Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s sculpted screams

October 25, 2024
3 min read

VEXED MAN & GARGOYLE, 2024

Photographs and Text by K.B. DIXON

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Halloween is coming up, so I assembled my office staff to celebrate with a commemorative photo. As you can see, none of them particularly cared for the idea.

Some OAW readers may recognize a few of the gargoyles featured here from an earlier ArtsWatch piece, “Gargoyles and Grotesques.” The human faces, however, are relatively new additions to my cabinet of curiosities. They have assumed supervisory positions and spend the better part of their day listening to their shelfmates’ complaints about pretty much everything.

These busts are replicas of work done by the 18^th century Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt — an unusual artist, or should I say an artist of the unusual. Once the sculptor to Vienna’s royal family, he suffered what has been retroactively diagnosed as a schizophrenic breakdown.

He sold off most of his earthly goods and abandoned Vienna for a hermit’s cottage in Slovakia, where he spent the last years of his short life (he died at 47) working on a personal project, a distinctly idiosyncratic collection of uniquely peculiar portrait busts he called “character heads.”

Unfortunately, Messerschmidt never christened his creations. They were originally thought to be the work of a lunatic, and the bizarre and occasionally comic names they have been given were supplied after his death by a cavalcade of prats. There is, for example, The Incapable Bassoonist, The Enraged and Vengeful Gypsy, and The Man Afflicted with Constipation.

One of the characters here in my modest collection has been flagrantly misnamed “Yawning Man.” It is possible, I suppose, to see him as yawning, but I never have. I have always seen him as “Screaming Man.” Consequently, I have become “Annoyed Man”—irritated by the anonymous effort to co-opt my interpretation.

The diametric divergence of these readings made me think immediately of that famous poem by Stevie Smith:

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