"""Reverse pictures"": twentieth-century American portraiture and the subversion of the medico-photographic body"

Ostrander, Dana Louise

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/113156 Copy

Description

Title

"""Reverse pictures"": twentieth-century American portraiture and the subversion of the medico-photographic body"

Author(s)

Ostrander, Dana Louise

Issue Date

2021-07-12

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Weissman, Terri

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Weissman, Terri

Committee Member(s)

• Romberg, Kristin
• Thi Nguyen, Mimi
• Powell, Amy

Department of Study

Art & Design

Discipline

Art History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• photography
• American art, portraiture
• identity
• the body
• sexuality
• race
• Indigeneity
• disability
• neurodivergence
• medicine
• pathology

Abstract

This dissertation considers the efforts of twentieth-century American artists to challenge empirical knowledge about the body through the reappropriation, manipulation, and parody of corporeal stereotypes. It contains a series of case studies which explore the work of Marsden Hartley, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, George Platt Lynes, and Diane Arbus. Although these artists were not known for creating self-consciously scientific work, I posit that anatomical typologies acted as a kind of structuring absence. Tracing their various forms of portraiture back to nineteenth-century medico-photographic precedents, I reveal how each artist mobilized the genre to undermine accepted ideas about race, indigeneity, sexuality, and disability. In Chapter 1, I look at Marsden Hartley’s figural paintings of male nudes, showing how works like Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy (1939) rely on stereotypes of indigenous “savagery” to justify their nudity. Deploying racial difference and hyper-masculinity as defenses against homophobic scrutiny, Hartley manipulated visual codes to circumvent public reproach. Chapter 2 examines the collaboration between Alfred Kinsey and the artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Platt Lynes. Surveying the drawings and photographs they gave to the Kinsey Institute during the 1950s, I argue that their contributions served to expand Kinsey’s sexual taxonomies, queer the structure of the archive, and introduce erotic lived experience in lieu of objective scientific analysis. Finally, Chapter 3 reinterprets Diane Arbus’ controversial “Untitled” series, suggesting that her photographs of neurodivergent sitters reject empirical observation in favor of opacity, indifference, and partial knowledge. Incorporating visual obfuscation and a non-clinical setting, Arbus reveals the naturalness of disability outside the strictures of the medical sphere. Proposing the term “reverse pictures” to describe these works, which manipulate visual codes to foreclose on corporeal knowledge, I argue that the artists under discussion here effectively subverted tropes of the pathological body. By parodying traditional anatomical imagery – its alleged objectivity, logic, and order – they deconstructed established knowledge, refused anatomical stereotypes, and complicated the empirical simplification of the world.

Graduation Semester

2021-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113156

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 Dana Ostrander

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