– by Ashley Lazevnick*
In one of the most influential essays on the artist Georgia O’Keeffe—published in the 1922 issue of Vanity Fair—the art critic Paul Rosenfeld made a vivid comparison between surgical procedures and her creative method:
The painter appears able to move with the utmost composure and awareness amid sensations so intense they are wellnigh insupportable, and so rare and evanescent the mind faints in seeking to hold them; and, here, in the regions of the spirit….[she seems] to sever with the delicacy and swiftness of the great surgeon aplunge in the entrails of a patient.[i]
Rosenfeld was not the only writer to pick up on the surgical qualities of O’Keeffe’s abstract paintings (Fig. 1); among dozens of others, Alexander Brook identified a pointed asepsis in her works that “seem all to be transfixed by an absolutely clean dagger that pierces neatly and hits a vital place.”[ii] And O’Keeffe was just one of several modernists that merited this analogy. Guillaume Apollinaire observed that “Picasso studies an object like a surgeon dissecting a corpse,” while Walter Benjamin characterized the cinematographer as a surgeon, for whom cutting exposed a more trenchant reality than could be achieved by a painter.[iii]
It was this uncanny collection of metaphors that brought me to the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. What was going on in the history of surgery during this period—I wondered—that would elicit such widespread comparisons between surgical science and the arts? What popular connotations or visual imagery would have informed such critics? Did the specialized literature—though unknown to many of these figures—contradict or enhance the metaphors they used? During my time at the Library, I consulted a wide range of materials, including trade journals, manuals of surgery, and—most stunningly—the collection of medical illustrations done by Hermann Faber and his son, Erwin Faber. It became quickly apparent that the metaphor with which I was dealing was not simply unidirectional; during the same period, surgeons were being thought of as artists—often compared to painters, draftsman, or etchers—while the highly skilled illustrations attested to the enmeshed pursuits of artistic representation, scientific accuracy, and even beauty.[iv]