Some artists seem wholly out of key with their times. The 18th-century Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-83) had been out of the public eye for 200 years, and then, in the past decade or so, began to emerge from obscurity. Two years ago he was in a group show at the Grand Palais in Paris, which was an extended examination of the artist as clown; this year, some of the works in the exhibition of his work in Frankfurt were displayed beside paintings by Francis Bacon at Compton Verney in the UK to demonstrate how much the two artists had in common. Works by Messerschmidt that come up for sale command millions of dollars.
The Frankfurt show is the first monographic exhibition of his extraordinary "character heads", a series of grotesque portrait busts, made in lead or pewter, and based in part on representations of himself. There are nearly 60 of these in existence, of which almost half are on display here. Most were created during the last decade of Messerschmidt's life, and they were made not for official patrons, but to please himself. By this time he was living in Bratislava, miles from the circles of aristocratic influence in which he had moved as a young man.
