Medardo Rosso

The Golden Age (L'Eta d'oro), 1886

Wax over plaster
19 x 18 1/4 x 14 in. (48.3 x 46.4 x 35.6 cm.)

Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Rosso presents a familiar private scene between mother and child. The mother holds and kisses her child, lovingly pressing the child’s cheek. Rosso made this evocative sculpture shortly after the death of his own mother and the birth of his only son. The quick, generalized modeling of the forms and hazy translucency of the wax powerfully recall the immediacy of the fleeting tender moment.

Rosso’s cast wax and plaster sculptures are unique within modern sculpture. In the lost wax process of making bronze sculptures, a wax spacer is brushed into the mold but eventually melted out and replaced by molten bronze. Rosso accepted this wax shell as his final product and added plaster for reinforcement. The artist made several casts of The Golden Age in a variety of materials, each time changing the composition slightly. Here, a corona of wax surrounds the composition, and a plaster footing raises the sculpture slightly.

Exhibition:

July 23 - October 9, 2016

For millennia, plaster has attracted artists through its remarkable versatility. Derived from ground or powdered limestone mixed with water, plaster was used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, although it was associated with architecture and painting as much as with sculpture. Poured into molds, it can replicate three-dimensional objects. As a material worked directly, it lends itself to both additive and subtractive approaches: artists can add more plaster to a sculpture to model it further, but they can also cut it apart or carve into it, as if it were stone.