Thoroughly Modern Models

Abstract

Looking at Men and Le Modèle noir anatomise how nineteenth- and twentieth-century art modelled the modern body and moulded embodied subjectivities. Together, these volumes tell the story of how the othered flesh of studio models – marked by class and race – was transformed by artists into models of ideal beauty, of the human machine, of blackness, of liberation, and of modernity, to name but a few. Both remain sensitive to the actual bodies and subjectivities thus transformed and, by returning them to art historical visibility, enrich our understanding of this artistic corpus, while themselves offering models for its study. Looking at Men investigates how a distinctly modern configuration of embodied masculinity – by turns potent and precarious – was constituted from the traffic between art and medicine in the nineteenth century. Across five chapters, Anthea Callen deftly navigates the reader through the many facets of what she terms the ‘pan-European medico-artistic alliance’, inculcating us into a male-dominated ‘body club’ of artists and doctors (p. 12). Callen argues that the social, material, and conceptual forms and practices of art and medicine operated along a continuum. To wit, artists and doctors routinely rubbed elbows, with the homosociality of the operating theatre and dissection room bleeding into the art school anatomy class and professional atelier. In these spaces the modern body gestated, with ‘scalpel–chisel–burin–pencil–brush’ (p. 16) incising and forming ‘flesh–wax–clay–plaster–paint’ (p. 18). As Callen shows, such bodies were not immaculately conceived, but were rather the consequence of modernity’s congress with the classical beau idéal. Visual cultures of anatomy – including sport, medicine, and anthropology – comprised the systems in which these bodies could circulate. In short, Looking at Men vividly articulates how the ‘human clay’ (p. 18) was moulded into modern men; its subtle and nuanced dissection of the discourses that made this process possible is a singular achievement.