Surface tension: skin, disease, and visuality in third republic France
Creators: name: Pierce, Kathleen
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2019

description: This dissertation examines relationships between representations of diseased skin and the surface of modern painting in fin-de-siècle France. I frame my analysis through historically specific, interdisciplinary understandings of the surface and discourses of syphilis, whose equivocal relationship to the skin disrupted bodily boundaries and the certainty of medical vision. I study diverse objects—including dermatological illustrations, medical models, and vanguard painting—to excavate formal and historical links between visualizations of the body across medicine, public health, and modern painting. Demonstrating the value of interdisciplinary thinking across art and medicine, I argue for the broad cultural reach of medical articulations of the body. I thread Pablo Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon through the dissertation as a potent example of this reach. Despite this painting’s canonical status, few scholars have considered its relationship to cultural spheres outside of art history. By juxtaposing the Demoiselles with dermatology’s visual culture, I reveal how both kinds of images evince fin-de-siècle surface tensions: the perforated skin of the syphilitic threatened the health of the individual, their family, and the French race while the splintered surface of the Demoiselles categorically challenged the representative role of painting. Through careful visual analysis, the close reading of primary sources, and archival research, and drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, this dissertation argues for new historical links between the early twentieth-century avant-garde and Parisian medical institutions, but also elucidates historically specific modes of understanding the rise of the modernist surface. Chapter one interrogates the visual culture of medical education to locate syphilis as a disruptor not only of bodily surface, but also of medical vision. To shore up this optical doubt, physicians represented syphilis through innumerable visual examples of idiosyncratic variation, visualizing the disease as an aggregate of separate, isolated body parts. I subsequently demonstrate parallels between medical image-makers’ increasing tendency to represent the body in parts and Cubism’s disarticulation of the body. Chapter two centers the fin-de-siècle trope of equating syphilis with the act of masking. I explore this phenomenon as it operates in popular visual culture, posters and postcards developed by public health officials, medical treatises, and the Demoiselles d’Avignon, paying particular attention to its intersection with gender and race. Chapter three homes in on a series of syphilis trials conducted on monkeys at the Institut Pasteur and illuminates the ways gender, race, and animality triangulate around syphilis’s tenuous relationship with visuality. It demonstrates significant connections between Picasso’s anarchist politics and critiques of experimental medicine and, subsequently, provides new touchstones for understanding the Demoiselles. My final chapter considers the use of spots in fin-de-siècle imagery, linking their all-encompassing presentation to the visual symptoms of syphilis and anxieties about the surface integrity of both bodies and art objects. My project makes three key interventions within and without art history. First, I insist on careful, critical readings not only of canonical art objects, but also of medical imagery and material culture. These latter objects are often presented as uncomplicated illustrations of larger issues rather than the rich, multifaceted representations they constitute. By engaging deeply with these objects in conjunction with canonical art, I reveal new historical links between artistic and medical modes of visualizing the body. Second, my project historicizes the concept of surface. Scholarly debates about modern painting have privileged surface since the 1960s, yet few look beyond the bounds of art history to understand its ascendency in early twentieth-century painting. I contextualize this rise within rhizomatic outcroppings of surface-centric thinking across fields. Finally, the dissertation’s arguments further clarify the historical ties that bind disease, race, and gender. This intervention is essential given the ways medicine increasingly structures care around genetic predisposition, wherein categories like gender and race operate as quantifiable and biologically defined filters through which one can calculate medical risk. It thus seems crucial that those producing scientific knowledge understand that concepts such as objectivity have histories, and that bodies are not only biologically, but also socially inscribed. This dissertation contributes to this effort.