Art: Academy showcases body works

Had it been presented in his time, Thomas Eakins would have loved "Anatomy/Academy," the exhibition about the confluence of art and the human body at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

This show of more than 100 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, medical models, and related ephemera extols the passion that cost Eakins his teaching job at the academy - a comprehensive, in his case almost obsessive, knowledge of human anatomy.

(He was fired in 1886 for exposing female students to the fully nude male body.)

Developed by the academy's three curators - Anna O. Marley, Robert Cozzolino, and Julien Robson - the exhibition develops the thesis that Philadelphia has long been a major center for teaching art and medicine. Frequently, the two disciplines enriched each other, as they continue to do.

Besides containing a number of works by Eakins, including casts of body parts used in teaching and his famous motion studies, the show marks the custodial return to the academy of Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, owned jointly with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painting will remain at PAFA until 2014.

"Anatomy/Academy" is an unusual production for an art museum because, while it consists predominantly of traditional art, it also includes exhibits that are essentially scientific in nature.

In an art climate that has experienced modernism and postmodernism, some of these now invite an aesthetic interpretation. Perhaps the most vivid example is a figural shape called Harriet, which is in fact a display of a dissected human nervous system made in 1888 by Rufus Weaver, a professor of anatomy at Hahnemann Medical College.

Even at close range, Harriet looks like a white-on-black drawing, or a delicate wire construction. Either way, its aesthetic allure is at least as prominent, and as pleasing, as its pedagogical purpose.

One responds similarly to a human-scale plaster figure called l'Ecorché (Flayed Man) by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. This cast of the 1767 original was made in the late 19th century as an anatomical teaching aid, even though Houdon created the figure as a study for a sculpture of St. John the Baptist.

The exhibition, drawn primarily from the academy's collection, also contains a group of large-scale models of body parts such as the eye, the inner ear, and the jaw commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania in the early 19th century from William Rush, America's first professional sculptor.

Rush carved his models from wood and painted them white. They're presented here to emphasize their abstract sculptural qualities, a plausible conceit although not always an entirely persuasive one.

The curators have organized the material in three chronologically thematic sections - late 18th and early 19th century; late 19th century, particularly the Centennial Exposition; and early to mid-20th century, focused on World War I and early modernism.

Besides Eakins, Rush, and Houdon, familiar artists and works pop up throughout. Artists, most of them local, include Christian Schussele, Violet Oakley, Alice Kent Stoddard, Alice Barber Stephens, Cecilia Beaux, Samuel Murray, Thomas Anshutz, Maxfield Parrish, Daniel Garber, John Sloan, and Robert Henri.

Other works of note include Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), Ivan Albright's Woman, Bernard Perlin's intensely allegorical The Garden, and Washington Allston's Head of Saint Peter, a study for a larger painting.

The exhibition's variegated character makes it more difficult to track than a typical theme show. Some works address anatomy directly; others, like Stoddard's portrait of Clara Marshall, an early graduate of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and The Women's Life Class, an illustration by Stephens, are concerned with medical and art education.

Drawn figure studies, which illustrate a 19th-century concern for anatomical precision, highlight the show's first section, while painted nudes and figures, such as Nude Reclining by Arthur B. Carles and Henri's Ruth St. Denis in the Peacock Dance predominate in the closing section.

One's attention constantly shifts from one sub-theme to another, from art to medicine, from medicine that could be art to art that looks at medicine. The most graphic example of the latter is Perlin's sanguinary canvas of a soldier's leg being amputated.

While the show is mainly historical, it reaches into the present with Donald Lipski's wall array of miniature skeletons and a photographic triptych by the German collective TODT in which human anatomy combines with mechanical parts to produce "bionic" figures.

These pieces indicate that, while the exhibition is mainly historical, the interaction of art and medicine continues, to the point where the exchange also benefits medical students more directly.

Art students still study anatomy at schools such as the Pennsylvania Academy because, as PAFA professor Al Gury says, "If you want to be a figurative artist, you need a working knowledge of surface anatomy and structure."

Recently, medical educators have come to recognize that medical students can become more effective diagnosticians by looking at the body as art students do, through close observation of the kind that Eakins promoted more than a century ago.

Four years ago, Charles Pohl of Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University initiated such cross-pollination, which was coordinated at PAFA by Gury. Using artists' models, Gury conducted a "visual diagnosis" of body types from an artist's point of view.

Pohl and other physicians then discussed what was important about visual diagnosis, and gave the medical students exercises designed to sharpen their perceptions in that regard.

That session was a one-off, but Gury said at the opening of "Anatomy/Academy" that Pohl had recently proposed that the sessions be revived. This probably will happen in the spring, Gury said. "I may have the medical students draw this time."

Academy students have long approached the medical aspect of anatomy by drawing cadavers at nearby Hahnemann University Hospital. Reciprocally, art therapy students in Drexel University's College of Nursing and Health Professions have access to cast-drawing classes at the academy, Gury said.

Learning anatomy remains an important part of the academy's foundation program, Gury said. In that context, "Anatomy/Academy" affirms that accurately rendering the body remains central to creating evocative representations of living human beings.

"Anatomy/Academy" continues in the Hamilton building at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, through April 17. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 to 5 Sundays. Admission to special exhibitions, including the permanent collection, is $15 general, $12 for visitors 60 and older, students with ID, and visitors 13 through 18. Information: 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org.

The show is accompanied by extensive public programming involving other city institutions, including a symposium on March 26 that will examine the body in relation to the material and visual culture of American art. For details, consult the academy website or call 215-972-2105.

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