It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I'm Lee Jung-Grechko, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're speaking with Dr. Sharon Hacker.
She's the author of Finding Lost Wax, the Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Maudardo Rosso. Dr. Hacker is an art historian and curator who specializes in Italian modern and contemporary sculpture. She's a leading authority on the sculpture of Maudardo Rosso, about whom she's authored over 30 publications and has curated exhibitions at the Harvard Arts Museum, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and the Gallery Tadeus-Rapac.
She's author of A Moments Monument, Maudardo Rosso, and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture. Also published in Italian and recipient of the Millard Mays Publication Fund Award from the College Art Association. Dr. Hacker has a special interest in sculptural materials, techniques, and their histories.
Dr. Hacker, thank you so much for speaking with us today. Thank you for having me. So first of all, how did you put together this volume?
Where did it all start? So this book started as an interdisciplinary study of a series of casts made by a late 19th century Italian sculptor named Maudardo Rosso. And he's what we like to call the most important artist you've never heard of. Rosso's known for his great achievements in modern sculpture through a series of strange looking plasters, waxes, and bronzes, most of which he made when he moved to Paris at the end of the 19th century.
Now, lots of people have written about these small sculptures, but few people have really taken the time to think about his materials and his methods. And these turn out to be really important. Actually, they were just as revolutionary for their time as his sculptural subjects and his truly radical ideas about art. And materials and techniques can just tell us a lot, not only about Rosso's sculptures and why they look the way they do, but also about this man, who he was, and what it was like to be an artist living and working in the late 19th century in Italy, and then in Paris where he moved.
And it also tells us about the changes that were happening in the world of bronze casting right at that time. So when I started working on Rosso in the 1990s, there was very little interest in technical questions. And probably because of that, it was mistakenly thought that he hand-modeled his waxes individually rather than cast them in molds, and you can still find that written in publications. Also, people thought that the material he used was beeswax, and that's the kind of wax that was typically used for modeling sculpture.
But actually, as we found out, neither of these assertions turns out to be true. So on one level, the book is about Rosso and how he made his works, which we found out were cast by a specific technique called the Lost Wax Casting Method, which in French is called the Cierper du. This was a pretty traditional technique. It's existed forever, but he uses it in an incredibly innovative way.
So the book is about how he experiments very radically with an angel technique and the newness of his approach. It's also about the differences between traditional practices and the goals of modern sculpture versus what he was trying to figure out through his use of materials. On another level, it's a fascinating story of the technique itself and what happened to it in the 19th century because it was completely forgotten in every country except for Italy. So we learn about that in the book as well.
I actually started looking more closely at Rosso's process because when I started working on him in the 90s, I noticed these strange shiny globs that were on the waxes. And this question led me to find out that Rosso didn't model the works by hand, but he actually cast liquid wax into gelatin molds. So we put a team together with Harvard's Drowse Center for Conservation, and that led to a collaborative study and an exhibition where we really tried to sit down and decipher his working methods. What happened was in the 90s, we just weren't ready to appreciate all the subtleties of his process, and we didn't come to any major conclusions about the composition of the wax samples that we'd analyzed.
So 10 more years go on, and I continue to work on Rosso and study his objects more deeply. And thanks to Peter Freeman, who's a dealer in New York who has a great interest in Rosso, we decided to do a large study of many casts of one single subject called the Jewish Boy. We traveled all around the world to study all known casts of the Jewish Boy, and then we were actually able to bring 10 of them to Peter Freeman's gallery in New York and organize a once in a lifetime two-day study day with scholars, conservators, and conservation scientists from all kinds of different areas of expertise. And that's how the book was born, the results ended up being this book, but it took seven more years to put together.
It really strikes me that you were involved in kind of interesting, maybe you think, glamorous detective work here. You're traveling around the world, you're putting together this team, trying to debunk submits about Rosso. Did it feel like you were embarking on sort of an adventure with us? Oh yeah, also because you know it changed the entire narrative about the artist.
From a misinformed idea of Rosso as a wax modeler making unique objects, he becomes a serial sculptor who's making each cast from a mold, but also introducing all kinds of experiments and variations for every cast during the process of making. So you have works that are both a series and unique objects. Just to give you one example, the waxes that he made were actually part of the Lost Wax process that normally leads to making bronzes, but Rosso does this crazy thing where he chooses to stop the process before the last step and keep the waxes. And you know, Rosso was a really crazy man.
I mean, we know that he cast many of his own works in his studio in Paris, but so he didn't really use a commercial foundry when he could. But what we didn't realize was how unusual and important that bit of information was because it meant that he could experiment a great deal, a great amount of freedom in his studio. And he even had casting parties where he would cast in front of an audience and Sir Champagne do his guest afterwards, which is entirely unusual for the 19th century. It really raises the craftsmen to the level of a performance artist long before Jackson Pollock is doing action painting.
He literally flaunts his own body and the drama of the act of casting, goring that molten metal into a mold. He even became the protagonist of a novel because people were so impressed by this and they wrote about these happenings and their diaries because they were so dramatic. So learning about materials and techniques is like a detective story because it involves lots of close, close looking at objects. It entails really practical down to Earth discussions about what it means to make the object and all kinds of attempts to retrace all these spontaneous decisions that happen in the foundry during all the steps of casting or at some very crucial moments, like when the metal or the liquid wax are being poured and lots of things can go wrong.
So it's very exciting to try to figure out how Russell did certain things or why it worked ends up looking the way it does. And of course, that's the reason I love working with other people from the fields because I learned so much. And that's why we had this transdisciplinary team put together. Those parties sound really great, by the way.
Moving past that, I want to talk a little bit more about the techniques. Why do you think it's important to understand those artists materials and techniques rather than the more traditional formalist art historical concepts of style and iconography? So one part of the study really involved bringing in specialists to conduct all kinds of technical analyses of the cast, which we can do today and we couldn't even do 20 years ago. We did wax sampling and we actually analyze the organic composition.
We did what's called XRF analysis, which tells you what kind of alloys are used in the bronzes. And all these different kinds of specialists discovered what strange and unpredictable combinations of alloys, increasing mixtures he was using to make his cast. Though this added a whole world of information about the high level of experimentation that this man was attracted to. I also did a lot of research on East cast history in archives around the world.
So each of these casts has its own material and historical story. And a lot of times it's related to a special person in Russell's life because this work was kind of his calling card. He really identified with the little warlord Jewish boy and he would give it his gifts to friends and to critics and to people who did shows for him. We also used cutting edge technology like 3D scanning to get a sense of the variation in the shapes from cast to cast and to be able to compare really minute details in the cast.
But the naked eye just can't detect and that was very exciting since the eye can sometimes really be wrong. So that's one of the advantages. Knowing about materials and techniques also puts an artist in his work in the bigger context of his time, which I feel is very important finding out that Russell used a specific casting method as opposed to another really let us to learn more about the way that he was doing. And more about that technique and how it was completely forgotten in France during the 19th century.
And it was really only thanks to Italian founders that it was revived in other countries during the 19th century. Some sculptors and founders in France tried to revive it, but they kept failing on their own and some even burned down their own studios trying to do it. So Rose's moved from Italy to France in the late 1880s takes on new importance when you know about the question of technique. It wasn't just he went to France to improve his career or to meet the Great Rodin, but also because of this move towards lost wax casting that was happening in France.
And this just blew open the door to a much bigger story. These Italian founders are going all over the world to the United States, to Britain, to Germany, even to Japan to open foundries and revive the technique abroad. So it turned out to be this real moment of transnational know-how just as it's being transferred from one country to another. And we have lots of essays in the volume about the technique in different countries and different specialists in each country's histories that show that in some countries lost wax was completely embraced and turned into a big business empire.
While in other countries like Japan, it was actually not well accepted at all because it was seen as two Western. So it was wonderful for us to have a non-Western perspective in the book as well. And I just think this approach is really the best way to go because it gives you a 360 degree view of the object. It opens up so many new questions and we were constantly engaged in this ongoing dialogue from the start where everybody is bringing their own expertise and experience and we have to figure out how to put all the pieces together like a puzzle.
It could be a bit challenging because most of us were all over the world and people weren't used to using Zoom yet, which makes it much easier now. Also, you know, you have all these new tools from conservation scientists, but that really doesn't mean that traditional art history or the experience I aren't important or that archival research should be forgotten. It's just wonderful to have them all together. And we also didn't want the book just to be historical or theoretical.
So we actually also included the voice of someone who is a practicing founder and a sculptor who could write about what really happens inside a foundry. So it wasn't just our thinking about it. It was somebody who really engages in it. And we also added a conservator to try to use all of our scientific data to restore a damaged cast.
And so we also have that in the volume as a guideline for how to conserve versus works. Since there's so many distinguished authors, I really hope you have a look online at the table of contests for their name and specialty. And I'd say one of the challenges of the book was how to hold all this material together in a single volume and make all the chapters speak to each other, making scientific data and information interesting and intelligible to artists, orions and vice versa. But the book is gaining interest among curators and collectors and even the general public.
So we're very pleased about that. Yeah, obviously you talked about, you know, you gathered these experts from all over the world and different kinds of specialists. Why did you decide to take that interdisciplinary approach? And then as you mentioned, include real founders, include real life sculptures in there so that it wasn't just this historical book.
I think because it makes it more exciting and more engaging and it opens up to a wider audience, we couldn't imagine doing just a dry study. We really wanted to make it relevant. And in fact, contemporary sculptors just love me, D'Arto Rosa. He's really an artist artist.
So many artists love him. Jacometi confessed his secret love for me, D'Arto Rosa. Brancuzzi was completely bowled over by him when he came to Paris and saw his works. There's so many artists today, art of poverty artists, contemporary artists like Tony Craig, Diana Al-Hadid, Philita Barlow, Richard Deacon.
They really believe that Rosso blew open the doors to contemporary sculptor and is an artist that helps them understand how they worked. So it really made sense to create a book that could create an added tool in terms of what people know about this artist and how they look at him by adding the question of technique. Yeah, I almost feel like reading this and hearing your thoughts on this, that it deepens just the average person's understanding of sculptors. It's almost like you're getting to know the hipster's sculptor because as you said, everyone knows Roda.
So knowing Rosso now really gives us more insight into just this evolution of sculpting. So can you just tell us why the case of Rosso is special for the bigger story that you're telling in this volume? Yeah, I mean, Rosso's the first artist to completely overturn every aspect of casting. He leaves all kinds of casting errors and artifacts of casting visible on his work, which is really daring and unusual for his time.
I mean, we find sprues leftover from the casting process. We find casts of the mother mold, which is something that's used to cradle the gelatin. We find air bubbles, rips, gashes, nails, holes. I mean, all these things would usually get cleaned up in a commercial foundry.
So Rosso's really the best example we have of an experimenter with the Lost Wax technique, and he gives us immense insight on how the technique could be used creatively. It also shows us how a technique can be lost and when know how is forgotten and how it can be recovered from one culture and brought to other parts of the world. So Rosso's story tells many stories and you can really see how his experiment with casting, what it was and what it could be for a modern sculptor's viewpoint. And I think this book hopefully will lead us to appreciate, I mean, in this new age of 3D scanning and precise reproductions and digital NFTs of the incredible level of variation and volatility and spontaneity of process that an artist can encounter when they accept the expected together with the widely unpredictable things that can happen, which is what can make art so exciting for the artist when they accept what the material is presenting, how it's behaving, and also for the viewer when the materials and techniques are taken in as welcome partners in the history of art.
So what was the reason that the Japanese never took it up because that's really interesting, that conflict between the Sicilian point of view and the Japanese point of view? Because they considered it too Western and they didn't like it, they just didn't appeal to them. They did take it up in the 1960s, actually finally. But they were just barely Westernizing at that point.
So, you know, Japanese artistic traditions were quite different, come from different roots. But I learned all this from the essay in the book. So it's not my expertise, but I find it fascinating that an Italian man would go to Japan. He actually founded Japanese wife and brought her back to Sicily and opened the art school in Sicily.
So more than just Transnational know how he actually found a wife. And I feel like that sort of thing happens a lot, especially looking at like the 19th and 20th century. I went to the Van Gogh Museum several years ago and I think there's a whole collection of just Japanese art that he had and how it influenced him. And you can see that in so many Western artists.
Exactly. I mean, the book is full of tidbits, really interesting stories about Foundries in New York and Foundries in Germany. And in France, it turned into a huge business empire. Really.
I mean, France became the dominant lost wax casting Foundry production. And they had agents all over the world and they had stands at fairs and catalogs and you could touch the works. And it was all basically thanks to the Italian know-how that was brought when a mass amount of Italian workers emigrated out of Italy looking for work. So there's a economic side, a political side, super interesting.
And you mentioned that there were these big disasters in the Foundries too. I actually learned that from the book as well from the world expert on French Foundries who wrote an essay for us. And they kept trying to figure out how this was done. So they would try to patent these crazy recipes for wax.
And they would try to find ways to do the gelatin. And they would try to cast using the lost wax method. But casting is a really dangerous process because there's a fire and you have to be very hot to get to the melting point of the metal. And you have to have good aeration because obviously the fumes.
And so, you know, some of them just didn't calculate all that quite well and had disasters. And that's when they kind of gave up and said, well, they're doing it in Italy so perfectly and they've been doing it for centuries. Let's find out how it's really done. What we found out also in the pictures is that we also had a little do-it-yourself oven.
And we had never noticed it in the pictures of him. But it was the time when people were learning to kind of de-skill. And so there was actually a little book written that said, here, make your own oven, cast your own works. And his oven looks just like that.
So probably the reason that his works are so small is because he had to fit them into these ovens. So he couldn't do like a monument because he just wouldn't have been able to actually cast it. So it was like an easy day oven but for something. Exactly.
Interesting. Learn something new every day. Dr. Sharon Hacker, she's author of Finding Lost Wax, The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of the Dardo Rosso.
Dr. Hacker, thanks so much for sitting down with us. Thank you so much for having me on this program. You are listening to the Humanities Matter Podcast.
You can find more podcast episodes on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast.