Search results
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (February 6, 1736 – August 19, 1783) was a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his "character heads", a collection of busts with faces contorted in extreme facial expressions.
The Character Heads. Messerschmidt created the Character Heads between 1770 and his death in 1783. Their distracting, if amusing, titles—such as A Hypocrite and a Slanderer and The Difficult Secret —were not his invention.
Feb 1, 2024 · Franz Xaver Messerschmidt became known as an outcast artist who created dozens of weird self-portraits. While living in exile in present-day Bratislava, he sculpted his face over and over again with strange grimaces distorting it.
Jan 23, 2024 · Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, an eighteenth-century German sculptor active in Austria, is best known for his series of dramatic "character heads." The metal and stone busts are often disturbing in their extreme expressions. They have long prompted critics and scholars to speculate that the artist made them in reaction to an undiagnosed mental illness.
In 1781, the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–83) cut a strange figure. A decade before, he had been an artist at the heart of Viennese high society. Poised to become professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, receiving commissions from Austrian nobility, Enlightenment intellectuals, and from the Empress Maria Theresa herself ...
Dec 8, 2023 · Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was an 18th century sculptor who studied and worked in Vienna in the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s. Messerschmidt’s works included fairly conventional sculptures. His busts and reliefs of the Imperial family sat on display in the permanent Belvedere exhibition last time I visited.
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1754 and soon received important commissions from the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa and her consort, Francis Stephen of Lorraine.
Sep 30, 2010 · Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Afflicted with Constipation, 1771–83, lead-tin cast. The eighteenth-century bookseller Christoph Friedrich Nicolai was a leading figure in the German Enlightenment and a quixotic critic of the younger German Romantics—Goethe, Schiller—who would soon supplant his own circle of intellectuals.
The upward path of Messerschmidt's career was brought to a halt by a mysterious illness. He was tipped to be professor of sculpture in the Academy of Arts in Vienna, and was a...
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt German. ca. 1770–83. On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 639. Messerschmidt, the leading sculptor at the court in Vienna in the 1760s, was forced, for personal and professional reasons, to leave for the provinces and by 1777 had settled in Pressburg (today Bratislava).
