Category Archives: Anatomy

As many Morbid Anatomy readers already know, for many years now, I have been traveling the world with my camera, in search of obscure medical museums, cabinets of curiosity, dusty natural history museums, privately-held cabinets, untouched collections, and idiosyncratic assemblages of all sorts, front-stage and back, public and private. Some of the fruits of my labor make the way to the pages of this blog, or into various exhibitions such as 2007's Anatomical Theatre and last years Private Cabinets.

My latest project utilizing this material is photo exhibition at Observatory gallery in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition, entitled "The Secret Museum," will be on view until Sunday June 6th, and features photographs of public and private, front-stage and back-stage collections from The United States, England, France, Poland, The Netherlands, Italy, and more. You will find in this exhibition photographs of taxidermied animals and humans (!), a life-sized breathing wax doll from the 19th century, Anatomical Venuses and Slashed Beauties, a fetal skeleton tableau from the 17th Century, backstage views at a number of natural history museums, an overlooked cabinet of curiosity in Paris, the untouched Teylers Museum of Haarlem, and much, much more.

Above are a just a very few of the many photographs included in the show (captions below); you can see a full collection of photographs (and some installation views as well!) by clicking here. Many photographs--all limited edition and signed giclée prints, handsomely framed and matted--are still available for sale, and quite reasonably priced! Please email me at morbidanatomy@gmail.com if you are interested in finding out more.

Also, if you are interested in a guided walk-through of the collection, why not come out for Atlantic Avenue Artwalk, which will be taking place over the weekend of June 5th and 6th? I will be on hand all day at Observatory and its next-door-neighbor The Morbid Anatomy Library, and happy to guide any interested parties through the exhibition.

Full details follow; hope you can make it!

The Secret Museum
April 10 - June 6th
3-6 Thursday and Friday
12-6 Saturday and Sunday

An exhibition exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world in photographs and artifacts, by Joanna Ebenstein, co-founder of Observatory and creator of Morbid Anatomy.

Photographer and blogger Joanna Ebenstein has traveled the Western world seeking and documenting untouched, hidden, and curious collections, from museum store-rooms to private collections, cabinets of curiosity to dusty natural history museums, obscure medical museums to hidden archives. The exhibition “The Secret Museum” will showcase a collection of photographs from Ebenstein’s explorations–including sites in The Netherlands, Italy, France, Austria, England and the United States–which document these spaces while at the same time investigating the psychology of collecting, the visual language of taxonomies, notions of “The Specimen” and the ordered archive, and the secret life of objects and collections, with an eye towards capturing the poetry, mystery and wonder of these liminal spaces.

To download press release, which includes sample images, please click here.

To see the entire exhibition in a virtual, on-line fashion, click here. To find out more about Observatory, including directions, click here. For more about the Atlantic Avenue Artwalk, click here. For more about the Morbid Anatomy Library, click here. For more on Anatomical Theatre, an exhibition about medical museums, click here. For more about Private Cabinets, an exhibition about privately held collections, click here.

Click on images to see much larger image; full collection to be found here, caption list here:

1. Femme à barbe (Bearded Lady), Musée Orfila, Courtesy of Paris Descartes University
2. Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Collection, Private Collection, London, England
3. Wax Department Store Mannequin, Early 20th Century; From the Home Collection of Evan Michelson, Antiques Dealer, New Jersey
4. Wax Model, Musée Orfila, Paris. Courtesy Université Paris Descartes
5. Venus Endormie (breathing model), Spitzner collection Collection Spitzner, Musée Orfila, Paris Courtesy Université Paris Descartes
6. Bird Collection, “La Specola” (Museo di Storia Naturale), Florence, Italy
7. Natural History Museum Backroom, Netherlands
8. Natural History Museum Backroom, Netherlands
9. Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Rouen, Rouen, France
10. Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, Paris, France, Established 1793
11. Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands, Established 1778
12. Plaster Models in Pathological Cabinet, The Museum of the Faculty of Medicine at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow

For many of you who are interested in pursuing medical illustration or just want to know more about the field in general, the Association of Medical Illustrators website (ami.org) is a resource rich information portal.  It contains everything you need to know about medical illustration including career information, tutorials, artist galleries, graduate program information, and much more.

The AMI did an amazing job updating their website from what was once a very outdated resource so I highly recommend browsing through all of the fresh resources on the site.  And if you’re in need of a medical illustrator, check out the online Medical Illustration sourcebook.  Many of my favorite illustrators and animators are listed in it, including Hybrid Medical Animation, AXS, Anatomy Blue, and Bryan Christie.

The AMI is also introducing a trial membership for a special fee of only $100!  This is a great opportunity to join the community and network for basically the price of a student membership. I highly recommend joining!

Title: “mySkull”
artist: David Foox
medium: acrylic, krylon, on X-Ray (sealed with a kiss) mounted on custom hosital viewing light box
size: 14″ x 22″

Title: “myHeart II”
artist: David Foox
medium: acrylic, krylon, on X-Ray (sealed with a kiss) mounted on custom dentist viewing light box
size: 12″ x 12″

Two new works by artist and toy maker FOOX and titled “myHeart II” and “mySkull“.

FOOX has taken more X-Rays of himself including an MRI of his skull and all in the name of art. With a solo show “As Within So Without” at Lyons Weir (NY) June 25th through July 17th, FOOX needs all the X-Rays he can get. That’s why he has enlisted the help of yet to be disclosed notable persons.  Can’t wait to find out the identity of these “notable persons!”

Lyons Weir Gallery, New York
“As Within So Without” a Solo Show by David Foox
Curated by Rebecca Marshall
Opening Party: June 25th, 2010 (show through July 17th, 2010)

FOOX continues the awareness campaign promoting organ donation as a cause to help save lives. His ORGAN DONOR vinyl dolls were featured in Kidrobot, Munky King, Zeus Comics, Poptopia, Ultrapop, Super7, and a host of modern art museums. In this exhibition of recent works by David Foox, FOOX shows us his insides – and those of society’s notable and interesting characters. Without disclosing which famous characters’ insides will be painted, FOOX does give us these two sneak peak works recently completed in advance of the opening. Look for more of X-Ray vision by FOOX in the coming months. For more information on FOOX NYC events email Bea bnfoox@gmail.com

Starting in 1939, Nazi henchmen and art dealers bought and stole thousands of paintings, sculptures, tapestries and other objects from private collections across Europe, then stockpiled them. Hitler helped draw up architectural plans, which megomaniacally grew to include a theater and an opera house, a hotel, a library and parade grounds. Photographs show him, pencil in hand, pondering plans and gazing raptly on the model for the site...

Just in time for International Museum Day (which was yesterday, actually!), a fascinating story in the New York Times which details the ill-fated story of Adolf Hitler's never-realized Führermuseum, an art gallery he planned to establish in his hometown of Linz, Austria.

The article details the surprising importance that collecting artworks and planning the architecture and minutia of a museum held for Hitler even up until the eve of his demise; it also traces the history of a series of intruiguing artifacts related to his pursuit: meticulous scrapbooks containing black and white photos of the projected Führermuseum's collection, scrapbooks which now function as a sort of "museum without walls" for this ill-fated museum that never was. The article also provocatively examines in what ways Hitler's projects of collecting and empire might have been linked.

The article explains:

It’s hard to overstate how seriously [Hitler] took the whole project. Art collecting obsessed him for years; his staff endured nightly soliloquies, Hitler droning on about art while Germany collapsed around him. He fussed even about how the rooms in the museum should be decorated.

And goes on to comment:

The jury is out over whether the 'disproportionate amount of time and energy,' as the head of the Allied art-looting investigation unit put it after the war, that Hitler demanded go to amassing art, diverted German resources from the war effort, hastening its end, or the reverse — whether Hitler’s obsession with Linz, and with collecting generally, in some measure motivated him to press on.

Full story follows; really fascinating stuff, and well worth a read!

Strange Trip for a Piece of Nazi Past
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

BERLIN — Robert Edsel, author of “The Monuments Men,” came to town the other day with a heavy album bound in green Moroccan leather. “Gemäldegalerie Linz XIII” was embossed on the spine. Inside were black-and-white photographs of mostly obscure 19th-century German paintings.

The album was one of the long-missing volumes cataloging the never-built Führermuseum in Linz, Austria, which Hitler envisioned someday rivaling Dresden and Munich. Starting in 1939, Nazi henchmen and art dealers bought and stole thousands of paintings, sculptures, tapestries and other objects from private collections across Europe, then stockpiled them. Hitler helped draw up architectural plans, which megomaniacally grew to include a theater and an opera house, a hotel, a library and parade grounds. Photographs show him, pencil in hand, pondering plans and gazing raptly on the model for the site.

“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” the German novelist W. G. Sebald wrote in “The Emigrants.” “At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.” He was recalling a long-forgotten Alpine climber, whose remains a glacier in Switzerland suddenly released, 72 years after the man had gone missing.

But really Sebald was describing the past, which everywhere turns up unexpectedly, jolting us from our historical amnesia. A German publisher, Berliner Verlag, just released a book of photographs of postwar Berlin that had somehow languished in its archives. I know a man in Spain who has been accumulating long-forgotten photographs and other private relics from the war: a mesmerizing and mysterious stash of soldiers’ snapshots and letters, and documents scrawled with Hitler’s notes. The missing Linz album surfaced not long ago outside Cleveland, of all places. An 88-year-old veteran, John Pistone, who fought with Patton’s army, picked it up in 1945 while rummaging through the Berghof, Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. Like other soldiers, he wanted a souvenir to prove he’d been there. He didn’t know, or particularly care, what the album was, and only learned its significance when a contractor installing a washer-dryer in his house noticed the volume on a shelf, hunted for information via the Internet, then called Mr. Edsel.

Mr. Edsel heads the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, an organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of the 350 or so Allied soldiers tasked with looking after cultural treasures in Europe. A 53-year-old, white-haired former oilman, Mr. Edsel isn’t the sort of person who takes no for an answer, and he persuaded Mr. Pistone to relinquish the volume to the German Historical Museum in Berlin , which has the other extant Linz albums. (This makes 20; 11 are still missing.)

Hitler was presented with the albums every Christmas and on his birthday. They featured reproductions of the latest art to go into the museum. The books were a virtual museum-in-waiting, a museum without walls. You imagine him cradling the bulky volumes, ogling bucolic scenes of a bygone German countryside now in ruins, imagining himself the next Medici.

It’s hard to overstate how seriously he took the whole project. Art collecting obsessed him for years; his staff endured nightly soliloquies, Hitler droning on about art while Germany collapsed around him. He fussed even about how the rooms in the museum should be decorated.

“I never bought the paintings that are in the collections that I built up over the years for my own benefit,” he took pains to write in his brief will, just before putting a pistol to his head, “but only for the establishment of a gallery in my hometown of Linz.”

A model of Linz had already been moved to the bunker in Berlin so it would be among the last things he saw.

Volume XIII, Mr. Pistone’s album, contains reproductions of 19th-century German and Austrian pictures, the art Hitler admired most. He may have bought some of these works with royalties from “Mein Kampf.” They’re mawkish idylls by painters largely obscure even to Germans and Austrians today. The best pictures are by Adolph von Menzel and Hans Makart, with whose early underappreciation Hitler perversely identified.

Time whitewashes evil, or not. Mr. Edsel expressed his opinion this week that more and more curios like Mr. Pistone’s album would surface now that the last surviving veterans are dying.

“Emotional value doesn’t transfer across generations,” is how he put it. “People don’t inherit passions.” One man’s private memento becomes another’s opportunity to sell something on eBay, notwithstanding that German and American authorities insist that artifacts like the Linz album are cultural property that shouldn’t be sold. Regardless, he meant that in the process of passing between generations, the object gains new life.

In a ceremony on Tuesday, Volume XIII was delivered to the German Historical Museum here, joining other Linz albums on display behind glass, like contaminated evidence. The jury is out over whether the “disproportionate amount of time and energy,” as the head of the Allied art-looting investigation unit put it after the war, that Hitler demanded go to amassing art, diverted German resources from the war effort, hastening its end, or the reverse — whether Hitler’s obsession with Linz, and with collecting generally, in some measure motivated him to press on.

Historians can thrash that out. Meanwhile, there are the 11 unaccounted-for albums. Presumably they’re still out there, like Sebald’s polished bones.

You can view the full article by clicking here, and see the related slide-show--from which the above image, captioned "Hitler at work on plans for his museum in Linz, Austria," was drawn-- by clicking here.

“The outdoor for your kids. The museum for their video games.”