by Karen Wilkin

The Italian-born sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) is the proverbial "artist's artist." Controversial in his own day, "discovered" by the Abstract Expressionist generation, and now widely acclaimed in art-historical circles, he is an important figure to many contemporary practitioners. Rosso is still not familiar to the American art public in the way that his older colleague Auguste Rodin is.

Yet, for anyone who cares about the history of modernism, Rosso is a pivotal, revolutionary figure, an independent-minded artist whose introspective heads and figures, with their bold but nuanced modeling and light-responsive surfaces, radically enlarged conceptions of what sculpture could be—formally, conceptually and technically—in the early years of the 20th century.

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Source: http://www.wsj.com/