A Donation to Science

On the value of cadaver study by artists...Not a "pleasant" topic, but recounting one of the most affecting aspects of my journey as an artist. 

Why would a contemporary art student benefit from the anatomical study of cadavers?  In 2001 and 2002, as a faculty member at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, I lead a small group of students on  a number of study trips to the anatomy labs of Hahnemann University Hospital. It wasn't sensational in a CSI kind of way, and nothing very dramatic happened. But something "illuminating" happened, and I'll tell the story here.

Our art school had a reciprocal arrangement with the medical school. Their students could come to PAFA and draw from our live models, while our students could go, and draw from their cadavers. There was a kind of beautiful symmetry to that I felt.  To be credentialed for access to the lab, our students and participating faculty had to attend an "orientation" session, led by one of the doctors who taught anatomy at the hospital. We were told the protocols: no photography, no bare hands, no touching except to reposition. We were told to put the plastic sheets back when we were done, and if the subject seemed to be too dry, sprinkle it with water. We were shown how to dispose of our gloves and wash up effectively as we concluded our trip. We were cautioned about the sometimes shocking nature of what we would see. We were also told about respect... but I'll get to that, and to the profound value I found in the experience a bit later.

When I was a student at The  Academy in the late 1960s, the spirit of Thomas Eakins was implicit in the building itself. His anatomical casts, made from "flayed" figures which he had dissected himself, were displayed in the auditorium. In the magnificent  cast room, along with the life sized replica of Michelangelo's "David," was  Jean-Antoine  Houdon's life sized flayed figure. The work of DaVinci and others created a kind of mystique around drawings from medically dissected cadavers, but it was not part of the school's curriculum at the time. Why would contemporary artists need to draw from cadavers? What did that have to do with ART? Even the great tradition of the Academy had been affected by "modernism" it seemed.

But at one point, I had hit a roadblock in my studies, and my teacher Joseph Amarotico told me I needed to do more "serious study." I decided to do a series of drawings from the Eakins casts. I spent hours, by myself, sitting in the dimly lighted auditorium, drawing the casts, displayed in glass cases, and then translated those drawings into a number of paintings.  The first painting, was titled "Relic Man."  I had painted it exactly as it appeared- a torso only,  suspended from a hook in the display case. It was essentially a still life. I used a commercial flat black paint as a background which simulated the dark auditorium.

Even before I'd finished, I thought I had "found" something.  I was excited to show the new piece to my teachers, and their reaction was unanimous.  Ben Kamihira told me I had created "a kind of terror" with the piece and that I should stay right on this path. Jim Leuders told me "you are using the same kind of paint you've been using, but it just suddenly has meaning!" The fact that I can remember these comments almost verbatim indicates the importance of the moment to me! The "flayed figures" resembled the remnants of some horrible cataclysm, in a way.  The war in Viet Nam was in full rage at the time, and as I did large paintings of platforms piled with the dismembered casts of Eakins, the daily newspapers were filled with images of torn soldiers and civilians from Southeast Asia.

Those painting were my "breakthrough" to a personal style, and thirty years, and many style changes  later, I was invited to be part of the faculty at PAFA.

And so it was in September 2001 that the opportunity to lead the trips to Hahnemann arose. Two thousand and one. It was just a few weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The world seemed as dark again, as it had been, during Viet Nam as I lead a group of six students up Broad Street to the hospital. We had all been to the orientation, and I had reserved the lab for two hours.  We showed our identification to the security guard and wended through corridors to the room with a small sign which said: "Anatomy Lab."

There were about 20 stainless steel dissection tables spaced evenly about the large lab. Medical diagrams of internal organs, circulatory systems and brain regions hung like paintings on the walls. Strange equipment of almost medieval appearance, and green chalk boards with scrawled notes and diagrams lined the periphery.  Full skeletons were suspended at various locations. The ceiling was low with florescent lighting and some spot lights available on tripods.  One entire wall was taken up with large refrigerated stainless steel lockers which held the bodies which were not already "in process." The figures on the tables, were covered in white or black plastic sheets.  

To begin work, we all put on surgical gloves.  I removed a sheet from one subject and invited the students to do the same. In September, the subjects  were mostly intact, but the skin had been removed to reveal the musculature. This is the state at which Eakins had made his casts and was of clear value to the students to see how muscles connect and intertwine.  As the semester went on, the subjects were more and more revealed, opened and reduced to skeletal frames. The figures had a rubbery feel, and the odor of disinfectant and preservatives filled the air. The subjects were all sizes,  races and genders, but there were no young people. Some people had died of noticeable disease, some were crime victims.

We spread out, each student finding one figure which seemed to interest them. As I immersed myself into a drawing, I looked around and saw my cohorts, each  working with intense concentration, scattered about the lab, silently drawing these anonymous figures who once walked the streets of Philadelphia. There was essentially a "reverent" feeling in the room.

As I contemplated my subject, I could not help but wonder about the person. What was his life? How had it ended? Why was the body here in the lab? Was there any meaning to it all? I felt as if the "worth" of this experience for myself, my students, for Thomas Eakins and others back in time was more philosophic in nature, than artistic. It had more to do with the "why we make art" rather than the "how."

For me it was in the faces. I concentrated on "portraits." My students often did studies of muscles and limbs, and the instructive nature of seeing what lies beneath the skin, was of clear value to their ability to express form. We didn't talk very much about it at the time, and as the semester wore on, the number of students interested diminished, and I often went to the lab alone. In their defense, they had been working for 6 hours already that day, and doing two more hours was actually exhausting!

On one occasion, I went over and a doctor was teaching in the lab. I marveled as he had students find and name various internal organs or locations. The value of these labs to the medical profession is undeniable. The first time you go cutting into a human to find an appendix or gall bladder, it is much better if the body cannot be harmed!  I hoped, seeing these young people who intended to be physicians, that some of them were indeed coming to our life drawing classes, for the pure joy of  learning to draw a living being. I somehow felt it would make them better doctors, but don't know why.

Respect. When we teach life drawing, we always prepare the students to respect the models, who do a very difficult job for our benefit. There is a certain "clinical" objectivity which develops for the nude human form as you try mightily to express its subtle form in two dimensions on paper. But the respect for the cadavers was different. They could not be offended by crude jokes or sexual innuendo after all. But from my own experience and also seeing the medical students at work, I saw that the respect , was for life itself. Seeing the "machinery" of a human being as a mass of inanimate tissue, like seeing the gears of a watch,- precise, amazing, absolutely no wasted space, it inspires. When Shakespear's Hamlet says "What a piece of work is man..." it is testament to the miraculous power of nature. One can see this all as pure undirected, unmeaning evolution, or invoke a greater intelligence and meaning to explain the inexplicable. I'm a believer, and came to my belief through science, but I don't make a big point of it to others, and don't rule out that I could be wrong.

But I was surprised by what happens at the end of the semester. For over three months, the cadavers had been "deconstructed." By December, there were primarily skeletal remains left on the tables. It is at that point, that all of the remains are taken to a crematorium. They are reduced to ashes, and then a service is held. The doctors who ran the classes and medical students, who learned from these "teachers," gather at a local funeral home, and pay homage to those who donated their bodies to science. They can say a prayer or not, but the respect for the miracle of life, the inventiveness of nature to construct such wonders can only have been enhanced by their experiences.

One day as I left the hospital, sketchbook in hand, I was walking down 13th Street. It was crowded with hospital staff in scrubs of various colors.  A man with a bouquet of flowers in his hand approached a car, pleading to someone inside. He offered them through an open window, but the window went up and the car drove away. The man threw the flowers into the street. 

So the medical students prepare for exams, and the long difficult road to becoming a doctor. Art students sit with their blank canvases and ask, "what should I do?" Satellites orbit the earth. Data streams, web sites exhort, crowds laugh in theaters, individuals cry over  novels, a couple waits for a lab test, a man thinks he feels "lucky" in Las Vegas, and a teenage girl with a thousand Facebook friends, feels lost in a small town in New England...etc.