Out of Rehab

There were any number of interesting shows to be made of this material. For example, the organizers could explore whether Rosso is closer to Rodin, or to Renoir. They could contrast Rodin's "modern" themes--dislocation, duality, dissonance, the Yeatsian sense that the center cannot hold--with Rosso's "modern" traits: ambiguity, irony, nihilism. They could compare Rodin's aggressively frank and psychologically see-through use of the fragmented human form with Rosso's enigmatic, obtuse, not at all straightforward approach. They could point out how Rosso's waxed bronze and plaster body parts create spectral, otherworldly images, conveying doubt, insecurity and the fleeting nature of life. They could analyze how the flickering of light and how the melding of sculpture and background make Rosso's figures difficult to read and impossible to pin down, like photographic double exposures. They could show how, at first blush, the work is Impressionist in its sentimentality, and how, after staring at it for some time, darker meanings emerge. They could ask, for example, whether "The Golden Age" is a sweet depiction of a mother and child, or a less-cartoonish precursor of "The Scream." They could speculate whether Rosso's sculptures depict people, or whether they are, in fact, mummies decaying before our eyes, foreshadowing the horrors of the 20th century.

But no. Rather than explore these questions, the show is content simply to mention the spat over how much Rosso's "Bookmaker" influenced Rodin's "Monument to Balzac." They gloss over all the good stuff: the radical use and meanings of the sculptors' language, the fragmentation, the off-kilter perversion of contrapposto. In the end, the Nasher show makes too much of too little. The narrative premise may work, but you'd never know it from viewing this mere trailer, in which too much rests on a pose.