Rosso employed wax-normally a preparatory medium-as a finish, harnessing its deathly connotations of impermanence and decay as well as its approximation of the warmth and tenderness of human flesh-an impulse akin to Rilke’s own meditations on humankind’s fleeting moments of contact with transient, sublime beauty. On view is a 1920–25 version of Bambino Ebreo made in plaster with a wax surface.
In a continuing endeavor to represent complex emotion in the young child’s features, Rosso re-created and recast the somber portrait bust several times for numerous exhibitions and personal gifts.
In two intimate 1974 artist’s books and a suite of sensuous watercolors, Kiefer presents meditative and spiritual scenes that show his longstanding fascination with both sculptor and poet.įirst conceived in 1893, Medardo Rosso’s Bambino Ebreo ( Jewish Boy) emerged as one of the artist’s most beloved late-career motifs. Rilke’s evocative prose allowed Kiefer to fully appreciate the work of the French sculptor, whose naturalistic touch and tendency toward the monumental would make him one of Kiefer’s most enduring sources of inspiration. In the 1960s, a young Anselm Kiefer picked up a copy of Rilke’s Rodin monograph, his first encounter with both of their work. Originally conceived seven years prior for the Monument to Victor Hugo-in which the muse, perched above the French literary giant, whispers inspiration to him- La Muse tragique is presented here as a single figure, evoking a heightened pathos befitting its subject’s symbolic identity. Rilke venerated the sculptor’s ability to translate poetic sentiments into figuration, as exemplified by Rodin’s large bronze La Muse tragique (1896). Two decades earlier, Rilke had moved to Paris to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, initiating a complex but lasting friendship between the two men.
Concerned with the interplay of suffering and beauty in human existence, the Elegies also project a hopeful vision of a more peaceful world. There, while standing atop a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, he claimed to hear the following line: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” Rilke eventually used these words to open the Duino Elegies, a 1923 collection of ten intensely religious metaphysical poems. In 1912, Rilke was invited to stay at Duino Castle-a fortress just north of Trieste, Italy-by the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. Gagosian is pleased to present Duino Elegies, a group exhibition that traces the resonance of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry through artworks spanning the past 150 years. The beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,Īnd we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
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