Juxtaposition #8

The suddenly blogospherically ubiquitous pinup-artist turned anatomical illustrator Fernando Vicente is clearly influenced by German artist Fritz Kahn. If this is your cup of tea, you'll probably also like "An Iconography of the Industrial Body: Fritz Kahn, Popular Medical Illustration and the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity," a talk by Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine, curator of Dream Anatomy and author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America:

Influenced by Dada, neue Sachlichkeit, surrealism, futurism, Bauhaus, constructivism, Art Deco, neo-classicism, comic strips, photomontage, and advertising graphics, Kahn, and the artists working under his direction, visually explained how the human body works, based on the findings of modern biological science. At the same time, the images refer back to the chaos, violence, impasses, pleasures, dreams, and technological and sociocultural ambitions of early and mid-20th-century Germany. Kahn deployed a visual vocabulary of modernism to figure industrial modernity within the body and the body within industrial modernity. The result was a corpus of images and tropes which imagined a new body for the modern age.

Sappol speaks this Friday, June 19th, at 7:30 PM in the Observatory in Brooklyn, NY.