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Model bodies

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 2; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s2215-0366(15)00269-2

2215-0374

Colin R. Martin,

History of Medicine Studies

Despite their human form, the lifesize wooden figures with articulated limbs and joints used by artists as inert surrogates for living models, from at least the 16th century, were as inconspicuous to the public as studio easels, brushes, and paints. Generations of artists condoned the use of the wooden mannequins in studying anatomical proportion, relationships between figures, and the fall of light and shadow on clothing and drapery, but they also recognised that they were treacherous allies when their use became obvious, so they remained “silent partners”. In the 18th century, the term mannequiné or “mannequinized” was coined to describe awkward or clumsily painted figures, which betrayed the use of inert models. Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, shown first in Cambridge (UK) and now in Paris (France), demonstrates how partnerships between artists and mannequins changed with cultural shifts over time, particularly when 19th century medical, scientific, and technological advances spawned new ideas about what it meant to be human. Artists began depicting mannequins in studio scenes to elicit psychological responses, manipulating the viewer's emotions as easily as they repositioned the wooden figures' jointed limbs. In late 19th century France, advances in neurology and psychology meant that nervous disorders were researched, diagnosed, and categorised. Publicity surrounding the clinical investigation of hysteria, often thought to afflict only women, captured the popular imagination. From the mid-1870s Jean-Martin Charcot, chief physician at La Salpêtrière hospital, Paris, focused his research on hysteria, legitimising hypnosis as a scientific tool for experimental intervention. He categorised le grand hypnotisme as a sequence of somatic stages: catalepsy, lethargy and somnambulism. Catalepsy is the most visually bizarre stage, with patients assuming and maintaining physically challenging positions for long periods. Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, the three-volume record of patient case histories published by Charcot from 1876 to 1880, documents his patients' symptoms and treatment; however, its objectivity was compromised by many voyeuristic images of scantily clad women in erotic poses. These hysterical patients provide some of the most striking 19th century medical imagery. Some photographs recall paintings of people in states of ecstasy, insanity, or demonic possession (as depicted by Peter Paul Rubens, for example). Georges Moreau de Tours' Les Fascinés de la Charité (1889) shows patients at La Charité hospital, Paris, in a state of “fascination”, a form of hypnotism closely related to catalepsy, induced by prolonged exposure to bright light—such as that reflected by the rotating mirror on the stand on the left. Each woman exhibits a different emotional response (joy, fear, or revulsion) with its associated gesture, a male patient raises his hands in an expression of “instantaneous surprise”. Some women's poses recall published photographs of La Salpêtrière patients in full and hemi-catalepsy. In this state, patients resemble posed artists' mannequins, with the patients' limbs fixed by the hypnotic encounter, as if their joints were tightened with keys like those of the mannequins. Jules-Bernard Luys (identifiable by his mutton-chop whiskers) was senior physician at La Charité and fervently advocated the use of hypnotism from the 1880s. Late 19th century painters and photographers began probing more deeply into imagined encounters behind closed studio doors, between artist, living model, and mannequin. Their suggestive, erotic, and sometimes troubling depictions consciously played on the uncanny presence of a figure that was realistic yet unreal, lifelike yet lifeless. Often, the mannequin was to evoke an implied sexual frisson between real and artificial figures, for example the figure of a mannequin in a pink dress slumped on the studio floor beside a standing man in Edgar Degas's Portrait of Henri Michel-Lévy (c 1878). Sometimes the psychological drama is darker and infused with menace. Ovid's legend of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with a female statue he created, inspired artists throughout the 19th century, but at the end of the century medico-scientific research into human sexual behaviour introduced a new reading of the myth. Psychologists began using the term “fetishism” to describe sexual behaviours deviating from the heterosexual norm, and coined new terms to define them. Agalmatophilia, the love of statues and artificial figures, provided medical acknowledgment of the capability of inert mannequins to inflame sexual desire in a susceptible minority. Surrealist artists went further in the 20th century, sexualising shop mannequins, as seen in Domenico de Chirico's paintings and Man Ray's photographs. The uncanny inertness of mannequins, in spite of their lifelike appearance, was exploited by the Surrealists in their exploration of the human unconscious. “Even today, their creepy, silent presence leaves us feeling anything but indifferent”, concludes Jane Munro, the curator of this fascinating and compelling exhibition, and editor of its exemplary catalogue. Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish is at the Musée Bourdelle in Paris until July 25, 2015 Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish is at the Musée Bourdelle in Paris until July 25, 2015