Sharon Hecker has published on modern and contemporary Italian art. Her writings on artists such as Medardo Rosso, Lucio Fontana, Luciano Fabro, Francesco Lo Savio, Giuseppe Penone, and Marisa Merz appear in books, edited volumes, scholarly journals and exhibition catalogues.

She also writes on cultural heritage and due diligence, expertise, authenticity and attribution, seeking to promote greater dialogue between art history, the art market and art law.

See full list of writings on www.academia.edu

READ NEW ESSAY:

Sharon Hecker e Michelle Vanzetti, “L’« originale » nell’arte come concetto mutevole nel tempo e nell’ambito della sua attuale tutela”Arte e diritto, n. 1, 2022. Download

Sharon Hecker “When the eye tired of observing rests”: Diffuse Attention in the Art and Writing of Medardo Rosso”, Odradek (Studies in Phllosophy of Lterature, Aesthetics and new Media Theories), University of Pisa, Vol 7 No 2 (2021): “Patterns of Attention”, ed. Alberto Frigo. Download

Sharon Hecker “Piercing Through and Holding Together: Luciano Fabro’s Italia all’asta and Enfasi (Baldacchino) in Stefano Chiodi, ed., senzamargine, MAXXI, Rome 2021.

Sharon Hecker and Carla Subrizi, co-editors, Sull’orlo di un cambiamento. L’arte immagina il mondo dopo la pandemia, in Novecento transnazionale. Letterature, arti e culture / Transnational 20th Century. Literatures, Arts and Cultures, V. 5 N. 1 (2021)

Sharon Hecker, “A moment’s monument, Medardo Rosso, Ecce puer (Behold the Child)” on www.smarthistory.org 

Sharon Hecker, “An Italian Sculptor-Emigré in Paris: The Case of Medardo Rosso” in Sculpting Abroad Nationality and Mobility of Sculptors in the Nineteenth Century in M. Sterckx, T. Verschaffel (eds.) (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020).

Sharon Hecker is the Series Editor for the new Series: Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts, published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Dr. Hecker is available for curatorial projects, research, lectures, workshops and consulting.

 
Disguising Disease in Italian Political And Visual Culture: From Post-Unification To Covid-19
co-edited with Arianna Arisi Rota
(Routledge, 2024)
 Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy: Literature, Art and Intellectual History 
Sharon Hecker and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from Mussolini to Today 
Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida, Eds.
(Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022)
REVIEWS
La dittatura della fantasia. Collage autobiografico
Remo Bianco. Prefazione di Sharon Hecker 
(Johan & Levi S.r.l, 2022)
REVIEWS

Coming soon

Posthumous Art, The Market and Art Law: The Afterlife of Art
Sharon Hecker and Peter J Karol, Eds. 
(Routledge, 2022)
REVIEWS
Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art
(Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2021)

REVIEWS
Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso.
(Brill, 2021)

Postwar Italian Art History Today. Untying ‘the Knot’
Co-edited with Marin R. Sullivan.
(Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018)
REVIEWS
A Moment’s Monument. Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture
(University of California Press, 2017)
REVIEWS
Un monumento al momento. Medardo Rosso e le origini della scultura contemporanea
(Johan & Levi Editore, 2017)

JOURNAL ARTICLES, CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES, EXHIBITION CATALOGUES, REVIEWS, TRANSLATIONS.

Lucio Fontana

Servant of Two Masters’: Lucio Fontana’s Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino (1948)Republished in Ceramica e arti decorative del Novecento, n. 5 (January 2020): 11-28

Servant of Two Masters: Lucio Fontana’s 1948 Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino.” Oxford Art Journal vol. 35:3 (December 2012): 337-361

Medardo Rosso

BOOKS
Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Techniques and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso, edited volume (Leyden: Brill, 2020).

Un monumento al momento: Medardo Rosso e le origini della scultura contemporanea (Milan: Johan & Levi Editore, 2018).

A Moment’s Monument. Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

EXHIBITION CATALOGUES
Sharon Hecker, “Interferenze innovative,” in Tommaso Calabro, Sharon Hecker, Alberto Salvadori, Soft Power. Rosso Morandi Ziegler, exhibition catalogue (Milan: Electa, 2019), np. Download

Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form (co-curated with Tamara S. Schenkenberg), (St. Louis, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2018).

Medardo Rosso: Sight Unseen and His Encounters with London (co-curated with Julia Peyton-Jones), exhibition catalogue (London: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2018).

Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form (co-curated with Tamara S. Schenkenberg), exhibition catalogue (St. Louis, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2016).

Back to Back: Medardo Rosso, Giovanni Segantini, and the Outsider in Italian Modern Art”. Orizzonte Nord Sud. Protagonisti dell’arte europea ai due versanti delle Alpi – Leading Figures of European Art North and South of the Alps, exhibition catalogue (Lugano: LAC, Lugano 2015).

“Walking Through Walls: Medardo Rosso and Diana Al-Hadid”Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso (New York: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2014).

Medardo Rosso (New York: Peter Freeman, 2009).

“Medardo Rosso,” in Winds of Change: The Milanese Avant-Garde 1860-1900, exhibition catalogue, ed. F. Licht (Naples, FL: The Gilgore Collection, 2003): 84-103.

Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions (co-authored with Harry Cooper), exhibition catalogue, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).

“Medardo Rosso” (artist’s biography) in 1900: Art at the Crossroads, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts (London and New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2001): 419.

Medardo Rosso: Ecce puer,” Da Hayez a Klimt: Maestri dell’Ottocento e Novecento della Galleria Ricci Oddi, exhibition catalogue, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Piacenza (Milan: Skira, 1997): 147-149.

ESSAYS IN EDITED VOLUMES
Sharon Hecker, “When the eye tired of observing rests”: Diffuse Attention in the Art and Writing of Medardo Rosso”, Odradek (Studies in Philosophy of Lterature, Aesthetics and new Media Theories), University of Pisa, Vol 7 No 2 (2021): “Patterns of Attention”, ed. Alberto Frigo. Download

Sharon Hecker, “Cast, Not Modelled: The Importance of Understanding Materials and Processes in Medardo Rosso’s Waxes,” in Ceroplastics. The Science of Wax, eds. Fabio Zampieri, Roberta Ballestriero, Owen Burke, Storia della Medicina, 06, L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2021.

“An Italian Sculptor-Emigré in Paris: The Case of Medardo Rosso” in Sculpting Abroad Nationality and Mobility of Sculptors in the Nineteenth Century in M. Sterckx, T. Verschaffel (eds.) XIX: Studies in 19th-Century Art and Visual Culture (XIX 3), Brepols, 2020.

“The Modern Italian Sculptor as International Entrepreneur: The Case of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928)”. “The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750-1914”, in Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna, Art Crossing Borders, Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets, 2019.

“Navigating International Networks for Modern Sculpture: The Case of Medardo Rosso,” in Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange 1870–1920, ed. Grace Brockington e Sarah Victoria Turner, (Peter Lang, 2019), pp 59-86.

“The Wax that Never Waned: The Lasting Legacies of Degas and Rosso, Pioneers of Wax in Sculpture,” in Roberta Ballerstiero, Owen Burke, Francesco Maria Galassi, Ceroplastics. The Art of Wax, Storia della Medicina, 3, 2019. Download

“Isolated Fragments: Disentangling the Relationship Between Arte Povera and Medardo Rosso,” in Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘The Knot’, co-edited with Marin R. Sulivan (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

“Everywhere and Nowhere: Medardo Rosso and the Cultural Cosmopolitan in Fin-de-siècle Paris”, in Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914. Strangers in Paradiseedited by Karen L. Carter and Susan Waller (New York and London, Routledge, 2015), pp. 143–154.

“Shattering the Mould: Medardo Rosso and the Poetics of Plaster,” in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, eds. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010): 319-330.

“Fleeting Revelations: The Demise of Duration in Medardo Rosso’s Wax Sculpture”, in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, R. Panzanelli, ed., Getty Research Institute Issues and Debates Book Series (Los Angeles: J.P. Getty Trust, 2008): 131-153.

“Medardo Rosso: Ecce Puer, 1906,” in Leggere l’arte, S. Fugazza, ed., (Piacenza, Galleria Ricci-Oddi, 2002): 79-88.

“Medardo Rosso: a Milano sognando Parigi,” in Milano. Venticinque secoli di storia attraverso i suoi personaggi (Milan: Celip, 2000).

JOURNAL ESSAYS
“Born on a train: the impact of Medardo Rosso’s internationalism on his legacy”. Sculpture Journal, 2018. Get access to journal  

The afterlife of sculptures: posthumous casts and the case of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928)”. Journal of Art Historiography, 2017. Download 

“An Enfant Malade by Medardo Rosso from the Collection of Louis Vauxcelles”The Burlington Magazine vol. 152:1292 (December 2010): 727-735.

“Ambivalent Bodies: Medardo Rosso’s Brera Petition”. The Burlington Magazine vol. 142:1173 (December 2000): 773-777.

“L’esordio milanese di Medardo Rosso”. Bolletino dell’Accademia degli Euteleti, December 1998, vol. 65, pp. 185-201.

“Medardo Rosso’s first commission”, The Burlington Magazine vol. 138:1125 (December 1996): 817-822.

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES
“Medardo Rosso”,  Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism 

“Medardo Rosso”, s.v., The Encyclopedia of Sculpture, Antonia Böstrom, ed., Vol. 3, P-Z, (New York and London: Routledge, 2000): 1470-1473

EXHIBITION REVIEWS
“Rosso: the Transient Form”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 151: 1280 (November 2009): 787. 

Luciano Fabro

“The Stopping Power of Lead: Luciano Fabro, Giuseppe Penone, and Marisa Merz,” in Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art, ed. Sharon Hecker and Silvia Bottinelli (Bloomsbury, 2021), 121-138.

“Perforare e tenere insieme: Italia all’asta ed Enfasi (Baldacchino) di Luciano Fabro” in senzamargine, Passaggi nell’arte italiana a cavallo del millennio, ed. Stefano Chiodi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi (Marsilio 2021), pp. 89-105 English, 97-113 Italian.

“Nature has fantasia,” in Into the Spotlight: Art at Baloise, ed. Martin Schwander (Hatje Cantz,2020).

“Why Luciano Fabro Today?”, in The Brooklyn Rail, Sept. 2018 edition, New York.

“I represent the encumbrance of the object in the vanity of ideology.” Lo Spirato (The Expired One) in Luciano Fabro, ed. Silvia Fabro, Galleria Christian Stein, Milan, 2017.

“Luciano Fabro: Bitter Sweets for Nadezhda Mandelstam” in The Taste of Art: Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas press, 2017). Download. Read review

“Markets, Bacchanals and Gallows”: Luciano Fabro’s ‘Italia all’Asta’ in Naples’ Piazza del Plebiscito in A. Nova and S. Hanke, eds. (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014).

“Sealed Between Us. The Role of Wax in Luciano Fabro’s Tuˆ.” Oxford Art Journal vol. 36:1 (March 2013): 13-38.

“If the Boot Fits…Luciano Fabro’s Italie.” In G. Gazzola, guest ed., Italy from Without. Forum Italicum vol. 47: 2 (August 2013): 431-462.

“Luciano Fabro: Drawing as Dialogue”, in Luciano Fabro. Disegno In-Opera, exhibition catalogue, GAMeC (Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013).

“Art is Glimpsed. Luciano Fabro’s Penelope”, in Contemporary Art/Classical Myth, J. Hirsh and I. Wallace, eds. (London: Ashgate, 2011): 57-86.

TRANSLATIONS
Translation of artist’s lessons on drawings in Luciano Fabro. 100 Disegni, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum Winterthur (Richter Verlag, 2013).

Translation of artist’s lessons on drawings in Luciano Fabro. Disegno In-Opera, exhibition catalogue, GAMeC (Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013).

Translation of essay in Luciano Fabro, exhibition catalogue, Porticus, Frankfurt am Main (1995).

Translator of artist’s theoretical writings in Luciano Fabro, exhibition catalogue,  SFMoMA (1994).

Other Italian Art

“Making Hardships Picturesque: Iconographic Sources and Contemporary Works Related to Morbelli’s ‘Vecchioni’ Paintings”. Angelo Morbelli. Il poema della vecchiaia, ed. Giovanna Ginex, exhibition catalogue (Venice: Ca’ Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, 2018-19).

“Romanticism,” The Burlington Magazine, 161, February 2019: 151-153. A review of the exhibition Romanticismo at Gallerie d’Italia and Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan.

“Marino Marini. Pistoia and Venice”, The Burlington Magazine vol. 159:1377 (December 2017). A review of the exhibition Marino Marini, Passioni visive at the Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia.

Exhibition Catalogues

“Fragmented Articulations: Francesco Lo Savio’s Transnational Modernism”. Francesco Lo Savio, exhibition catalogue (Trento and Rovereto: MART, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 2018). 

Due Diligence, Cultural Heritage, Authenticity and Attribution

Read Sharon Hecker’s articles and Op Eds on these subjects here: www.theheckerstandard.com

The Post-Covid19 Art World