Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, The Yawner (1771–81 |
In a short film included in “Franz Xaver Messerschmidt 1736–1783: From Neoclassicism to Expressionism,” an exhibition at The Neue Galerie, Ronald S. Lauder, the museum’s co-founder and president, talks about his first encounter with Messerschmidt’s “character heads”—busts of men whose faces are in extreme states of contortion. Lauder recalls his surprise upon discovering that a sculptor hailing from the eighteenth century created them; he mistook Messerschmidt for a contemporary. It’s not an uncommon response. When shown photos of the work, colleagues, friends, and family invariably do a double-take upon learning that Messerschmidt lived and worked in the era of Goya and Fragonard. There’s something to Messerschmidt’s unsettling vision that is commensurate with our (as Lauder has it) “modern sensibility.” It’s worth pondering why that is.
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was born on February 6, 1736 in the Bavarian city of Wiestensteig. His father, a tanner by trade, died when Messerschmidt was ten years old. His mother, Johanna, moved the family to Munich to live with her brother Johan Baptist Straub, a sculptor at the Bavarian court. After apprenticing with Johan, Messerschmidt traveled, ending up in Graz where he continued his studies in sculpture with another uncle, Philipp Jakob Straub. (Clearly, a knack for the medium was in the family’s dna.) Two years later, Messerschmidt enrolled in Vienna’s prestigious Academy of Fine Arts, where he caught