ABSTRACT
Medardo Rosso stands at the beginning of Italian modernism, occupying that ambiguous position practically by himself, and he enters the history of French Impressionism at an angle, so to speak. Yet Rosso is undeniably one of the great modern sculptors. He seems to have had a decisive influence on one of Rodin's greatest works, the "Balzac"; and it is said that dealers used to peddle Rosso's sculptures in this country as Rodins. Sculptors who have been searching out the possibilities of a more expressive surface without wanting to abandon the monolithic image will find in Rosso a precursor of their aspiration. Rosso was one of those artists—Courbet and Daumier were others—who looked to the immediate scene both out of a natural sympathy and as a means of breaking through the inherited pieties of an exalted and phony canon of beauty.
