, 40, 90, 92, 231n19, 248n19 Cantù, Cesare, 15 Caponi, Jacopo, 99, 250n26 Capuana, Luigi, 225n76 Carabelli, Carlo, 94, 250–51n34 Carabin, François Rupert, 195 Caramel, Luciano, 95, 125, 188, 212, 227n96, 228n97, 231n18, 240n39, 247nn13–14, 249n24, 250n32, 253n61, 254n78, 256n1, 261n65, 263n68, 264nn1–2, 265–66n3, 267n10, 269n31, 269n39, 270–71n48, 271n53, 273n69, 279–80n62, 280n66, 281nn69–70, 283n108, 284n3, 286n15, 288n34, 292n73, 292n76, 292n81, 295–96n108

INDEX

      •      3 2 5

Caravaggio, 20 Carcano, Filippo, 37 Carducci, Giousuè, 89, 97 caricature, 14, 18, 49, 67, 68, 70, 71, 241n47, 282n90 Baudelaire on, 18, 71–72 Daumier and, 18, 51, 68, 70, 78, 82, 138, 162, 170, 171, 240n40 French Realist, 138–39, 162, 169 Carne altrui (Rosso), 3, 72–76, 74, 79, 90, 107, 125, 198, 205, 240n39, 241n51, 243n66, 248n19, 256n1, 265n3, 296n108, plate 4 Carolus-Duran, 268n23 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, 118, 195, 214, 223n55, 231n25 Ugolino et ses fils, 34, 35

cemeteries, 43–45, 234nn47–48, 251n48 Cimitero del Gentilino, 45, 233–34n44 Cimitero Monumentale, 43–45, 94, 95, 96, 100, 103, 234n44 La Riconoscenza’s removal from, 3, 31, 43, 46, 47, 50–51, 233n37, 234n52 Père Lachaise Cemetery, 47, 48, 51, 52, 169, 235n64 Cernuschi, Henri, 113 Cézanne, Paul, 40, 94, 151 Salle Cézanne, Salon d’Automne, 200, 202, 202, 205, 250n31 Chabod, Federico, 22 Chabrier, Emmanuel, 149 Cham, 49 Champfleury, 283n95

Carrà, Carlo, 217, 287n28 Carrier-Belleuse, Albert-Ernest, 180 Casas, Ramon, 110 Casino de Paris, 138, 139 Cassatt, Mary, 67, 162, 245n88 casts/casting of ancient art, 21, 187–88, 190–91, 194–95, 202–4, 209, 289n52, 289n54, 295n108, 297n120, 300n160 in bronze, 5, 43, 88, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 104, 112, 113, 114, 131, 145–46, 147, 148, 182, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 228n97, 237n1, 240n38, 252n54, 262n65, 264n1, 268n19, 269n31, 270n39, 288n36, 289n52, 292n76, 299n136, 300n160 casting parties, 147–48 in plaster, 5, 34, 85, 93, 146, 169, 188, 191, 213, 252n51, 262n65, 300n160 of Renaissance art, 21, 74–75, 190–91, 194, 209, 295n108 in wax, 5, 93, 120–21, 130, 131, 142, 145, 146, 147–48, 184, 187, 188, 191, 212, 259n43, 262n65, 265n3, 266n3, 271n48, 288n36, 300n161 See also foundries Cattaneo, Carlo, 12 Cavallotti, Felice, 11 Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 12, 72 Cazalis, Henri, 16 Cecioni, Adriano, 74 Cellini, Benvenuto, 147

Champsaur, Félicien, 255n79 Chapu, Henri, 235n62 Charpentier, 40, 67, 78 Charpentier, Alexandre, 195, 261n61 Charpentier, Félix, 293n86 Chateaubriand, 297n122 Chatel, Charles, 124 Cheramy, Paul-Arthur, 149 Chesneau, Ernest, 49 children. See heads, of children Chiodo, Mario Vianello, 179–80, 266n4, 274n7, 279n55, 285n13 Chirico, Giorgio de, 58 Chirtani, Luigi, 22, 38, 40–41, 64, 80, 94, 97, 226n85, 231nn19–20, 238n15, 249n22 Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate, 25 Claris, Edmond, 293n85 De l’Impressionnisme en Sculpture, 155, 193–94, 209, 280n62, 284n108, 293n81, 293n85 Clemenceau, Georges, 213, 266n3 Coles, Henry, 200, 296n112 Collegio San Carlo Canavese, 10 Collodi, Carlo, 57 Commemorazione delle Cinque Giornate, 97 convalescence, 125–27, 129, 130, 264n1, 268n23 Cooper, Harry, 120 Coppée, François, 16 Corcos, Victor, 176 Corio, 10 Corio, Ludovico, 23

3 2 6      •       I N D E X

cosmopolitanism/internationalism, 6, 108, 110, 111, 113, 132–33, 176, 179, 192, 196, 214, 224n56 artists and, 108–9, 113, 114, 179, 180–81 in Milan/Italy, 2, 4, 11, 88–89, 97, 98, 106, 229n1, 247n11 Rosso and, 1–2, 4, 5, 88, 95, 97, 108–9, 113, 114, 121, 148, 176, 179, 180, 191, 217 Courbet, Gustave, 21, 66, 67–68, 225n73, 226n80 Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine, 73 L’Homme blessé, 126–28, 128 Portrait de l’auteur, dit L’homme à la pipe, 24–26, 25, 40 Rosso and, 3, 24–27, 40, 46, 51–52, 62, 73, 126–28, 194

Degas and, 68, 70, 162 Intérieur d’omnibus, 81–82, 81 Intérieur d’omnibus. Entre un homme ivre et un Charcutier, 69–70, 69 Les emigrants, 169–71, 170, 283n95 “Le travail et la vie d’une gardienne d’immeuble,” 77, 78, 78, 79 lithography and, 4, 18, 51, 62, 69–70, 71, 78, 79, 81–82, 171, 245n88, 281n72 Ratapoil, 162–63, 163, 281n72 Rosso and, 3–4, 18, 62, 68, 69–71, 77–78, 79, 81–82, 138, 162, 163, 169–71, 225n70, 231n25, 275n15, 281n72 Dayot, Armand, 171, 293n86 De Amicis, Edmondo Cuore, 9–10

Un Enterrement à Ornans, 51–52, 53, 67 Couture, Thomas, 22, 40, 64, 190 Cozzani, Ettore, 98, 227n96, 230n18 Cragg, Tony, 213, 215 Cremetti Gallery, 209, 264n1, 266n3, 271n48, 280n62 Cremona, Tranquillo, 63 Crispi, Francesco, 11, 22 critics French, 48, 61, 62, 88, 89, 145, 149–55, 166, 171, 183, 194, 204, 209 Italian, 24, 48, 54, 62, 70, 97, 124 Symbolist, 4, 57, 85, 88, 125, 149, 151, 153, 170, 276n19 Croce, Giuseppe, 11 Cruet, Paul, 267n9 Cubism, 197, 204 Cuore (De Amicis), 9–10 Curiosités esthétiques (Baudelaire), 17, 18 Curletti, Angelo, 45, 223n43 Curletti, Pietro, 14, 43, 45, 46, 233n43, 234n46 Curletti family, 233n43, 234n44

Defresne, Jacques Gustave, 274n7 Degas, Edgar, 64, 66, 140, 151, 153, 282n90 Daumier and, 68, 70, 162 Le Tub, 49, 50 Ludovic Halévy et Albert Boulanger-Cavé dans les coulisses de l’Opéra, 162, 164 Petite danseuse de 14 ans, 75, 147, 153 Place de la Concorde, 174, 175 Rosso and, 49, 66–67, 68, 69, 85, 138–39, 146, 147, 162, 169, 173, 175, 231n25, 281n69 Delacroix, Eugène, 27 De l’Impressionnisme en Sculpture (Claris), 155, 193–94, 209, 280n62, 284n108, 293n81, 293n85 Dellavalle, Giovanni, 8 De Nittis, Giuseppe, 21, 109, 110, 112, 115, 123–24, 225n73 Depretis, Agostino, 22 De Quincey, Thomas, 270n41 Desbois, Jules, 171, 195, 293n86 Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline, 297n122 Désespoir (Préault), 48–49, 49 Divisionism, 21, 43, 45 Donatello, 188, 189, 191, 193, 290n57, 291n66 Dopo una scappata (Il Birichino) (Gavroche) (Rosso), 23, 27, 28, 38, 88, 91–92, 107, 114, 124, 182, 192, 221n33, 227nn94–95, 231n19, 246n3, 256n1, 267n11, 295n108, plate 1 Doria, Armand, 149, 227n94, 260n49 Dossi, Carlo, 76 Dowdeswell’s Galleries, 67

Dalou, Jules, 110, 180, 242n60, 245n89, 251n39 Funerary Monument of Victor Noir, 47, 48 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 126 Dante (The Thinker) (Pannelier), 36, 36 Darier, Ferdinand-Jean, 149 Daumier, Honoré, 18, 27, 51, 66, 67, 225n73, 244n44, 245n88 caricature and, 3, 62, 66, 67, 138, 162–63, 169–70

INDEX

      •      3 2 7

Dresden, 186–88, 191, 192, 273n5, 288n44 Dreyfus Affair, 5, 108, 110, 132 Druet, Eugène, 200, 208, 296n112 Duchamp, Marcel, 195 Dujardin-Beaumetz, Henri Étienne, 213 Dumas, Alexandre, 73 Dumont-Courselles, Henri, 139 Duquesnel, Félix, 166 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 67, 112, 113, 151, 160, 209 Daumier retrospective and, 18, 70, 245n88, 283n95 Duranty, Louis Edmond, 64, 66 Duret, Théodore, 67, 194 Ecce puer (Rosso), 6, 132, 179, 202, 210–13, 210, 300n160

Étex, Antoine, 34 Funerary Monument to François-Vincent Raspail, 51, 52 Europe, 2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 15, 22, 33, 35, 45, 57, 63, 67, 70, 72, 85, 109, 140, 170, 180–81, 196, 203, 214, 218, 258n36 Central Europe, 186, 187, 192, 195 Rosso’s travels/visibility in, 2, 4, 6, 147, 179, 209, 214 Exposition Universelle, 34 of 1878, 18, 153 of 1889, 66, 99, 107, 113, 114, 135, 190, 196, 250n26 of 1900, 157, 181–84, 185, 186, 191, 194, 273n69 (ch6), 273n5 (ch7), 285n10, 291n68

Echo de Paris, 204, 279n57 École des Beaux-Arts, 73 Eissler, Gottfried, 193, 290n58, 299n138 Eissler, Hermann, 129, 299n138 Eliade, Mircea, 55 El Locch (Rosso), 23–26, 40, 92, 112, 227n95, 227–28n96, 228nn97–98, 256n1, plate 1 Elsen, Albert, 233n38 emigration/immigration, 4, 23, 64, 107–8, 109, 121, 123, 129, 142, 156, 157, 169–70, 171, 196 Enfant à la Bouchée de pain (Rosso), 136–37, 136, 200, 202, 271n48, 299n136, 300n160 Enfant au sein (Rosso), 115–21, 125, 262n65, 295n108, plate 12, plate 13, plate 14 Enfant malade (Rosso), 123, 133–36, 134, 182–83, 187, 205, 264–65n2, 286n15, 295n108, 298n136 Engrand, George, 124 Enjolras, Marie-Jacques, 131 Entwicklung des Impressionismus in Malerei und Plastik, 195–96, 294n94 Epstein, Jacob, 49 Esner, Rachel, 110 Espagnat, Georges d’, 184 Esposizione Nazionale Milan, 12–13, 14, 81, 222n36 Rome, 38–39, 265n3, 291n68 Turin, 66 Venice, 61–62, 69, 71, 80, 87, 90, 92, 94, 241n48, 241n51, 244n73, 248n19, 249n22 Esposizione Nazionale Artistica, 71

Fabro, Luciano, 215 Faini, Elisa Rognoni, 234n51, 250n32, 255n80 Falciola, Pia, 17 Fano, Alessandro, 98, 252n50 Farina, Isidoro, 93, 249n24 Fascism, 57, 218 Fattori, Giovanni, 65, 110 Faure, Jean-Baptiste, 113, 149, 259n43 Fauvism, 197, 204, 209 Ferdinandus, Alexandre, 73 Ferrari, Ettore, 182, 183 Ferroni, Egisto, 21 Filippi, Filippo, 14, 95, 98, 99, 252n50 funerary monument to, 14, 95, 98–106, 100, 186, 213, 251n48, 252n57, 253nn60–62, 254n78, 255–56n83, 256nn84–85, plate 8, plate 10, plate 11 Fine (La Ruffiana) (Rosso), 14, 38, 38, 89, 90, 91, 99, 107, 230–31n18, 248n19, 252n51, 256n1 Fischer, Urs, 196 Fix-Masseau, Pierre Félix, 195 flâneur, 76, 116, 160 Flaubert, Gustave, 16, 180 Fles, Etha, 142, 184–86, 185, 193, 210, 218, 253n61, 266n4, 273n70, 281n70, 288n32, 299n136, 299n140 Flint, Kate, 20, 22–23, 67 Florence, 33, 42–43, 65, 66, 74–75, 97, 218 1910 Impressionist exhibition in, 217, 254n78, 265n2, 270–71n48, 271n53, 273n69

3 2 8      •       I N D E X

Fol, Monique, 115 Folies Bergère, 138 Fonderia Giovanni Strada, 94 Fontana, Ferdinando, 102 Forgione, Nancy, 160, 173 Fortis, Leone, 98 foundries, 2, 5, 94, 110, 145–46, 153, 171, 190, 191, 228n97, 250–51n34, 264n1, 288n41, 291n64, 291n68 Rossi’s building of his own, 146, 147 Rosso as a sculptor-founder, 2, 146, 148, 149, 150, 155 France Francophilia, 16, 18–20, 112 Francophobia, 22, 89 Italy and, 4, 22, 87, 89, 90, 111, 217, 231n25

Daumier retrospective at, 18, 70, 245n88, 283n95 Galerie Georges Petit, 107, 110, 112, 255n79 Galerie George Thomas, 267n6 Galleria d’arte Moderna di Torino, 120–21 Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, 266n4, 273n70 Galleria Nazionale d’Arte di Torino, 262n65 Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 131, 252n51 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, 226n82 Galvano, Giuseppe, 248n19 Garavaglia, Bianca, 137, 272n55 Garavaglia, Feruccio, 272n55 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 166 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 11, 12, 23, 27–28, 32, 56, 87,

modern art in, 20, 63, 64, 135 Realism in, 3, 24–25, 47, 52, 66, 73, 129, 169, 227n94, 260n49 Rosso as a foreigner in, 4, 5, 89, 108, 109, 111, 115, 136, 156, 157, 166, 183, 188, 198, 213, 285n10 Rosso’s French citizenship, 179, 198, 213, 284n3 Triple Alliance against, 4, 22, 87, 89 Franco-Prussian War, 110, 256n6 French Revolution, 27, 87, 97 Marianne, 27, 96–97 Funerary Monument of Victor Noir (Dalou), 47, 48 Funerary Monument to Archduchess Maria Cristina of Austria (Canova), 50–51, 51 Funerary Monument to Domenico Vismara (Giudici), 102, 103, 105 Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi (Rosso), 14, 95, 98–106, 100, 186, 213, 251n48, 252n57, 253nn60–62, 254n78, 255–56n83, 256nn84–85, plate 8, plate 10, plate 11 Funerary Monument to François-Vincent Raspail (Étex), 51, 52 Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis (Rosso), 27, 95–98, 96, 186, 251n37, plate 7, plate 9 Futurism, 1, 11, 12, 184, 217, 218, 238n11, 287n28

97, 229n1, 236n76 Rosso’s proposed monuments to, 3, 29, 229n2 of 1882, 31–37, 213, 229n2, 236n69 of 1884, 54–59, 235–36n68 Gast, Camille du, 149 Gauguin, Paul, 151–52, 153 Gautier, Théophile, 15, 17, 19, 56 Gavroche (Bayard), 27, 29 Gazzetta d’Italia, 64, 70 Geffroy, Gustave, 152, 278n39, 293n86 Gemito, Vincenzo, 183 Genauer, Emily, 295n103 Genoa, 9, 221n24 Geoffroy-Dechaume, Adolphe-Victor, 171 Germain, Alphonse, 88, 125, 149, 276n19 Germany, 22, 110, 111, 187, 188, 195, 256n6 Rosso’s reception/ travels/visibility in, 85, 142, 183, 184, 186, 188, 191–93, 194 in Triple Alliance, 4, 22, 87, 89 Geyer, Martin H., 110–11 Ghelthoff, Urbani De, 248n18 Ghidoni, Domenico, 75–76, 243n69 Ghisleri, Arcangelo, 97 Giacometti, Alberto, 1, 5, 49, 144, 177, 181, 214 La Place, 167, 168 Le Cube, 213 Giedion-Welcker, Carola, 218 Gil Blas, 67, 114, 138, 150, 200, 204, 225n76 Gille, Philippe, 167 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 22 Gioli, Francesco, 65

Galbiatti, Carlo, 46 Galenson, David W., 112–13 Galerie Durand-Ruel, 67, 112, 113, 151, 160, 209

INDEX

      •      3 2 9

Giran-Max, Léon, 124 Giudici, Primo Funerary Monument to Domenico Vismara, 102, 103, 105 Gli amanti (Ripari), 18, 19 Gli innamorati sotto il lampione (Rosso), 38 Gnocchi-Viani, Osvaldo, 27 Godet, Anatole, 73 Goncourt, Edmond de, 16, 19, 20, 66, 110, 112, 225n75, 255n79 Rosso and, 85, 113, 115, 254n78 Goncourt, Jules de, 16, 19, 66, 225n75 Gori, Pietro, 109 Goupil, Adolphe, 112, 181, 258n36, 259n37 Gourmont, Remy de, 279n57 Grafton Galleries, 209

of children, 130–37, 182, 185, 192, 195, 259n38 of women, 137–44, 149, 241n51, 247n14 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 297–98n122 Heine, Heinrich, 20 Henley, William, 37 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 297n122 Heredia, José-Maria de, 16 Hermann, Paul, 186 Hevesi, Ludwig, 209, 270n48 Hillman, James, 37 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 15 Hofmann, Ludwig von, 192 Holland, 184–86 Hôpital Lariboisière, 125, 268n18 Houdon, Jean Antoine, 191, 195, 231n25, 291n66

Grande rieuse (Rosso), 138, 140, 198, 200, 272n57, 296n108, plate 15 Grandi, Giuseppe, 17, 20, 63, 102, 281n72 Grandville, Jean-Jacques, 245n88 Granié, Joseph, 124 Graul, Richard, 193, 293n81 Great Britain, 90 Great Exhibition of 1851, 12 Greenberg, Clement, 238n11 Groninger Courant, 185 Groult, Camille, 149 Grubicy, Alberto, 22, 90, 183–84, 226n90, 288n42 Grubicy, Vittore, 22 Gualdo, Luigi, 15, 16, 19, 54, 112, 223n55, 224n56 Allucinazione, 15, 16, 112 Guillaume, Eugène, 285n10 Gutherz, Harald, 192, 200–2 Guys, Constantin, 16, 125

Howard, Francis, 297n116 Huberman, Georges-Didi, 213 Hugo, Victor, 15, 19, 56, 73, 118, 229n1, 297n122 Les Misérables, 15, 27, 29, 88 Hundred Years’ War, 82 Huret, Jules, 279n57 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 16, 17, 19, 147, 153, 225n73, 274n10

Hague, 70, 185, 264n1 Hamon, Philippe, 204 Hannoosh, Michele, 71–72 Haussmann, Baron, 140, 157 Haweis, Stephen, 200, 296n112 Head of Vitellius (Rosso), 187, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 289n52, 290n63, 294n92, 298n136 heads, 1, 6, 14, 15, 23, 66, 95, 96, 117, 182, 184, 187, 188, 190, 192, 194, 198, 202, 205, 213, 215, 246n2, 247n13, 289n52, 297n120

3 3 0      •       I N D E X

Ibels, André, 124, 147, 204 Ibels, Henri-Gabriel, 124, 267n8 Iker, Alphée E., 124 Il Caffè Giornale Gazzetta Nazionale, 101 Il Corriere della Sera, 101 Il Pungolo, 101–2 Il Risorgimento, 64 Il Secolo, 88, 97–98, 100 Il Sole, 62, 66, 79, 97, 101, 110, 244n81, 253n62 Il Vecchio (Rosso), 38, 39, 89, 252n51 Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette (Rosso), 5, 123, 125, 140–42, 200, 213, 283n97, 300n162, plate 17 Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit (Rosso), 6, 145, 156–62, 158, 167–77, 173, 174, 213, 280n62, 283n105, plate 19 Impression d’omnibus (Rosso), 62, 80–86, 167, 200, 213, plate 6 Impressionism, 21, 104, 113, 180, 181, 184, 186, 192, 209 Impressionist exhibitions, 63, 64, 66, 67, 88, 89, 147 optics and, 4, 104, 114, 149, 151

promotion/reception of, in Italy, 3, 22, 62, 63–68 Rosso and, 1, 3, 4, 16, 61–62, 63, 64, 66–68, 69, 80, 85, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 98, 101– 2, 103–4, 114, 125, 127, 129, 132, 138–39, 140, 142, 147, 149–50, 155, 157–60, 162, 180, 184–85, 193–94, 195–96, 209, 217, 227n94, 231n25, 237–38n10, 238n11, 260n49, 264n1 Vienna Secession and, 195–96 Innamorati sotto il lampione (Rosso), 38, 234n46 Intérieur d’omnibus (Daumier), 81–82, 81 Intérieur d’omnibus. Entre un homme ivre et un Charcutier (Daumier), 69–70, 69 International Society for Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, 297n116

Khnopff, Fernand, 192 King, 204, 206 Klingemann, Ernst August, 297n122 Kosegarten, Gotthard Ludwig, 297n122 Kozloff, Max, 134, 142–43, 212 Krahn, Volker, 188, 189 Kramer, Hilton, 197 Krauss, Rosalind, 93, 157, 205–6, 212, 218 Kuliscioff, Anna, 27

Ionides, Constantine Alexander, 36 Iris, messagère des dieux (Rodin), 117–18, 117 Italian Exhibition, Earl’s Court, 4, 90–94 Italy France and, 4, 22, 87, 89, 90, 111, 217, 231n25 nation building in, 3, 33, 55 promotion/reception of Impressionism in, 3, 22, 62, 63–68 Rosso’s departure from, for France, 2, 4, 107–8 Rosso’s Italian citizenship/renunciation of, 179, 182 Rosso’s reappearance in, 217, 274n7 in the Triple Alliance, 4, 22, 87, 89 unification of, 2, 3, 7–8, 9, 12, 20, 22, 55, 76, 80–81, 96, 229n1 See also cosmopolitanism/internationalism; nationalism; Risorgimento

Indisposizione di Belle Arti, 12, 13–15, 18, 23, 70, 71, 222n39, 222n41, 223n44, 228n96 Laforgue, Jules, 297n122 Lagrange, Marion, 109–10 Laib, Wolfgang, 196 L’Allucinato (Rosso), 3, 13, 14–16, 23–24, 112, 227n94, 228nn96–97 La Lombardia, 54, 97, 101, 236n76 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 297n122 Laocoön: Oder ber die Grenzen der Malerie und Poesie (Lessing), 129, 154, 168 La Perseveranza, 14, 98, 99, 100, 101, 252n57 La Petite République socialiste, 182–83, 194 La Place (Giacometti), 167, 168 La Plebe, 27 La Porte de l’Enfer (Rodin), 35, 37, 93, 105, 255n79, 296n112 La Portinaia (Rosso), 3, 76–80, 90, 107, 124, 198, 240n39, plate 5 La prima mostra dell’impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso, 132, 217, 270–71n48, 271n53, 273n69 La Promotrice Fiorentina, 65 La Revue Anarchiste, 124 La Riconoscenza (Rosso), 3, 14, 31, 43, 44, 45–54, 57, 58, 104, 105, 213, 221–22n33, 233n37, 234n46 L’Art Français, 125, 127 L’Art: Revue hebdomadaire illustrée, 37, 105 La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio (Arrighi), 18, 76, 225n71

Janson, H. W., 218 Jensen, Robert, 112–13, 186, 192, 195, 196 Johns, Jasper, 218 Johnson, Mark, 165 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 132 Jourdain, Francis, 266n6 Jourdain, Frantz, 197 June Rebellion, 27 Kapoor, Anish, 196 Keller und Reiner, 192, 292n73 Kessler, Marni, 140 Keyzer, Frances, 137, 200, 204, 206–7, 295n108

La Bodinière, 124, 267n8 one-person show at, 124–30, 241n51, 244n73, 262n65, 264nn1–2, 265n3, 266–67n6, 267n10 La Commedia umana, 80, 90 La Famiglia Artistica, 13, 14, 43, 98, 223n43

INDEX

      •      3 3 1

Latini, Don Giuseppe, 10 La Vie Moderne, 67 Lazzari, Costantino, 11 Lebon, Elisabeth, 147 Le Charivari, 18, 49, 69, 70, 78, 162, 170, 240n40 Le Chiffonnier (Manet), 39, 41 Le Cube (Giacometti), 213 Lefèvre, André, 22 Lefèvre, Camille, 195 Le Figaro, 113, 166, 167, 183, 255n79, 280n64 Lega, Silvestro, 28 Le Gaulois, 78, 166 Légion d’honneur, 110, 124, 231n23 Le Grand Journal, 153 Leipzig, 191, 193, 264n1, 269n31, 292–93n81,

L’Europe Artiste, 205 L’Homme blessé (Courbet), 126–28, 128 Licht, Fred, 39, 175 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 17 L’Illustration, 112 L’Illustrazione italiana, 38, 53, 61, 80, 90, 99, 249n22 Limoni, Luigi, 37 L’Impressionniste, 67 Lin, Maya Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 58–59, 58 Lista, Giovanni, 16, 17, 137, 152, 154, 174, 175, 188, 191, 212, 221n21, 221n24, 221n26, 225n70, 227n95, 229n2, 236n76, 240n44, 247–48n14, 248n15, 251n39, 256n1, 261n65, 267n8, 269n31, 271n48, 272n55, 272n57,

292n73 Leistikow, Walter, 192 Le Journal amusant, 18, 70 Le Matin, 166 Le Mond illustré, 81 Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette, 51 Leonardo da Vinci, 20, 130, 195, 228n96 Le peintre de la vie moderne (Baudelaire), 16, 75, 116, 125–26, 280n64 Le Penseur (Rodin), 34–37, 36, 173 Lepère, Auguste-Louis, 124 Le pont de l’Europe (Caillebotte), 67, 140 Le Reveil National, 247n14 Leroi, Paul, 37 Leroux, Gaston, 166 Les Bourgeois de Calais (Rodin), 82–84, 83, 175, 283n105 Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon I (Vela), 33–34, 34, 129, 152–53 Les emigrants (Daumier), 169–71, 170, 283n95 Les Misérables (Hugo), 15, 27, 29, 88 Le Soir, 149 Le sommeil (Brancusi), 205, 206 Les Philosophes (Manet), 39, 41, 42 Les Rougon-Macquart (Zola), 16, 67, 73, 78 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laocoön: Oder ber die Grenzen der Malerie und Poesie, 129, 154, 168 Le Supplice (Brancusi), 205–6, 207 “Le travail et la vie d’une gardienne d’immeuble” (Daumier), 77, 78, 78, 79 Le Tub (Degas), 49, 50

277n28, 279n56, 283n105, 284n3, 290n57, 290n64 L’Italia, 97, 101, 102 lithography. See Daumier, Honoré, lithography and live models, 42–43 Livorno, 65, 70 Locke, Nancy, 42 Lodi, Francesco, 94 Loiseau, Gustave, 184 Lombardy, 11, 13, 17, 20, 21, 23, 66, 233n43 capital of, 11, 18 Lombroso, Cesare, 126 London, 12, 67, 180 Rosso’s presence/visibility in, 4, 6, 90–94, 112, 132, 187–88, 193, 204–6, 209–11, 264n1, 289n52, 297n116 Longoni, Emilio, 45, 226n82 Lo Spirito Folletto, 18 Louis-Napoleon, 162 Lucini, Gian Pietro, 259n37 Ludovic Halévy et Albert Boulanger-Cavé dans les coulisses de l’Opéra (Degas), 162, 164 Lumière brothers, 168 Lys, Georges de, 147

3 3 2      •       I N D E X

Macchiaioli, 3, 20–21, 61, 62, 64–65, 102, 226n80 Madame Noblet (Rosso), 142, 143, 182, 198, 288n36, 289n47, 296n108 Madame X (Rosso), 5, 123, 142–43, 182–83, 186, 212, 273n69, 286n19, plate 18

Magazine of Arts, 37 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 153, 212, 297n122 Mancastroppa, Ernesto, 53, 99 Manchester Guardian, 200, 204, 209 Manet, Édouard, 22, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 194 Cameroni and, 40, 225n73, 231n23, 242n59 Les Philosophes, 39, 41, 42 Le Chiffonnier, 39, 41 Olympia, 73–74, 75, 115 Portrait de Berthe Morisot à la Voilette, 140, 141 Rosso and, 3, 39, 40–41, 42, 46, 62, 73, 74, 75, 116, 139, 140, 157, 231n25 Manzoni, Alessandro, 20 Marcello, 16 Marcus, Sharon, 76, 77

Memnon (Rosso), 202–4, 203, 296n108, 297n120, 297–98n122 Mercure de France, 85, 150–52, 153, 154, 267n9, 277n30 Mère et son enfant endormis (Rosso), 88, 246n3 Merz, Marisa, 215 Metzidakis, Stamos, 55–57 Meunier, Constantin, 115, 180, 195, 293n86 Meunier, Lucien-V., 73 Michelangelo, 33, 97, 188, 195, 228n96 Medici Madonna, 74–75, 74, 198, 208 Milan, 11–29, 42, 43–45, 76, 80–81, 90, 93, 142, 198, 226n82 presence/reception of French artists and writers in, 16–20, 40–41, 64, 66–67, 70, 73, 76, 78–79, 223n55

Marey, Étienne-Jules, 168 Margueritte, Paul, 279n57 Maria Cristina funerary monument to, 50–51, 51 Mariani, Mario, 22, 48, 54, 55, 80, 90, 236n76, 245n83 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 14 Mario, Alberto, 97 Marlais, Michael, 151 Martegani, Alessandro, 37 Martelli, Diego, 22, 64–66, 70, 124, 189, 193, 239n25, 247n11 Martinelli, Paola, 24 Martini, Arturo, 218, 238n11 Masson, André, 167, 214 maternal/mother-and-child themes, 52, 90, 93, 107, 115–21, 124, 125 Mathews, Timothy, 177 Matisse, Henri, 169, 176 Mauclair, Camille, 5, 150–52, 153, 154–55, 277n28, 277n30, 278n39 Maufra, Maxime, 184 Maupassant, Guy de, 66, 73, 225n73 Maurevert, Georges, 257n22 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 12, 22, 27, 95, 96–97 Medici Madonna (Michelangelo), 74–75, 74, 198, 208 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 1, 85, 142, 183, 188, 192, 193, 194–97, 209, 214, 290n55, 294nn91–92 Meissonier, Ernest, 16, 225n73 Meller, Mari Kálmán, 174

Rosso’s presence/period in, 10–29, 67, 72, 77, 81, 88–89, 109, 112, 124, 125, 130, 136, 137, 150, 167, 177, 182, 183, 185, 186, 193, 195, 198, 221n21, 221n24, 231n19, 249n22, 256n1, 263n68, 263n70, 266n3, 267n6, 271n48, 274n9, 280n62, 281n72, 283n97 funerary commissions in, 4, 43–54, 94–106, 233n37, 234n52, 252n54 Scapigliatura, 3, 15, 16–17, 18, 20, 23, 45, 61, 62, 73, 76, 103, 126, 218, 237n6 Miles, Malcolm, 58–59 Millet, Jean-François, 22 Milone, Pietro, 8 Minghetti, Marco, 9 Minne, George, 180 Mirbeau, Octave, 152, 255n79, 278n39 Mitron, Jean, 182–83, 191 modern art French, 20, 63, 64, 135 internationalization of, 181, 192 modernism, 5, 156, 196 modernity, 15, 20, 71, 110, 157, 217 Baudelaire’s ideas/writings on, 3, 16, 17, 18, 49, 71, 116, 125, 140, 142, 155 of Rosso, 16, 18, 55, 80, 93–94, 97, 106, 108, 116, 121, 127, 128, 150, 155, 157, 161, 177, 212 symbols/themes of, 74, 76, 77, 116, 138–39, 140, 147 modern life (la vie moderne), 1, 15, 20, 61, 63, 65, 68, 114, 125, 140, 156, 160, 177

INDEX

      •      3 3 3

Mola, Paola, 291n64, 292n76 and Vittucci, 16, 84–85, 95, 99, 120, 125, 130, 140, 175, 186, 188–89, 202–3, 212, 221n24, 227n94, 228n96, 229–30n2, 231n18, 240nn38–39, 241nn51–52, 244n82, 245n83, 245n86, 249n22, 252n58, 257n22, 259n40, 261–62n65, 263n70, 264n2, 265n3, 266n3, 267nn9–10, 269n31, 269n34, 270n39, 271n48, 271n53, 272n57, 272–73n69, 273–74n6, 279–80n62, 280n63, 281nn69–79, 283n105, 283–84n108, 284n3, 288nn34–35, 288n44, 289n52, 289n54, 290n58, 290n63, 291n71, 292n73, 292n77, 292–93n81, 296n108, 297n120, 299n150, 300n160

Raspail; Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis Monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi (Pozzi), 32, 32 Moore, Henry, 1, 120, 214–15 Suckling Child, 118–20, 119 Moreau-Nélaton, Étienne, 192 Moret, Henry, 184 Morice, Charles, 5, 149–50, 151, 153–54, 155, 190, 194, 204, 262n65, 263n70, 267n9, 279n56, 279n62 Moulin Rouge, 138 Mucha, Alphonse, 209 Munkácsy, Mihály, 112 Murger, Henri, 15, 223n53 Musée de Luxembourg, 181, 213, 287n30, 300n160

Moleti, Gerolamo Ragusa, 17 Mond, Alfred William, 209–10, 211, 213, 299n141, 299n150 Mond, Angela, 209–11 Mond, Emile, 209–11 Mond, Francis Leopold, 211 Mond, Ludwig, 210 Mondo Artistico, 252n50 Monet, Claude, 103–4, 153, 157, 159–60, 184, 293n86 Monet-Rodin exhibition, 107, 110 Moneta, Ernesto Teodoro, 88–89, 96–97, 229n1, 247n11 Montaiglon, Anatole de, 153 Montaignac, Isidore, 149 Monti, Raffaele, 142 Monumento a Giuseppe Garibaldi (Ximenes), 55, 56 monuments Garibaldi, Rosso’s proposed monuments to, 3, 29, 31–37, 54–59, 213, 229n2, 235– 36n68, 236n69 modern/to modernity, 4, 6, 62, 80–86, 156, 167, 177 Napoleon I, monument to, 33–34, 34, 129, 152–53 See also Balzac; Funerary Monument of Victor Noir; Funerary Monument to Archduchess Maria Cristina of Austria; Funerary Monument to Domenico Vismara; Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi; Funerary Monument to François-Vincent

Musée du Louvre, 27, 52, 67, 126, 162, 191, 290n63, 291n66 Museo Archeologico di Venezia, 290n63 Museo Medardo Rosso, 250n32, 252n51, 270n48 Museum der bildenden Knste, Leipzig, 193 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 218 Musset, Alfred de, 15, 223n53 Mussolini, Benito, 218, 232n33 Muybridge, Eadweard, 168 Myrbach, Felician von, 209

3 3 4      •       I N D E X

Nabis, 167, 173 Namuth, Hans, 147 Nanà a Milano (Arrighi), 73, 76 Napoléon I, 56 monument to, 33–34, 34, 129, 152–53 Napoléon III, 22, 47, 140 National Gallery, Berlin, 193 National Gallery, London, 210 nationalism, 2, 6, 68, 98, 108, 111, 179, 218, 256n6 in Italy/Milan, 4, 9, 11, 13, 20, 64, 87, 94 nationalist framing of Rosso, 152, 156, 182, 183, 188, 198, 205 Nègre, Charles, 49, 49 Neo-Impressionism, 151, 153, 183, 192 Nerval, Gérard de, 15, 223n53 Newton, Joy, 115, 152 New York Times, 214 Night Stroll (Seurat), 159, 159 Noblet, Louis-Sylvain, 149, 157, 280n62, 293n86

Noblet family, 266n3, 288n36 Nochlin, Linda, 67–68 Noir, Victor funerary monument to, 47, 48 Noulens, Joseph, 88 Nouvelle Revue, 193 Novalis, 297n122 Novecento Italiano, 218 nude, 68, 73, 118, 168–69 Rosso and, 43, 100, 105, 233n38 Oberdan, Guglielmo, 236n76 Ojetti, Ugo, 269n31 Olympia (Manet), 73–74, 75, 115 Orwics, Michael, 68 Ossian, 65 Osthaus, Karl Ernst, 192, 292n77 Ottone, Casimiro, 43 Pagliano e Ricordi, 12, 221n32 Paillard, Henri-Pierre, 124 Palermo, 17 Pannelier, Victor Dante (The Thinker), 36, 36 Papet, Édouard, 170 Paris Commune, 22, 56, 67, 110 fin-de-siècle, 4–5, 108, 138, 160, 204 foreign artists in, 5, 21, 22, 40, 64, 70, 108– 10, 111, 112, 124, 180, 181, 205, 225n73, 226n80 Grand Palais, 87, 197, 198, 204 Montmartre, 110, 112, 124, 134, 137, 139, 146, 150, 235n64, 273n6 Père Lachaise Cemetery, 47, 48, 51, 52, 169, 235n64 Rosso relocation to/presence/stays in, 4–5, 6, 16, 20, 61, 76, 85, 88, 89–90, 94, 106, 107–21, 108, 123, 125, 130, 132, 133, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143–44, 145–49, 150, 152, 155–56, 157, 160, 166, 167, 171–72, 177, 179, 181–84, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193–95, 198, 205, 213, 214, 217, 227n94, 237n1, 239n29, 244n73, 251n39, 271n48, 273n69, 279n61, 281n72, 291n64 Rosso’s presumed mid-1880s trip to, 97, 245n89, 255n79

Salon, 4, 17, 18, 34, 48, 49, 51–52, 73, 87–88, 112, 113, 135, 148, 155, 169, 180, 197, 225n73, 246n3, 248n15 Vendôme Column, 56, 67 Partito Operaio Italiano, 11, 27 Partito Socialista, 27 patination, 148, 150, 189, 190, 191, 193, 297n120 Paul, Jean, 297n122 Paulmann, Johannes, 111 Pavia, 11, 13, 222nn39–40, 227n94, 229n2, 248n15, 272n55 Garibaldi monument in, 32, 37, 54, 236n69 Pearlman, Henry, 250n31 peasants, 46–47, 48, 51 Pécout, Gilles, 10 Peduzzi, Renato, 37 Pei nostri morti (Segantini), 46–48, 47 Pelez, Fernand, 134–36, 137 Un martyr—Le Marchand de violettes, 135–36, 135 Penone, Giuseppe, 213 Pesce, Gaeton (Gaston), 90, 248n15 Petit, Francis, 112 Petit, Georges, 107, 110, 112, 255n79 Petite danseuse de 14 ans (Degas), 75, 147, 153 photographs/photography, 18, 112, 255n79 Moore and, 120 Rosso and, 1, 71, 72, 74, 82, 83, 84–85, 99, 104, 120, 159, 172–73, 193, 194, 207–8, 215, 221–22n33, 228n97, 241–42n51, 244n82, 245n83, 245n86, 245n89, 254n78, 255n83, 265–66n3, 272n57, 273n5, 279–80n62, 292n73, 293n81 cropping, 116, 163, 173 experimental photographs, 1, 12, 135, 143 installation photographs, 193, 198–200, 206, 207–8, 295–96n108, 296n110 as a marketing tool, 6, 12, 72, 76, 85, 113, 148, 157, 194, 206, 207, 250n32, 253n60, 270n48 self-portraits, 12, 26, 173 studio photographs, 12, 36, 82, 148, 157, 162, 262n65, 263n70 survival of works through, 43, 49, 80, 85, 186 Pica, Vittorio, 274n10 Picasso, Pablo, 85, 110, 194 Piedmont, 8, 10, 64, 180, 231n25, 272n55

INDEX

      •      3 3 5

Piérard, Louis, 180, 264n1, 265n3, 270n48 Piet, Fernand, 124 Pingeot, Anne, 22, 175, 226n84, 283n105 Pino, Alessandra, 24 Pissarro, Camille, 65, 66, 157, 159–60, 184, 194, 293n86 Place de la Concorde (Degas), 174, 175 plaster, 42, 85, 110, 166, 167, 169, 171, 289n49, 292n79, 296n112 Rosso and, 80, 84, 145, 188, 237n1, 250n34, 280n63 casts/casting/versions in, 5, 34, 85, 93, 146, 169, 188, 191, 213, 252n51, 262n65, 300n160 models, 43, 99–100, 156, 157, 245n86, 252n54, 264n1, 274n7

Ranzoni, Daniele, 63 Raspail, François-Vincent funerary monument to, 51, 52 Ratapoil (Daumier), 162–63, 163, 281n72 Rathenau, Walter, 192 Realism, 17, 24–25, 66, 67, 73, 129, 138–39, 227n94, 260n49, 282n90 caricature and, 138, 162–63, 169–70 Courbet and, 3, 24–25, 52, 62, 66, 67–68 Daumier and, 3, 62, 66, 67, 138, 162–63, 169–70 depoliticization of, 3, 62, 67–68 Rosso and, 3, 4, 62, 67, 68, 69, 73, 75, 79–80, 85, 89, 90, 102–3, 116, 127, 129, 162–63, 169–70 Redon, Odilon, 89

Poe, Edgar Allan, 15, 20, 297n122 Pollock, Jackson, 147 Porciani, Ilaria, 33 Portrait de Berthe Morisot à la Voilette (Manet), 140, 141 Portrait de l’auteur, dit L’homme à la pipe (Courbet), 24–26, 25, 40 Portrait of Dr. Fles (Rosso), 186, 200 Post-Impressionism, 89, 110, 135 Pot-bouille (Zola), 78–79, 244n81 Potts, Alex, 156, 275n16 Pozzi, Egidio Monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi, 32, 32 Pozzi, Giudita (Rosso’s wife), 93, 249n24, 256n2 Praga, Emilio, 17 Préault, Auguste, 275n15 Désespoir, 48–49, 49 Preston, Stuart, 214 Prezzolini, Dolores, 142, 266n4 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 142, 254n78, 266n4, 295n102 printing press, rise of, 11–12, 72 Prix de Rome, 180 prostitutes, 68, 72–76, 77, 79, 116, 243n66 Prudhomme, Sully, 297n122 Puccini, Giacomo, 98, 102, 256n85 Pusterla, Attilio, 136

relief, 84, 93, 95, 101, 105, 117, 169–71, 182 bas-relief, 46, 55, 65, 101 Renaissance, 33, 130, 189, 214, 292n79 casts/reproductions of art from, 21, 74–75, 190–91, 194, 209, 295n108 Renard, Marcel, 274n7 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 67, 140, 149, 157, 184, 200, 202 Rescaldini, Antonio, 228n96 Reveil matin, 255n79 Revue de Paris, 255n79 Revue des Deux Mondes, 151, 166, 225n76 Riall, Lucy, 33 Richter, Jean Paul, 15 Ricordi, Giulio, 98, 252n57 Ricordi, Tito, 98 Rictus, Jehan, 109, 147, 148, 190, 193, 196, 197, 270n45, 271n53, 290n61, 293n84, 295n102 Rieuse (Petite rieuse) (Rosso), 124, 137–38, 138, 182–83, 185, 269n31, 271n53, 272n57, 286n15, 288n35, 295–96n108, 299n136 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 192, 275n16 Rimbaud, Arthur, 16, 297n122 Riotor, Leon, 247n13 Ripari, Virgilio Gli amanti, 18, 19 Risorgimento, 20, 21, 27, 33, 97 aftermath of/years following, 2, 7–8, 10, 22, 33, 37, 57, 108 heroes/key figures of, 8, 12, 22, 29, 95 mythology of, 9, 37 Rivista Internazionale del Socialismo, 27

railways, 8–9, 13, 91, 180, 273n4 Rambaud, Yveling Silhouettes d’artistes, 171, 172 Rameau, Jean, 166

3 3 6      •       I N D E X

Rodin, Auguste, 4, 97, 108, 120, 154, 171, 180, 192, 195, 198, 275n16, 285n10, 289n49, 291n68, 296n112 Balzac, 6, 104, 115, 129, 130, 156–57, 164, 165–67, 173, 271n48, 278n39, 296n112 Dresden exhibition, 187 Iris, messagère des dieux, 117–18, 117 La Porte de l’Enfer, 35, 37, 93, 105, 255n79, 296n112 Le Penseur, 34–37, 36, 173 Les Bourgeois de Calais, 82–84, 83, 175, 283n105 Monet-Rodin exhibition, 107, 110 Pavilion d’Alma, Exposition Universelle, 157, 181, 280n66 Rosso and, 1, 6, 35, 36, 82–84, 85, 93, 105, 108, 110, 117, 118, 120, 124, 130, 150–51, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156–57, 164, 165–66, 167–68, 173, 175, 183, 190, 194–95, 200, 202, 204, 209, 214–15, 242n60, 245n89, 251n39, 255n79, 262n66, 267n9, 271n48, 273n69, 274n7, 278n39, 280n66, 283n105, 289n52, 297n116 Zola and, 115 Rodriguez, Jean-François, 242n51, 296n108 Roger-Marx, Claude, 152, 153, 171, 278n39 Romanticism, 17, 19, 20, 27, 97, 152, 298n122 Rome, 33, 131, 180, 190, 218, 240n39, 252n51, 299n136 academy in, 42 ancient, 14, 96, 190 Esposizione Nazionale, 38–39, 265n3, 291n68 Romussi, Carlo, 88, 113 Rosa, Giovanna, 15 Rosenblum, Robert, 135 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 6, 210, 299n144 Rossi, Lucio, 112, 259n37 Rossini, Gioacchino, 98 Rosso, Domenico (Rosso’s father), 8–9, 93, 180, 221n25 Rosso, Francesco (Rosso’s son), 93, 232n33, 240n39, 266n4, 274n7, 280n62 Rosso, Medardo adoption of French citizenship, 179, 198, 213, 284n3 Italian citizenship/renunciation of, 179, 182

marketing/promotional/sales tactics, 5, 6, 12, 72, 76, 85, 114, 125, 145, 146, 147, 148, 179, 198, 209, 290n58 retitling of his works by, ix, 27, 80, 87–88, 89, 91–92, 124–25, 132, 189, 198, 210, 228n96, 241–42n51, 261–62n65, 265– 66n3, 269n39, 271n48, 279–80n62 as a sculptor-founder, 2, 146, 148, 149, 150, 155 Works Aetas aurea, 4, 92–94, 92, 105, 107, 115, 120, 125, 240–50n26, 249n22, 256n1, 296n108, 300n161 Amor materno, 52, 54, 90, 93, 107, 125, 248n19, 249n22, 250n26 Après la visite, 5, 123, 125–30, 126, 127, 131, 132, 186, 200, 201, 259n40, 264n1 Bambina che ride, 130–32, 131, 137, 269n31, 292n76 Bambino ebreo, 132–33, 133, 192, 195, 200, 201, 211, 259n43, 269–70n39, 288n36, 292n77, 296n108, 299n138, 300n160 Bersagliere (In esplorazione), 23, 27–29, 38, 88, 90, 227n94, 231n19, plate 2 Bookmaker, 161, 161, 162–67, 267n10, 293n82, 299n136 Cantante a spasso, 39–42, 40, 90, 92, 231n19, 248n19 Carne altrui, 3, 72–76, 74, 79, 90, 107, 125, 198, 205, 240n39, 241n51, 243n66, 248n19, 256n1, 265n3, 296n108, plate 4 Dopo una scappata (Il Birichino) (Gavroche), 23, 27, 28, 38, 88, 91–92, 107, 114, 124, 182, 192, 221n33, 227nn94– 95, 231n19, 246n3, 256n1, 267n11, 295n108, plate 1 Ecce puer, 6, 132, 179, 202, 210–13, 210, 300n160 El Locch, 23–26, 40, 92, 112, 227n95, 227–28n96, 228nn97–98, 256n1, plate 1 Enfant à la Bouchée de pain, 136–37, 136, 200, 202, 271n48, 299n136, 300n160 Enfant au sein, 115–21, 125, 262n65, 295n108, plate 12, plate 13, plate 14

INDEX

      •      3 3 7

Work (continued) Enfant malade, 123, 133–36, 134, 182–83, 187, 205, 264–65n2, 286n15, 295n108, 298n136 Fine (La Ruffiana), 14, 38, 38, 89, 90, 91, 99, 107, 230–31n18, 248n19, 252n51, 256n1 Funerary Monument to Filippo Filippi, 14, 95, 98–106, 100, 186, 213, 251n48, 252n57, 253nn60–62, 254n78, 255–56n83, 256nn84–85, plate 8, plate 10, plate 11 Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis, 27, 95–98, 96, 186, 251n37, plate 7, plate 9 Gli innamorati sotto il lampione, 38

286n15, 288n35, 295–96n108, 299n136 Se la fusse grappa!, 14, 38, 69–72, 76, 90, 92, 240n39, 241n48, plate 3 self-portraits, 12, 26, 39, 92, 171, 172, 174, 283n108 Une conversation, 175–76, 176, 186, 191, 284n108 Untitled, 163, 165 Uomo che legge, 161, 162–67, 171, 267n10, 281n70, plate 20 Yvette Guilbert, 138–40, plate 16 Rosso, Michele (Rosso’s brother), 8, 93, 288n42 Rothenstein, William, 194 Rothschild, Oscar Ruben, 132, 211, 269n39 Rouart, Alexis, 146

Grande rieuse, 138, 140, 198, 200, 272n57, 296n108, plate 15 Head of Vitellius, 187, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 289n52, 290n63, 294n92, 298n136 Il Vecchio, 38, 39, 89, 252n51 Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette, 5, 123, 125, 140–42, 200, 213, 283n97, 300n162, plate 17 Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit, 6, 145, 156–62, 158, 167–77, 173, 174, 213, 280n62, 283n105, plate 19 Impression d’omnibus, 62, 80–86, 167, 200, 213, plate 6 Innamorati sotto il lampione, 38, 234n46 L’Allucinato, 3, 13, 14–16, 23–24, 112, 227n94, 228nn96–97 La Portinaia, 3, 76–80, 90, 107, 124, 198, 240n39, plate 5 La Riconoscenza, 3, 14, 31, 43, 44, 45–54, 57, 58, 104, 105, 213, 221–22n33, 233n37,

Rouart, Eugène, 146 Rouart, Henri, 70, 146, 149, 182, 186, 198, 267n6, 273nn3–5, 281n69, 293n86, 295–96n108 Rouart, Louis, 267n6 Rouault, Georges, 198 Rousseau, James Physiologie de la portière, 78, 77, 78, 79 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 229n1 Rude, François, 97, 195, 231n25 Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (Caillebotte), 160, 160 Ruggieri, Francesco, 233–34n44 Rusiñol, Santiago, 110 Ruskin, John, 298n122 Russolo, Luigi, 287n28

234n46 Madame Noblet, 142, 143, 182, 198, 288n36, 289n47, 296n108 Madame X, 5, 123, 142–43, 182–83, 186, 212, 273n69, 286n19, plate 18 Memnon, 202–4, 203, 296n108, 297n120, 297–98n122 Mère et son enfant endormis, 88, 246n3 Portrait of Dr. Fles, 186, 200 Rieuse (Petite rieuse), 124, 137–38, 138, 182–83, 185, 269n31, 271n53, 272n57,

3 3 8      •       I N D E X

Saffi, Aurelio, 97 Sainte-Croix, Camille de, 57, 85, 154–55, 170, 227n95, 231n25, 232n30, 233nn35–36, 240n39, 244n82, 245n92, 262n65, 264n1, 265n3, 267n6, 267n11, 279n57, 279n61, 280n62, 281n69, 283n97, 284n108, 290n63, 293nn85–86 Saint-Marceaux, René de, 234n48 Saint Pierre, Eustache de, 82 Salon, 4, 17, 18, 34, 48, 49, 51–52, 73, 87–88, 112, 113, 135, 148, 155, 169, 180, 197, 225n73, 246n3, 248n15 Salon d’Automne, 197, 202, 209 of 1904, Rosso at, 73, 74, 85, 197–208, 199, 201, 202, 208, 209, 242n51, 250n31,

270–71n48, 295–96n108, 296nn109– 10, 296n112 Salon des Champs Elysées, 124, 267n7 Salon des Refusés, 21 Salon du Groupe des Artistes Indépendants, 89–90, 197, 247n13 San Lorenzo, 33 Sannino, Daniela, 16 San Pietro in Vincoli, 33 Santillane, 138, 150, 273n6, 274n7 Sarfatti, Margherita, 218 Scapigliatura, 15, 16–17, 18, 20, 73 Baudelaire and, 15, 16–17, 20, 126 Rosso and, 3, 15, 23, 45, 61, 62, 63, 76, 103, 218, 237n6 Scheffler, Samuel, 111

Simmel, Georg, 195 Sisley, Alfred, 67, 184 Sizeranne, Robert de la, 166 Società Anonima degli Omnibus per la Città di Milano, 81 Società di mutuo soccorso, 9 Société des Artistes Indépendants, 4, 89–90, 197, 247n13 Société Française pour l’Arbitrage entre Nations, 88 Soffici, Ardengo, 74–75, 205, 217, 254n78, 264n1, 271n48, 280n62, 295n102, 295–96n108, 299n150 Soldini, Antonio, 37 Soleil du dimanche, 112 Sonn, Richard, 146

Schoelcher, Victor, 48 Schubert, Franz, 297n122 Scott, Nancy, 129 sculpture dislocation/elimination of base/pedestal for, 49–50, 61, 71, 84, 95, 100, 101, 104, 167, 195, 198 heroic tradition in, 2, 3, 8, 31, 55, 71, 83 monumental, 1, 33, 34–35, 55–57, 82, 83, 98, 161 serial, 5, 87, 123–24, 146, 147, 181, 188 Segal, George Bus Riders, 85, 86 Street Crossing, 167, 169 Segantini, Giovanni, 22, 43, 182, 183, 184, 226n82, 268n22, 287n28, 294n97 Pei nostri morti, 46–48, 47 Seidel, Curt, 270n48, 271n39 Seidlitz, Woldemar von, 294n91 Se la fusse grappa! (Rosso), 14, 38, 69–72, 76, 90, 92, 240n39, 241n48, plate 3

Sonzogno, Riccardo, 12, 17, 224n62 Spackman, Barbara, 125, 126 Spertini, Giovanni, 37 Stabilimenti Riuniti V. Turati & M. Bassini, 76 Stabilimento Artistico Vittorio Turati, 12 Steedman, Carolyn, 132 Stevens, Alfred, 116 Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, 57 Street Crossing (Segal), 167, 169 Suckling Child (Moore), 118–20, 119 Sue, Eugène, 73 Surdi, Baldassare, 221n33 Sutto, Paolo, 191, 290–91n64, 291n66, 291n68 Symbolism, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 170, 212 poets/writers, 109, 124, 154, 279n57 Symbolist critics, 5, 57, 85, 88, 125, 149–50, 151, 170, 276n19, 279n57

self-portraiture, 12, 25, 25, 26, 26, 39, 92, 126, 171, 172, 174, 283n108 Settignano, Desiderio da, 130 Seurat, Georges, 89, 140 Night Stroll, 159, 159 Severini, Gino, 217, 287n28 Shiff, Richard, 94, 104 Shirreff, Erin, 215 Signac, Paul, 89, 151 Signorini, Telemaco, 21 Silhouettes d’artistes (Rambaud), 171, 172

Taine, Hippolyte, 19 Tanguy, Julien (Père), 250n31 Tarchetti, Igino Ugo, 126 Taylor, Jeffrey, 218 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (Boccioni), 184, 238n11 Tedesco, Enza Del, 37 Tempel, Bruno, 63 Tentoonstelling van schilderijen uit de moderne Fransche school en beeldhouwwerken van M. Rosso, 184–86, 288n34 Thiaudière, Edmond, 61, 88, 153

INDEX

      •      3 3 9

Tipografia Lebrun-Boldetti, 12 Tipografia Lombardi, 12, 72, 221n32, 241n51 Titian, 73, 75 Tivaroni, Carlo, 97 Tolstoy, Leo, 103 Tortonese, Paolo, 16 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 138, 139 Toussaint, Gaston, 195 Trajan’s Column, 56 Trebini, Giovanni Francesco, 186, 288nn41–42 Treu, Georg, 186–88, 190, 191, 192, 193, 288n44, 289nn48–50, 290n63, 293n81, 293n84, 294n92 Treves, Emilio, 12 Triboulet, 112 Triple Alliance, 4, 22, 87, 89

Vela, Vincenzo, 13 Les Derniers Jours de Napoléon I, 33–34, 34, 129, 152–53 Venice, 218, 241n48, 269–70n39 Venice Biennale, of 1914, 73, 137, 242n51, 262n65, 265n2, 266n4, 270n48, 271n48, 271n53 Vercesi, Pasquale, 226n82 Verdi, Giuseppe, 98 Verga, Giovanni, 79, 225n76 Verismo, 3, 54, 61, 62, 81, 90, 114, 126, 129 Verlaine, Paul, 153, 190, 290n61, 297n122 Verrocchio, 189 Versailles, 34, 129 Viardot, Louis (Luigi), 22, 64, 97, 226n85, 238nn15–16

Troubetzkoy, Paolo (Paul), 192, 197–98, 204, 287n30 Tschudi, Hugo von, 193 Turati, Vittorio, 76 Turin, 8, 9, 10, 17, 66, 93, 218, 221n25, 231n19, 264n1, 268n19 Tuscany, 21, 22, 64, 66 Macchiaioli, 3, 20–21, 62, 75, 102

Victoria and Albert Museum, 289n52 Vienna, 50, 185, 191, 193, 195–97, 209, 271n48 Vienna Secession, 45, 209, 294n98 of 1903, 195–96, 294n94, 294n98 Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Lin), 58–59, 58 Vigeland, Gustav, 195 Villemer, Jean, 166 Vismara, Domenico funerary monument to, 102, 103, 105 Vittorio Emanuele, II, 8 Vittucci, Fabio. See Mola, Paola, and Vittucci Vogler, Paul, 124 Vollard, Ambroise, 112, 200, 250n31 Vuillard, Édouard, 167

Ugolino et ses fils (Carpeaux), 34, 35 Une conversation (Rosso), 175–76, 176, 186, 191, 284n108 Un Enterrement à Ornans (Courbet), 51–52, 53, 67 Unità italiana, 95 United Kingdom, 22, 184 United States, 170, 180, 209 Un martyr—Le Marchand de violettes (Pelez), 135–36, 135 Untitled (Rosso),163, 165 Uomo che legge (Rosso), 161, 162–67, 171, 267n10, 281n70, plate 20 Utrillo, Miguel, 110 Valera, Paolo, 14, 15, 76 Valsamas, Maxime, 70 Vamba, 8, 220n7 van Gogh, Theo, 70 van Gogh, Vincent, 70, 94, 250n31 Vatican, 190, 194, 290n63 Vauxcelles, Louis, 147, 197, 200, 204, 295n108

3 4 0      •       I N D E X

Wagner, Anne M., 120 Wagner, Richard, 98 wax, 42, 147, 153, 291n68 Rosso and, 1, 146, 147, 149, 150, 185, 186, 187, 193, 195, 198, 205, 212, 215, 237n1, 259n38, 269n39, 293n81, 298–99n136, 299n138, 300n160 casts/casting in/cire perdue/versions in, 5, 93, 120–21, 130, 131, 142, 145, 146, 147–48, 184, 187, 188, 191, 212, 259n43, 262n65, 265n3, 266n3, 271n48, 288n36, 300n161 Wilde, Oscar, 103 Wollen, Peter, 111 working-class themes, 24, 43, 46 women. See heads, of women World, 205

World Society Journal, 209 World War I, 11, 217 Ximenes, Ettore Monumento a Giuseppe Garibaldi, 55, 56 Yeats, W. B., 37 Yvette Guilbert (Rosso), 138–40, plate 16 Zandomeneghi, Federico, 21, 64, 109, 110 Zanzi, Emilio, 269–70n39

Zoja, Luigi, 57 Zola, Émile, 16, 17, 19, 64, 90, 103, 115 Cameroni and, 19–20, 27, 40, 66, 78–79, 111–12, 225n73, 225n76, 231n23, 242n59, 244n81 Les Rougon-Macquart, 16, 67, 73, 78–79, 244n81 Nanà, 73 Pot-bouille, 78–79, 244n81 Rosso and, 48, 67, 73, 78, 85, 90, 111–12, 113– 15, 116, 260n57

INDEX

      •      3 4 1