THEthe greatest sculptor of the early twentieth centuryslowly recovered from his studies by Paola Mola, with my collaboration, in the glorious FMR by Franco Maria Ricci, His name is Adolfo Wildta twentieth-century Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Aristocratic surname, of Swiss origin, actually coming from a humble Milanese family, Wildt enriches Italian art of the early twentieth century with unparalleled originality.
Wildt stands out for his exceptional technical masteryfor a maniacal dedication to craftsmanship, combined with an almost baroque pleasure inimpose the most convoluted drillings on matter and on the surfaces the supreme clarity of opal. Wildt will remain forever faithful to the art of the “finisher” which was his first workshop specialization, infusing his craft with a dizzying spirituality.
In his teaching we witness the grow of an increasingly tormented vision of the human condition overflowing with existential energiesnourished by the inevitability of pain, and in any case never defeated and, indeed, always determined to overcome earthly limits and grasp the purity of the essence. From this spasmodic emotional sensitivity derives an inextricable combination of Decadentism, Symbolism, Expressionism and Art Nouveau, isolated and individualistic like few others in Italy, consistent with Viennese Secessionism, but clinging with pride and awareness to Bambaja, Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Michelangelo.
Adolfo Wildt: The Pure Fool, 1931. Photo Mario Govino © 2011 FAI-Fondo Ambiente Italiano
The same strength of a Michelangelo’s work emanates from a sculpture, now preserved at Villa Necchi Campiglio, in Milan, with the singular title: The pure fool. In the pure madman we cannot help but feel the echo, involuntary yet inevitable, of The Impure Fool, the novel that Roberto Calasso dedicates to Daniel Paul Schreber, president of the Court of Appeal in Dresden, author of that extraordinary self-diagnosis of 1903, written while he was interned in a mental hospital, Memoirs of a Nervous Patient, which inspired first Jung and then Freud in the medical and literary analysis of paranoia.
“Imclean” because Schreber imagined he was violating, in a growing delirium, the boundary between man and woman, and fought against a God imagined and felt as his persecutor. Wildt’s sculpture dating back to 1931, presented in the form of preparatory plaster at the Roman Quadrennial of the same year, portrays Parsifal, which in Arabic means “the pure madman”, an innocent child, raised safe from courts, weapons, culture, who precisely by virtue of his purity and candor can venture in search of the Holy Grail. Benito Mussolini does not even enter the room where Wildt’s Parsifal is exhibited.
The sinuous, almost hermaphrodite form of the “pure madman” violates the aesthetic code of the regime. The sculpture should instead be admired in its entire volume, to grasp the shapely movement, which expresses an elusive inner energy, a soul that does not allow itself to be caged, that slips away, violates restrictions, limits, prejudices, boundaries. There is a classic dynamism in it which however is not that of Myron’s Discobolus. There is a vortex of forms which however is not that of a futurist sculpture. The pure madman gives life to an entirely internal movement, to a sort of expression in gestures of what goes on inside him.
The pages of the books resonate Memoirs which Schreber wrote to demonstrate that he was not crazy, and to avoid being banned. But if Schreber succeeded in his aim, albeit temporarily, things went badly for Wildt. And who knows what will become of me if these written papers are enough to keep me from calling myself crazy. Only Margherita Sarfatti, a Jew who was beginning to break off her friendship with the Duce, defended Wildt’s work, which was also commissioned by a Hungarian Jewish banker, Leo Goldschmied. But that gesture of contempt by Mussolini determined the end of Wildt’s career, just as he created one of the most beautiful sculptures of the Italian twentieth century.
