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Second impressions
Discovering Medardo Rosso; plus George Bellows’s ‘Tragedies of War’
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions"
At the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, through October 26.


"George Bellows and the Tragedies of War"
At the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, through October 26.


For all the acclaim he earned during his lifetime (1858–1928), and for all of his technical and artistic innovations (he made wax a permanent sculptural material and returned casting to the sculptor’s domain), the name Medardo Rosso does not trip lightly from most people’s lips as a standard bearer of Impressionist art in three dimensions the way, say, Auguste Rodin or Edgar Degas does. But that much he deserves, according to the argument put forward in "Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions," which is up now at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, the first of its kind in an American museum in 40 years.

The lucid catalogue that accompanies the exhibit, with essays by Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, elaborates what you’ll immediately take in, that "Impressionist" fails to account for essential aspects of Rosso’s art. For one thing, he was fixated on repetition. He remade, whether in plaster, wax over plaster, or bronze, the same image again and again. Monet in his paintings of haystacks or the cathedral at Rouen tried to capture fleeting moments in time and light; Rosso was more about mechanical repetition in a way that anticipates Warhol. In fact, he made only one entirely new work after 1900, spending nearly three decades pursuing recastings of established forms.

Rosso was also in the avant-garde of what we call modernism in several other respects. The airholes, the fissures, the unmolded areas, the serendipitous contours that resulted from the casting process — he let all of these stand in the finished work. Chance and imperfection, his art declares, are every bit as integral to his busts and figures as their more evidently deliberate aspects. In fact, every Rosso sculpture represents a peculiar, even unsettling fusion of the planned and the unplanned. And it’s not just that the left side of the face of Bambino ebreo ("Jewish Boy") remains unformed or that the backside of Ecce puer ("Behold the Child") looks as unpremeditated as a river bed. Where Bambino ebreo’s face is most articulated, it still looks as if it were in the act of coming together: the skin is never smooth, the bones never seem firmly positioned, the eyes are hollowed-out and obscure.

Perhaps the most dynamic sculpture in "Second Impressions" is Rosso’s 1894 L’uomo alle corse ("Bookmaker"), a relatively diminutive piece — it stands under two feet — that nevertheless seems grand and immense. Not only did Rodin praise the work, but critics and eventually Rosso himself came to suspect Rodin of appropriating features of L’uomo alle corse — notably the vertiginous slant of the figure — for Rodin’s own 1898 Monument à Balzac, which is often viewed as the first great modernist sculpture. Although it’s clear that L’uomo alle corse paved the way for Rodin’s masterpiece, I think it would be a mistake — one more or less taken up in the catalogue and the exhibit — to suppose that the praise eventually heaped on Rodin is praise taken from Rosso. It isn’t. L’uomo alle corse is merely brilliant; Balzac is monumental.

But the essays by Cooper and Hecker as well as James Cuno’s introduction to them all represent efforts to lift Rosso from the obscurity into which he regularly falls. For the sake of this distinguished artist, I hope they succeed. At the same time, it’s worth recognizing Rosso’s own contribution to the periodic critical and popular inattention to his opus. Three issues strike me as problematic in the work: scale, seriality, and articulation.

Le monument à Balzac — on which Rodin worked for seven years, earning widespread ridicule upon its completion and never seeing it cast in bronze — stands over nine feet tall. Size is, of course, not to be confused with import; however, the psychological, spiritual, physical, and æsthetic impact of every work’s dimensions are fundamental. The cathedral at Chartres would be a carriage house if its ceiling were low. In the same way, the 19-inch L’uomo alle corse reads like a miniature — more precisely like a study — in a way that Balzac’s height and girth forbid.

In fact, creative output as the stuff of study — art as examination material — dogs this exhibit and may ultimately explain why Rosso will always remain more interesting than arresting. Not only is his sculptures’ scale more on the order of specimens than spectacles, but by presenting them serially (the exhibit includes three Uomini alle corse in plaster, bronze, and wax over plaster; four Bambini ebrai, two in bronze, two in wax over plaster; four Grandes rieuses; and so on), the Sackler doesn’t invite us to the drama of seeing. Instead, we’re invited to the classroom of comparing. I found myself fascinated by the difference between the wax L’uomo alle corse — recessed, attenuated, obscure — and the plaster one, which reads as energetic, fully formed, and immediate. Yet I wish somebody, artist or curator, had simply picked the best one for me to see. Instead of hearing a great poem, I was thrust into a translation class and forced to engage in the merits and demerits of various versions. The pleasures were all in the mind, not in the body.

Finally, the unremitting elusiveness of Rosso’s creations — the eyes that never look outward; the mouths that seldom admit to their attitude; the busts for which bodies are unimaginable — begins to feel not like a wealth of ambiguity with multiple emotional charges so much as a lack of resolution. Grande rieuse ("Large Laughing Woman") would seem to refute two of those objections. Although her eyes are obscure, her smile remains forceful, and her middle-aged body is fully suggested by her shoulders and upper chest — that is, if you’re looking at her plaster incarnation. In her wax-over-plaster incarnation, the smile begins to look like a mouthpiece, as if a plastic guard were propping up her facial muscles. In her bronze version, the entire structure tips forward (evident in person but not in the catalogue) at such an angle as to make her grin seem mad, a smile before she smashes. You can’t trust it.

Every artist takes the chance that the decisions he or she makes about a work won’t "read." But making those decisions is crucial. Rosso’s commitment to repetition combined with an inarticulateness verging on inaccessibility testifies to a powerful rather than an overpowering talent.

AN AMAZING EXHIBIT of an entirely different kind is just a few doors down from the Sackler at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. George Bellows (1882–1925), an Ashcan School artist best known for his bright, kinetic oil paintings of boxers, wrestlers, and scenes from the raw sides of New York City life, was so moved by British reports of German brutality in Belgium during World War I that in a six-week period between April and May of 1918, he created a series of lithographs testifying to the horrors of war. He also created five oil paintings, one of which, The Germans Arrive, forms the centerpiece of "George Bellows and the Tragedies of War."

To say that this is a disturbing exhibit only begins to describe what Bellows created. A dizzying and nauseating work, The Germans Arrive is based on an actual account: it depicts a soldier holding a struggling teenage boy whose two hands have been cut off. They lie on the ground at his feet while his bloodless face and ashen body writhe in the soldier’s hold as his wrists spew blood. The "introduction" to Bellows’s series — that is, the works on the walls just outside "Tragedies of War" — is no less compelling, with etchings and lithographs on the subject of war by Goya, Daumier, Picasso, Winslow Homer, and Manet, among others.


Issue Date: August 22 - 28, 2003
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