Recent years have witnessed a flood of new scholarship on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783), the sculptor who produced a famous group of busts, known misleadingly as “Character Heads,” that represent human faces in sometimes strained, disturbing grimaces. Although south German by birth, Messerschmidt spent much of his career in Vienna, where he was affiliated with the Academy of Fine Arts and executed commissions for the Habsburg court. Today a selection of his Character Heads forms the core of the Belvedere Museum's sculptural collection. This book is a revision of Ulrich Pfarr's 2002 dissertation for the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, and is a major contribution to Messerschmidt studies. It is a bountifully rich treatment of the artist, occasionally frustrating but packed with insights.

Pfarr's book belongs as much to psychoanalysis as to art history, but it is a Germanic psychoanalysis far removed from the Lacanian perspectives prominent in American art history. He begins by noting that many unsubstantiated claims about Messerschmidt have become ideologically fixed and interpretations based on an unrepresentative selection of objects. He also notes that the issue of source material for Messerschmidt is tricky; the oft-cited and probably fictional description of Messerschmidt's studio in Bratislava by the philosopher Friedrich Nicolai has influenced scholarly interpretations heavily, and Pfarr is among the few scholars to take seriously the possibility that Nicolai's report is unreliable. Pfarr envisions his study as a contribution to the “historical understanding of emotions” and Mentalitätgeschichte. He also engages in a lengthy critique of Messerschmidt's critical reception, particularly in the work of the Austrian-born psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris. The result is a book that operates multivalently.

After a nuanced discussion of Kris's psychoanalytic reading of Messerschmidt, Pfarr analyzes Nicolai's text, interpreting it as a critique of illicit societies and of Catholic sexual morals. Pfarr then examines the posthumous names given to the sculptures at the time of the first public exhibition in 1793; these often colorful titles (e.g., “The Incapable Bassoonist”) he explores through the Freudian concepts of projection and transference. He then turns to the problematics of facial expression itself, to theories of physiognomy and pathognomy, and finally to the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed in the 1970s by psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen. This system categorizes facial movements according to muscular position and intensity, which Pfarr believes provides an objective basis for studying expression. The book's middle section is a minutely detailed application of FACS to Messerschmidt's heads. Pfarr concludes that the sculptures do not represent emotions in a clear-cut way, but that they are emotionally inconsistent and probably influenced by various eighteenth-century esoteric theories.

After a digression on Messerschmidt's technique, Pfarr turns to the question of whether the busts form a series and proposes ordering them based not on linear progression, but rather after the examples of contrapuntal music and late baroque architecture, which he claims resemble the artist's serial employment of multiple forms in changing configurations. He concludes by arguing that self-understanding occurs irrationally, a Freudian claim, and that this process contains a tragic element. Messerschmidt kept his psychic tragedy private, Pfarr muses, but we may locate traces of it in his sculptures.

This is a brilliant and maddening book. Never have the fundamental assumptions underpinning Messerschmidt studies been placed under such rigorous scrutiny and probed with such care. Pfarr is a deep and powerful thinker who unfolds his ideas with incisive exactitude. His analysis involves extensive physical discussions of Messerschmidt's heads, something sorely lacking from much writing about them. Yet, for all his precision, it is frequently difficult to pinpoint exactly where Pfarr stands, because he often criticizes and credits the same ideas simultaneously, a process one notices especially in his treatment of Kris. In general, Pfarr's take on Messerschmidt is less radical than the framing of his argument might lead one to believe. Moreover, it is an open question whether the psychoanalytic approach deployed here illuminates Messerschmidt's eighteenth-century practice or our modern responses to it—whether it is really Mentalitätgeschichte or Rezeptionsgeschichte. That said, this is a thought-provoking book that genuinely moves Messerschmidt studies forward by questioning outdated assumptions and offering striking new interpretations of his art.