Fragmented identities: reading subjectivity in Henry Tonks' surgical portraits

Art History

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 578-607

  Chambers, Emma ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67749102081     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00684.x     Document Type: Review

References (93)

1. Julian Freeman, 'Professor Tonks: War artist', The Burlington Magazine, 127: 986 May 1985, 284- 291, 293;
2. J. P. Bennett, 'Henry Tonks and plastic surgery', The British Journal of Plastic Surgery, 39 (Supplement), 1986;
3. Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant Garde Art and the Great War, New Haven, CT and London, 1994, 138.
4. For a concise summary of the historical development of ideas of likeness in portraiture see Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester, 1997, 9-18.
5. Ernst Van Alphen, 'The portrait's dispersal: concepts of representation and subjectivity in contemporary portraiture', in Woodall, ed., Portraiture, 240-1.
6. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner, New Haven, CT and London, 1989;
7. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez, New York, 1982.
8. This number compared with over 41,000 who had their limbs amputated, 272,000 who suffered injuries in the arms or legs that did not require amputation and 89,000 who sustained other serious damage to their bodies; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War, London, 1996, 33.
9. Andrew Bamji, 'Facial surgery: The patient's experience', in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle, eds, Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced, London, 1996, 490.
10. Bamji, 'Facial Surgery', 494.
11. Joseph Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks, London and Toronto, 1939, 129.
12. Reginald Pound, Gillies: Surgeon Extraordinary, London, 1964, 30.
13. Harold Delf Gillies and David Ralph Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, London, 1957, 11.
14. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, London, 1988, 5.
15. Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 11.
16. Allan Sekula, 'The body and the archive', in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Clinical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, MA and London, 1990, 348-353.
17. Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 64.
18. Harold Delf Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face, London, 1920, x.
19. Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face, 140, 148;
20. Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, 10, 38.
21. Gillies, Plastic Surgery of the Face, 126, 148.
22. Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks, 129.
23. I am grateful to Andrew Bamji for this assessment of how Tonks' drawings compare with those of other illustrators in the Gillies Archive.
24. Tonks' use of pastel had developed from his ballet studies such as the pastel study of the ballet Les Sylphides which he exhibited at the New English Art Club in 1913.
25. Pastels are fabricated chalks made from powdered pigments combined with non-greasy binders, as opposed to natural black, white and red chalks derived from earths. Although pastel orginated in sixteenth-century Italy, its use was perfected in the eighteenth century particularly for portraiture. Paul Goldman, Looking at Prints, Drawings and Watercolours: A Guide to Technical Terms, London, 2006, 12-18.
26. 'One word as to pastels . . . they are so fragile, on the other hand they are very rapid for notes and certainly truer than watercolour', Henry Tonks to Dugald Sutherland MacColl, 2 July 1934, T357, MacColl Papers, Glasgow University Library.
27. Quoted in J. P. Bennett, 'Henry Tonks and plastic surgery', 13.
28. Tonks to MacColl, 28 June 1916, T212, MacColl Papers, Glasgow University Library.
29. Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, 9. See also Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 73.
30. Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital, London, 1918, 143-4.
31. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 65-6.
32. R. Tait McKenzie, Reclaiming the Maimed: A Handbook of Physical Therapy, New York, 1918, 117.
33. Suzannah Biernoff, 'Shame, disgust and the historiography of war', in Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward, eds, Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture, London, 2008, 217.
34. Sarah Crellin, 'Hollow Men: Francis Derwent Wood's Masks and Memorials, 1915-1925', The Sculpture Journal, 6, 2001, 79.
35. McKenzie, Reclaiming the Maimed, 123.
36. Manchester Evening Chronicle, May/June 1918, quoted in Biernoff, 'Shame, disgust and the historiography of war', 233.
37. Woodall, Portraiture, 10; René Descartes, 'Discourse 4' in Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 1637, London, 1968
38. For a survey see Sandra Kemp, Future Face, London, 2004.
39. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, London, 1789.
40. Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, London: 1806;
41. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London, 1872.
42. See Kemp, Future Face.
43. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, vol. 19 in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans James Strachey, London, 1961;
44. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London and New York, 1962;
45. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York and London, 1993.
46. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 108-22.
47. Biernoff, 'Shame, disgust and the historiography of war', 218.
48. Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital, 144.
49. Parveen Adams, 'Operation Orlan', in The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences, London and New York, 1996, 141-59.
50. Adams, The Emptiness of the Image, 145.
51. Kristeva's well-known analysis has been productive for historians of war art primarily in relation to the representation of corpses, and the threat that their decay presents to the subjectivity of combatants and the cultural and political order. See Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance, New Haven, CT and London, 2004, 102-3
52. and Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture 1914-1930, Aldershot, 2007, 106-9, 141. It has also recently been used to analyse emotions of disgust in relation to wounding and facial disfigurement; Biernoff, 'Shame, disgust and the historiography of war', 223-6.
53. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53.
54. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
55. Gillies and Millard, The Principles and Art of Plastic Surgery, 12-13.
56. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53.
57. Anzieu's The Skin Ego has recently received considerable attention from cultural historians because of the opportunity that it gives to investigate the relationship between mind and body without either collapsing one into the other or treating them as completely separate entities. See for example Jay Prosser, Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York, 1998;
58. Steven Connor, 'Integuments: The scar, the sheen, the screen', New Formations, 39, winter, 1999;
59. Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, eds, Thinking through the Skin, London and New York, 2001;
60. Claudia Benthien, Skin: on the Cultural Border between Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap, New York, 2002.
61. 'The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides . . . representing the superficies of the mental apparatus.' Sigmund Freud, footnote added to The Ego and the Id in 1927 quoted in Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 85.
62. Anzieu describes the three functions of the Skin Ego as: a sac (a containing, unifying envelope for the self), as a screen (a protective barrier for the psyche) and as a sieve (a filter of exchanges and a surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible). He goes on to list nine functions of the skin and correlates these with the functions of the Skin Ego, Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 98-109.
63. Mechthild Fend, 'Bodily and pictorial surfaces: Skin in French art and medicine, 1790-1860', Art History, 28: 3, 2005, 315-16.
64. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 104. According to Anzieu, damage to the real skin will also affect the Skin Ego. He refers, for instance, to deliberate mutilations of the skin as 'a dramatic attempt to maintain the boundaries of the body and the Ego and re-establish a sense of being intact and selfcohesive', Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 20.
65. Woodall, Portraiture, 5.
66. Jonathan Cole, About Face, London and Cambridge MA, 1999.
67. Cole, About Face, 179.
68. Cole, About Face, 196.
69. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 'The politics of staring: Visual rhetorics of disability in popular photography', in Sharon Snyder, Brenda Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, eds, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, New York, 2002, 56-7.
70. Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 1999, 36-40.
71. See Pound, Gillies: Surgeon Extraordinary, 34-5, 39, 46, and Bamji, 'Facial surgery: The patient's experience', 497-499 on patients' differing experiences of return to civilian life.
72. Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 44-5. See also Jonathan Black, "'Who dies if England Live?" Masculinity, the problematics of "Englishness" and the image of the ordinary soldier in British war art c. 1915- 28', in Stephen Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney- Smith and John K. Walton, Relocating Britishness, Manchester and New York, 2004 and Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity, 70-1, 118.
73. H. H. Thomas, Help for Wounded Heroes, London, 1920, 1, quoted in Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 56.
74. Bourke cites a soldier's account of being given a sermon before going into battle on how Christ had given his life for others and they were expected to do the same; Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 248.
75. Chaplain Geoffrey Gordon quoted in Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 212; the work described by Gordon is 'The Great Sacrifice' published in The Graphic, 25 December 1914, repr. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 213.
76. See also Biernoff, 'Shame, disgust and the historiography of war', 218-19. Ana Carden-Coyne discusses how media campaigns promoted the work of the RAMC and treatment of the wounded in terms of medical innovations and humane treatment and how this contrasted with patients own perception of their treatment; 'Soldiers' Bodies in the War Machine: Triage, Propaganda and Military Medical Bureaucracy 1914-1918', in Ken Arnold, Klaus Vogel and James Peto, eds, War and Medicine, London, 2008, 75-7, 81-3.
77. Tonks worked as a volunteer at a Red Cross clearing station at Arc en Barrois in 1915, Nevinson worked as an volunteer with the Friends Ambulance Unit in 1914-15 and Kennington spent time as an official war artist at the 55th Casualty Clearing Station at Tincourt in February and March 1918.
78. See Emma Chambers, Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery, exhib. cat., London, 2002, 11-13.
79. Paul Fussell notes the pervasive imagery of the crucifixion in war poetry in which 'each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ'; The Great War and Modern Memory, London, Oxford and New York, 1975, 118-19.
80. Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 10 and fn 43.
81. This hall was never built and the pictures eventually became the property of the newly established Imperial War Museum; Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 75-89.
82. Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 105.
83. See Chambers, Henry Tonks, 18-22, for further details of how this work was commissioned, executed and reviewed.
84. Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 97- 8.
85. John Middleton Murry, The Nation, 20 December 1919, 419-20, quoted in Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 97.
86. See Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity, 93-4 for a comparable situation in sculptural war memorials.
87. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, 1985, 121.
88. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 70.
89. Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939, Berkeley, CA and London, 2001, 12, 15-60.
90. Biernoff, 'Shame, disgust and the historiography of war', 217.
91. Tonks to unnamed recipient, 18 August 1917, fol. 16, Tonks Correspondence File, Imperial War Museum.
92. Tonks to MacColl, 29 September 1916, T216, MacColl Papers, Glasgow University Library.
93. Whilst Tonks' portrait pastels were not publicly exhibited, paintings of soldiers with facial injuries were shown in the Royal Army Medical Corps section of the Imperial War Museum's first exhibition in a series of works by J. Hodgson Lobley. In The Queen's Hospital for Facial Injuries, Frognal, Sidcup: the Toymakers' Shop (c. 1918, Imperial War Museum), soldiers with facial injuries are shown convalescing and learning new skills to prepare them for life outside the surgical unit.