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From Nudes to the Nervous System, Studies of the Human Body
ANATOMY
Exploring the Human Body
By Phaidon Editors
BODY
The Photography Book
By Nathalie Herschdorfer
In 1895, when the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered mysterious rays that could pass through muscles, tendons and skin, he trained these invisible beams of light onto his wife’s fingers and wedding bands. In the haunting image that resulted, Bertha’s slender bones glow in ghostly, semi-translucent silhouette, reaching up from a dark cloud. “Hand With Rings” is an oddly tender portrait, an expression of the enduring human desire to see inside those we love, and a memento mori for the modern age (when she saw it, Bertha reportedly exclaimed, “I have seen my death”). The world’s first X-ray photograph of the body swiftly became an international sensation, and now appears in Phaidon’s “Anatomy,” one of two new books that explore the blend of fascination and panic that has long attended our relationships with our physical selves.
The book’s primary editor, Thomas Schnalke, brings together an astonishing range of medical illustrations, ancient artifacts, contemporary art and microscopic views from around the world, tracing the practice of portraying the body and its pieces over thousands of years. A professor and museum director at the Charité research hospital in Berlin, Schnalke guides us through hundreds of diverse images: an ancient Egyptian papyrus, medieval bloodletting diagrams, a Mayan sculpture, psychedelic brain scans, paintings by Caravaggio and Frida Kahlo, an ivory prosthetic nose, photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Man Ray. Even Mr. Potato Head makes an appearance.
The kaleidoscopic volume inspires genuine awe, both at the intricacies of our biology — Gordian tangles of lymphatic vessels, the roller coaster topography of the tongue — and at the technical finesse, empathy and humor artists have brought to the complex task of depicting them. The visual and thematic links between the works help us navigate their dizzying abundance. One spread drolly pairs a 1981 photograph of Rudolf Nureyev’s right foot en pointe with a colossal marble hand (part of a 39-foot statue of the Roman emperor Constantine) pointing skyward. These shrewd juxtapositions save the collection from feeling jumbled or disorienting, as do the book’s elegant design and its succinct yet informative captions.
That the images were selected by an international panel of scientists, academics and curators is evident in their variety and depth. Titans of Western anatomy and figurative art (Vesalius, Gray, Leonardo) share the stage with less familiar characters, like Angélique du Coudray, an 18th-century French midwife who toured rural villages training peasants with her hand-sewn fetuses, stuffed placentas and an upholstered uterus.
In contrast to Phaidon’s historical sweep, “Body” focuses only on pictures taken in recent decades. Drawing on myriad genres and techniques — portraits, nudes, fashion spreads, medical micrographs — Nathalie Herschdorfer, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Le Locle, Switzerland, approaches the body as a nebulous and dynamic organism, a site for self-invention, a source of self-loathing, and an arena for personal myth and public scrutiny. Wrangling 369 images into seven thematic chapters including “Alter Ego,” “Mutations” and “Love,” Herschdorfer presents an unwieldy vision of the human figure as a fraught but ubiquitous muse.
The quality of the works is inconsistent, and even some of the stronger ones are saddled with vague, shallow descriptions. Regarding four luminous portraits of transgender subjects by the French photographer Bettina Rheims, Herschdorfer merely notes “the strenuous work involved” in maintaining the models’ appearances.
Frustrations aside, the book contains a number of contemporary masterpieces. In her 2004 nude self-portrait “Feeling Me,” Elinor Carucci looks away with riveting ambivalence as her husband’s hand touches her pregnant belly. Catherine Opie’s well-known “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993) depicts a bloody cartoon house, sky and female stick figures carved into the skin of her back. A portrait by the rising star Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who photographs his and others’ bodies fragmented by mirrors, complements the late Ren Hang’s sculptural compositions of intertwining torsos and limbs. Some obvious choices are absent: Rineke Dijkstra, the Dutch artist who captures the vagaries of adolescence, is excluded in favor of Kim Kardashian’s selfies.
One work finds its way into both books. “Study, Charité, Berlin” (2015), by the German photographer Thomas Struth, depicts dozens of antique wax and plaster casts — death masks, hands and feet — arrayed like sacrificial offerings on a marble slab. It’s fitting: Now that we can manipulate our bodies more radically than ever, from our noses to our DNA, these two volumes offer a spectrum of ways to view, and celebrate, the living machines that allow us to taste, touch and navigate the world. Through them we marvel at how incredible it is to exist, in the flesh, at all.
Zoë Lescaze is an art critic and the author of “Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past.”
ANATOMY
Exploring the Human Body
By Phaidon Editors
Illustrated. 343 pp. Phaidon. $59.95.
BODY
The Photography Book
By Nathalie Herschdorfer
Illustrated. 431 pp. Thames & Hudson. $65.
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