Artwork of the month September

Medardo Rosso, Ecce Puer, 1906, Hilti Art Foundation

Medardo Rosso

* 1858 in Turin, † 1928 in Milan, Italy


Ecce Puer, 1906


Bronze

44.8 x 37.3 x 36.5 cm

Hilti Art Foundation

 

In 1906, Emile Mond, head of a well-to-do family in London, commissioned Medardo Rosso to fashion a portrait of his six-year-old son Alfred William: Ecce Puer. In December 1906, at an exhibition in London, the work was still titled Portrait de l'enfant Mond: impression. In 1910, Rosso renamed it Ecce Puer (Lat.: look, a boy!). Indicating that Rosso's perception of his own work had shifted from portraying a specific person to the generalised portrait of a child.

According to one story that has been passed down, the child was standing one evening behind a curtain watching the company that had been invited to his home. Rosso spontaneously captured this impression. Etha Fles, a collector of his work, remembers the child standing in the half-open door of the guestroom watching the artist at work, whereupon Rosso described and recorded this as a vision de pureté dans un monde banal (vision of purity in a trivial world). Whatever the case, Rosso's Ecce Puer is a work of exceptional content and great aesthetic impact. It is presumably the last work he ever created, since he did not address any new themes after 1906.

Ecce Puer is also an eloquent example in positively monumental form of the special role that representations of children play in Rosso's oeuvre as a whole. Despite the fleeting nature that characterises almost everything Rosso created, the sculpture seems to stake out a presence that captures the quintessential child with great empathy. It is not through precise formulation but rather subtle implication that the artist renders a physiognomy still largely untouched by the seminal experiences of life. We have the impression of a child's profoundly tender, sheltered existence, which will soon be outgrown and inevitably left behind, generating an aura of melancholy. Rosso espied a vision de pureté dans un monde banal for the duration of a brief moment and it is in capturing such moments that his genius lay.

 

Uwe Wieczorek

<b>Medardo Rosso, Ecce Puer, 1906, Hilti Art Foundation</b>
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein highlights a work from the permanent collection each month throughout the year. Works from the collection of the Hilti Art Foundation are also included in this series on a regular basis.