1963, “An Exhuming Job:” Medardo Rosso, Margaret Scolari Barr, and the MoMA Exhibition

The article revolves around the pivotal retrospective of Medardo Rosso held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963. The exhibition marked the first institutional acknowledgement of the Italian sculptor in the United States, after the inclusion of single pieces in major group shows and a retrospective in a private gallery. The article's argument is twofold. First, by reconstructing the history of the reception of Medardo Rosso in the United States since the postwar years, I contend that the MoMA show assessed for the first time the centrality and relevance of the artist's figure and practice, countering the prevailing narrative around the evolution of art between the late 19th and early 20th century, which was mainly focused on Auguste Rodin with regards to sculpture. By emphasizing the radical modernity of the artist's practice and visual concerns, the exhibition substantially contributed in positioning Rosso as a source of modern and contemporary art, as attested by a few early, yet remarkable, occurrences of his name and illustrations of his works in major publications devoted to the American art of the 1960s. The latter argument points at the figure of Margaret Scolari Barr, the scholar and art critic who played a substantial role in organizing the exhibition (officially curated by Peter Selz) and authored the accompanying monograph on the artist. By analyzing the degree of her scholarship, as attested by the publications that she devoted to Rosso throughout the years, and reconstructing the history of her encounter with the artist's body of work and the development of her research around it, I argue that Scolari should finally reconsidered as a major art critic and a fundamental figure bridging the art between the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Scolari was way more than just the wife of Alfred Barr. Her contribution and extensive knowledge of European culture and languages was crucial in fostering the process of integration and analysis of the history of European art of the 19th and 20th century in the United States. Furthermore, her interest in figures like Rosso bears witness to the independency of her vision as an art critic from the major canon of modernism, as assessed by Barr, and her thorough commitment to rediscover a neglected figure and position his practice at the core of the major concerns of modern art. The article is followed by an appendix, in which I reconstructed the whole exhibition by identifying as many works as possible, based on information that I was able to retrieve from archival and bibliographical sources.