THE EYE & THE ARM: PROSTHETICS & VISUAL CULTURE IN FRANCE, 1915-1925

THE EYE & THE ARM: PROSTHETICS & VISUAL CULTURE IN FRANCE, 1915-1925 Public Deposited

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Creator

Partin, William, III
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art and Art History, Art History

Abstract

This thesis traces three moments in the changing conceptions of the prosthetic in the visual cultures of postwar France: first, the medical photographs of Jules Amar, wartime director of the French laboratory for military prostheses and professional education, second, the Purist paintings of Fernand Léger produced in the years following the conclusion of World War I, and third, the Dada objects of Man Ray created under the dual influence of Paris Dada and emergent Surrealism. Though these cultural producers worked in different media and from distinct ideological perspectives, each engages the "prosthetic" as a key element for his visualizations of a radically re-organized (or, in Man Ray's case, dis-organized) postwar society. These images demonstrate the conceptual abstraction of the prosthetic between 1915, when "prosthetic" referred almost exclusively to a material artifact, and 1925, by which point "prosthetic" encompassed to both the material artifact, as well as a discursive framework.

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