Acknowledgements

Callen, Anthea

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Acknowledgements

Anthea Callen

Looking at Men: Anatomy, Masculinity and the Modern Male Body

~Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the Senior Research Fellowship in 1995–6 that enabled me to begin work in Paris on this book. I am indebted for a further research-leave award to the AHRC and to the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, which generously awarded me a Senior Fellowship in order...

Author

Anthea Callen

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22330

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the Senior Research Fellowship in 1995–6 that enabled me to begin work in Paris on this book. I am indebted for a further research-leave award to the AHRC and to the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, which generously awarded me a Senior Fellowship in order to pursue the British connections, including Royal Academy archival research. The University of Warwick gave me both financial assistance and study leave for work on this book, and I am especially grateful to Roger Whittenbury (then Pro-Vice-Chancellor) and to Sarah Shalgosky (Mead Gallery Curator) for their support and encouragement. Shalgosky was responsible for bringing to the Mead the first major cross-over exhibition of art and anatomy in Britain: The Quick and the Dead, a 1998 national touring exhibition from the Southbank Centre brilliantly curated by artist Deanna Petherbridge – to whom I am also indebted for her inspirational work in the field, which pre-dated the more high-profile millennium show Spectacular Bodies curated for the Hayward Gallery by Martin Kemp and Marina Warner.

In Paris, I am immensely indebted to the excellent curators of the collections in the Paris École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), who have advised and assisted my research there over many years, particularly Annie Jacques, Cathérine Mathon, Emanuelle Brugerolles and Emmanuel Schwartz. I am grateful to Jean-François Debord, former Professor of Morphology at ENSBA, for the enthusiasm and generosity with which he shared with me his deep knowledge of the subject and his departmental collections. The excellent research published under the direction of his successor, Professor Philippe Comar, most notably the remarkable Figures du corps (2012) on the École des Beaux-Arts collections, has been invaluable to me; so too has that of Cathérine Mathon. I have been greatly assisted by the help of staff at the Université René Descartes, Paris, and the Musée Histoire de la Médecine’s historical archive and library, and likewise those at the AP-HP library and archive, the Bibliothèque Charcot at La Salpêtrière, Paris, and the Hôpital Saint-Louis’s wax moulages museum.

In Britain, I am deeply grateful for the help of experts at the Wellcome Library and Collections in the History of Medicine, London, most especially William Schupbach, Iconographic Collections Librarian, and Andrea Meyer Ludowisy. I am also indebted to the Royal Academy of Art, London’s Library and Archives, the Royal College of Surgeons, London and the Royal College of Physicians, London. I am grateful to medical historian and retired trauma surgeon Dr Michael Crumplin for his invaluable research on Charles Bell’s war drawings and paintings. In the USA there are many scholars and curators who have given me assistance in my research, many of whom are mentioned here or in the book by name, but others – and notably the many who kindly provided me with illustrations, often without charge – I warmly thank now. I acknowledge too with sincere thanks all the many scholars, curators and administrators who made my research possible whom I have not mentioned by name.

Having begun life drawing at school before studying at art college, I was introduced to artistic anatomy in the mid-1980s with a course in human anatomical drawing at the Sir John Cass School of Art in London. Unlike our predecessors we did not study dissection, but of course we worked from male models, since surface anatomy is clearest on a well-toned male body with little subcutaneous fat.

My scholarly interest in artistic anatomy grew thanks to what I call the promiscuity of the library, in this case the spectacular domed reading room of the old Bibliothèque nationale, rue de Richelieu, c.1990. Wandering the aisles I chanced upon the open pages of another scholar’s research: large engraved plates of male anatomical dissection. I was at the time completing my research on Degas’ female bodies and in one of those timely finds had just acquired a female anatomical flap book of c.1900 at Vincennes flea market that fed my Degas thinking. This ‘medical’ flap book, my drawing and the discovery of male anatomical prints gave a new edge to my thinking about the male body in representation: Looking at Men is the long-nurtured result. The richly stimulating promiscuity of the library – whether fellow scholars’ work or books the eye chanced upon in the stacks – is mainly relegated now to the dinosaur age. Today we have the likes of Google and Wikipedia giving access to a previously unimaginable wealth of material where everything from highbrow to trivia commingles in an apparently random hierarchy. Love them or fear them, without these powerful digital tools supplying rare historical texts and images my recent research would have been impossible.

Most of the medical anatomists I write about – Jean-Joseph Sue (père and fils), the Bell brothers, Pierre-Nicholas Gerdy, Jean-Martin Charcot, Paul Richer, Henry Tonks – were also themselves artists. Before photography, drawing was the primary tool for creating a visual record of one’s observations – and even afterwards for many medics the new ‘scientific’ medium of photography gave a less amenable, less precise record. Drawing – as artist-anatomist Richer stressed – enabled selection, an emphasis on key features considered crucial to identifying a particular ‘condition’, or bodily imperfection. Yet Richer’s ‘natural’ ideal body was predicated on his choice of exemplary modern physiques: athletes, acrobats, soldiers, bodybuilders. The muscular perfection he noted (or found wanting) in his private carnet of beautiful male models was the harmoniously proportioned and well-toned body à la Grecque: his natural ideal was the modern god/gladiator. Artifice, not just in photography or drawing but in the selection of human model, was therefore of paramount importance in constructing a diagnostic as much as an aesthetic model – and hence in the processes of othering and its resistance explored in my research.

~

Description: Male Anatomy by Callen, Anthea

Anthea Callen, Male Anatomy, 1984, graphite on paper, 91 × 68.5 cm.

Pivotal in the development of my thinking in Looking at Men has been a superb painting by the obscure artist François Sallé, The Anatomy Class at the École des Beaux-Arts (1888), and I am very grateful to Alan Krell for introducing me to the original large-scale work housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in the early 1990s when I was first working on male anatomies. I owe much to our fruitful conversations and to his own research on the painting.

Marcia Pointon, when editor of Art History, generously invited me to write up my research on anatomy training at the École des Beaux-Arts for her special edition on Art Academies in 1997. Her encouragement and support throughout the writing of this book and her scholarly and editorial insights have been invaluable. Pointon kindly read sections of the book, as did Fae Brauer, a major scholar of the medicalised male body with whom I have had the pleasure of collaborating. I am greatly indebted to Brauer for her inspired research and her detailed comments on my text. I am grateful to Karen Lang for reading my Introduction at a critical stage, and for her thoughtful and generous comments. I am extremely grateful too for the useful, thorough and positive feedback of my three manuscript reviewers.

Warm thanks go to my ex-Warwick University colleagues Richard Dyer and Michael Hatt, two inspirational writers in the field; Hatt kindly read and commented on sections of the book. Thanks are also due to Paul Hills, from whom I learned much: at Warwick in the 1980s he and I invented our ‘Body Course’ that brought together theory and practice by including a life drawing class. I am also grateful to the wonderful Edward Lucie-Smith for sharing with me his ideas and his Sandow archive, and thousands of other images. More recently, among many inspiring colleagues at the Australian National University I am especially indebted to practitioner-theorists Helen Ennis and Denise Ferris for their thoughtful and exemplary feminist interdisciplinarity. My thanks to them for their encouragement, as indeed to artists Ruth Waller and Jude Rae for their valuable insights.

For the North American Physical Culture magazines, illustrations and some additional invaluable source material, I am greatly indebted to Michael Ward at www.ephemeraforever.com; also for his introduction to John Locke, via magazineart.org, and Erik Tweed at The Magazine in San Francisco – all of whom have kindly given me enthusiastic help beyond the call of duty, in addition to images.

For specific advice and intellectual input in a variety of ways, I give appreciative thanks to Richard Shiff, George T. Shackelford, Douglas Druick, Peter Zegers, Gloria Groom, June Hargrove, Griselda Pollock, Roszika Parker, Linda Nochlin, Deborah Cherry, Sander Gilman, Roy Porter, Ludmilla Jordanova, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Andrea Carlino, Michael Sappol, Andrew Bamji, Christopher E. Forth, Cécile Delesalle, Laure Delesalle, Belinda Thompson, Martin Kemp, Alison Smith, Jonathan Katz, David C. Ward, Colleen Chesterman, Helen Taylor and Roger Lemarc. I am also greatly indebted to the research and encouragement of colleagues and fellow researchers in the crossover territory between art, history, visual culture and medicine: Hilary Marland, Claudia Stein, Dan O’Connor, Keren Hammerschlag, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Mechthild Fend, Andreas Mayer, Mary Hunter, Tania Woloshyn, Gemma Blackshaw, Suzannah Biernoff, Allison Morehead, Leslie Topp; and with special thanks to Myrto Hatzaki for the Oscar Wilde quote.

I want to express my profound gratitude to the wonderful Gillian Malpass, who commissioned this book and kept faith in it. Thanks also to Mark Eastment for taking the project forward. My enthusiastic editor at Yale, Lydia Cooper, skilfully managed my demands and steered it to fruition; Marianne Fisher provided crucial copy-editing; Clare Davis oversaw the production; and Catherine Bankhurst created a layout design that elegantly marries image and text.

Finally I extend warm thanks to my friends and my family for their love, unflagging patience and enthusiasm over the long haul: to my children Phoebe Beal and Tom Barrett, my brother Henry Young, to the Spencer clan, and particularly my husband Nick Spencer for his love and unconditional support.

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