Not long ago, saying “Medardo Rosso” (1858–1928) on this side of the Atlantic would usually provoke vague looks and noncommittal noises. Rosso is still not the most familiar name in the history of Modernism, yet today, at least in museum-going circles, there’s a good chance that he’ll be identified as a pioneering Italian Modernist sculptor. In part, this is because of the wide-ranging 2015 show of his work at New York’s Center for Italian Modern Art (cima) and this past spring’s exhibition of bronzes at Peter Freeman Gallery, Soho. Or we might hear “Wasn’t there something of his towards the end of ‘Unfinished’ at Met Breuer?” But artists almost always know who Rosso is and, for anyone engaged by the course of Modernism, he looms large. His sculptures, with their ambiguous images and richly inflected, light-responsive surfaces, are unlike anything made by even the most adventurous of his contemporaries. It’s not an overstatement to describe Rosso’s self-imposed mission as a paradoxical effort to make light dematerialize sculptural form. His deceptively casual, suggestive heads and (occasional) figures seem to emerge from inchoate matter under the pressure of our gaze, as if coming into being only temporarily, before dissolving into something unidentifiable once again. These remarkable works posit ideas about what sculpture could be, conceptually, formally, and technically, that were radically new in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and remain compelling today. Yet while Rosso is increasingly acclaimed by initiates, he remains less familiar to the general