Leonardo's Anatomy

Vitruvian Man as seen by Leonardo da Vinci

There's probably no serious artist today who has not seen and/or heard of the Vitruvian Man. Most such artists would tell you that it was a drawing contrived by Leonardo da Vinci. It would, no doubt, surprise them to know that they're only partially correct. There's more to the story than that. As the name would suggest, Vitruvian Man was the brain-child of a Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, (commonly known as Vitruvius). He was a Roman author, architect, civil engineer, and military engineer during the 1st century BC, known for his multi-volume work titled De Architecture. His discussion of perfect proportion in architecture and the human body led to the famous Renaissance drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of Vitruvian Man. Vitruvius was also the one who, in 40 BCE, invented the idea that all buildings should have three attributes: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, meaning: strength, utility, and beauty. These principles were later adopted by the Romans. The concept of the Vitruvian Man emerged through his belief that the principles governing the representation of the human form also applied to temple architecture in terms of weight, symmetry and proportion. It was he, rather than Leonardo, who first gave birth to the concept of the Vitruvian Man (above).

Leonardo's Human Skull, 1849

One might therefore think Leonardo "stole" his Vitruvian Man from the ancient Roman intellect. In all fairness, Leonardo gave credit where it was due, titling his work: Le Proporzioni del Corpo Umano Secondo Vitruvio (The Proportions of the Human Body According to Vitruvius). Thus, more accurately, Leonardo was merely "influenced" by Vitruvius. Leonardo began his studies of the human anatomy with drawings of the human skull (above) in 1489. He borrowed three-dimensional drawing techniques from architecture that had never been seen applied to anatomical studies before. A new technical vocabulary for anatomical drawings was created and da Vinci's sketches in plan, section, elevation, and perspective marked a massive progression in how the body was documented. If getting your gear together and heading out for an evening of life drawing sounds like more trouble than it's worth, consider what Leonardo endured for the sake of educating his own singular vision. Rumors of his resorting to grave robbery persist to this day, but the truth is that he was allowed to dissect and study corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Criticized for his undertaking, Leonardo passionately defended the purpose of his anatomical drawings.

An early anatomical drawing by Leonardo

Medical students, barber, surge-ons, anatomists and doctors who wished to study the human body in depth in that era still had a large stigma attached to them. As such, it was not easy for people like Leonardo, Vesalius, Malpighi, and others to get access to or even look at human anatomy. Consequently, many of the ana-tomical errors that Galen, an earlier anatomist made were still being taught to doctors and anatomists right into the 17th cen-tury. Quite often, they had to content themselves with working from animal models and deducing human forms based on those carcasses. in the early sketches, Leonardo was very much influ-enced by the accepted wisdom about anatomy--showing, for ins-tance, a man's spine connecting to his penis, and the woman's spine going into the womb. Then in later works show-ing much more accurate pictures, although in some cases with inaccuracies based on extrapolation from animal dissections (animals presumably being easier to get hold of than people).

Studies of human musculature interested Leonardo

as an aid in the drawing of nude figures.

Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his varied interests, experments, and his endless curiosity. However, his anatomical studies are unlike his famous paintings, of which there is direct physical evidence, and his engineering plans, both architectural and mechanical, few of which historians believe were ever executed. The anatomical studies in his notebooks are particularly interesting because they represent explorations that he actually undertook but of which there is no remaining direct evidence.

Leonardo's drawing of the human heart.

Chalk this up to pure curiosity rather than a drawing aid.

There is an ongoing debate as to what extent Leonardo’s anatomical studies were meant to aid his painting. While it seems likely that many of his mycological studies had direct relationships with his depictions of humans and animals, it is difficult to imagine how learning about the internal organs (above) would have helped his art. Thus, studies such as the one he did of a pig’s heart are fascinating because they are examples of Leonardo’s thirst for knowledge simply for knowledge’s sake. Leonardo’s entries in his notebooks regarding his dissection of the human heart are themselves worth studying for two reasons. First, Leonardo pioneered the technique of drawing anatomical diagrams and second, there is a clear difference between what one sees during a dissection and what Leonardo sketched. Potential reasons for this dichotomy include simplification for clearer explanations of the dissection, insufficient drawing techniques to depict inner body parts accurately, and plain guesswork as to what was actually going on inside the heart.

Three hearts--Leonardo's drawing is amazingly accurate.

Anatomist now days use technologies like MRI scanners (Magnetic Resonance Scanners) to unlock the mysteries of the human body. Leonardo da Vinci, was equipped with nothing but a scalpel, pen, and paper. Even so, he was able to discover and record information that rivaled that of the MRI scanner. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452. He is considered by many the greatest painter of all time. However, he is also known as one of the greatest anatomists of his time. When he died in 1519, he left behind thousands of pages of notes and drawings that lay undiscovered for hundreds of years. These notes include hundreds of surprisingly accurate anatomical sketches.

Leonardo experimented drawing the same muscles in

different poses and from varying angles.

Leonardo da Vinci first began his sketches in Milan, Italy during the year 1482, already a full fledged artist. He was very curious about the human body; he wanted to get inside and see how it worked. To accomplish this, da Vinci would acquire bodies from the church and dissect them. He analyzed the different muscle groups and tendons, trying to deduce what made what move and what worked where. He recorded these observations in his notebook. His sketches were done very meticulously and, to modern anatomists surprise, immensely accurate. sketches were done mostly with a special ink quill and gave much information that would not be discovered again until the 20th century, 500 years later. The sketches were done mostly with a special ink quill and gave much information that would not be discovered again until the 20th century, 500 years later.

The upper human body under stress.

After several years of studying and observing the human body, da Vinci put aside his anatomical studies for a decade while concerning himself with other matters. Matters such as: His famous painting The Last Supper and his work in military engineering. During the year 1504, his enthusiasm for anatomy grew again, and he continued his analysis. It is said, that towards the end of his life, anatomy took up a majority of his time (that and his most famous and mysterious project, The Mona Lisa); his main goal was to publish illustrated papers on the human body. Unfortunately, he was side tracked by other projects and never got the opportunity. Instead, he kept his findings in his notebooks hidden from the world for centuries.

The Unborn Child, 1504, Leonardo

People today are overwhelmed by the amount of information da Vinci was able to unravel about the human body so long ago. In fact, it is consistently debated on what the world would be like today if people understood the significance of his discoveries in the 16th century. The drawings spark the interests of scientists of all fields. The attention to detail and draftsmanship of the observations equal, if not surpass, modern anatomical textbooks. He even took into consideration the posture, drawing the models in ballet like positions to highlight certain parts of the body. He is known today as not only the greatest painter of all time, but also an anatomical genius. Making discoveries in the 16th century that would take the rest of the world 5 centuries longer to discover. Leonardo is sometimes arguably the greatest genius to have ever lived.

Leonardo saw the human head in layers.

 Here he depicts the scalp and the 

cerebral ventricles

Vitruvian Man

When most of us think of geometry we either get a headache or our eyes glaze over. It's right up there with reading Beowulf as the most exciting intellectual pursuit most artists could possibly look forward to. Well, I'm not sure if he ever read Beowulf, but Leonardo Da Vinci, among his many other artistic, scientific, engineering, and mathematical pursuits, certainly found geometry interesting. Being a painter, he explored ways in which he could utilize his interest in lines, angles, arcs and all the other esoteric details of the subject in planning and drawing his faces and figures. Not too many of us think of figures (human ones, that is) and geometry in the same context, but I guess that's what made Leonardo a legendary intellect in his own time.

Vitruvian Man, 1487, Leonarda da Vinci

Geometry is more readily associated with the art and science of architecture, and Leonardo certainly had a strong interest in that. In the sixteenth century, there wasn't much in the way of books to study on the subject, except for the writings of the Roman Architect, Vitruvius. Vitruvius lived and worked in the first century BC. But more important than his buildings were his writings. It was through these that one of Leonardo's most famous drawings came to be. It's a nude male figure, arms outstretched, with what appears to be four legs and four arms around which has been inscribed a perfect square and a slightly larger circle. Leonardo called it the Vitruvian Man.

As Vitruvius described the human figure in geometric terms, if one places a compass point at the navel (ouch) of the full-grown adult male (not sure if this holds true for females or not), then places the pencil at the feet of the figure, the circle created by this configuration will also touch the tips of the fingers of the outstretched arms when raised to the level of the top of the head. Similarly, he discovered that a square could be drawn using height of the figure as one axis and the horizontally outstretched arms as the other axis. Thus, ones height (you don't have to be nude but no fair wearing shoes) equals the distance between the two opposite middle fingers when the arms are fully extended. Try it sometime, it works (give or take an inch or so).

Muscle Painting

The Battle of Cascina, 1504, Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Muscular skeletal drawing by
Leonardo da Vinci

For those working artist who have never had the joy or privilege to have taken a college-level figure drawing/painting class, this is for you. You really should. Sooner or later, as you move through your career as an artist, you're going to want to or need to paint the human figure, either nude, nearly nude or clothed in form-fitting clothes. Having had little or no experience in this endeavor you're going to try nonetheless and realize pretty quickly there's more to it than simply drawing naked people. The fact is, every naked figure is composed of skin, bones, and muscles (by far the most demanding part) whether they're exposed or merely suggested. The reason so many otherwise excellent artist avoid painting figures are many, but most come down to the fact that, first of all they're quite difficult, second, there are certain societal and religious moral factors mitigating against such works (many of them solely in the artist's mind, and third, in today's art world, the line between legitimate figural art (below) and erotica or even pornography is treacherously thin. Moreover, it's an undulating line, changing position, if not daily, then at least yearly. Add to that, the element of gay erotica, and most male artists wouldn't touch the genre with a ten-foot paintbrush.

 

Muscles II, 2009, Rob Bartrell,
tinged with homoeroticism.

Nude on Pillows II, 2003, Robert
Lambert, muscle panting today.

The female nude today, lots of
muscles, spike heels and all.

I don't suppose I'm revealing any long kept secrets, but let me say for the record that painting nude figures goes back at least to the Ancient Greeks around the 6th-century BC rendered in black on jars meant to contain olive oil for coating the body the PanHellenic games around that time. I mention it here but don't offer photos simply because this type of painting is far too familiar include. And, I might as well bring it out in the open here as anywhere. Such figural art often evolves into sometimes quite graphic homoerotic art. Moreover, that's pretty well been a trend down through the entire history of painting. Regardless of era, even pretty much regardless of artist, painters have been unwilling or unable to divorce sex from the nude body. And if that were true in the past, in today's Internet-driven world of art, that's doubly the case. You have no idea how much porn I had to plow through to collect the images you see here...okay, maybe you do.

 



Study for the Creation of Adam, 1514, Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Vitruvian Man, 1490, Leonardo

Regardless of whatever latent sexual motivation an artist might have, stick figure just don't make it. Neither do shapeless blobs. As two of the stars of the Italian Renaissance demonstrated more than five hundred years ago, drawing nudes is a scientific pursuit as well as artistic. Well, that kind of takes a lot of fun out of it right from the start. We see that in Leonardo's Vitruvian Man (left) from around 1490. There's even an element of mathematics and geometry involved. Michelangelo, no doubt, instinctively recognized this but mostly chose to ignore it. A few of his drawings would indicate that decision had it's negative impact. Aside from his David, which is, after all, sculpture rather than painting, Michelangelo's most famous painted rendering of a nude figure is his Creation of Adam (above), the centerpiece of his Sistine Chapel Ceiling. And, had he consulted Leonardo, he might have more accurately gauged the proportions of the head to Adam's muscular nude body. As many critics and historians have pointed out however, Michelangelo was much more interested in muscles than faces. Often his drawings simply omit the head. In fact, it would seem that he was only interested in male muscles. His female bodies don't differentiate much as to gender. His female sculpture of Night (below) from 1526-31 in the Medici Chapel in Florence appears to be a man with breasts attached (and somewhat ineptly at that). He does, however, redeem himself somewhat in his (now lost, except for copies) Battle of Cascina (top) from around 1504. Never before, and seldom since, has a single composition delivered so many complexly drawn figures interacting so perfectly.

Night, Medici Chapel, Florence, 1526-31, Michelangelo Buonarroti

Elevation to the Cross, 1610-11,
Peter Paul Rubens

With the passing of the Renaissance, only Peter Paul Rubens (in painting) and Bernini (in sculpture) carried on in the muscular tradition of Michelangelo despite the much vaunted impact of the Sistine ceiling on painters yet to come. Rubens had a muscular festival of the arts in his Elevation to the Cross, from around 1610-11. Much of this embracing of the female nude (no pun intended) can be laid at the doorstep of the rise in social acceptance and male popularity of the female nude during the 17th-century Europe. What? You say, women have muscles too. Well, no, not like they do today, nor would painting them in the manner of Michelangelo's masculine female figures have been acceptable in any case. Women were seen as rounded, soft, chubby, voluptuous, in fact, sometimes what we'd call simply downright fat. We see this in no less an artist the Diego Velasquez's Venus at her Mirror from around 1649-51. That tradition carried on to the "sanitized" nudity of French academic art in the 18th-century as seen in Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus from 1863. I've seen Teddy bears with more muscle structure. It began to wane only as the purposeful distortions of Cubism and the various flavors of Expressionism took hold in the early 20th century, largely eliminating the sexual element from nude painting (not to mention any hint of muscles).

Venus at her Mirror, 1649-51, Diego Velazquez

Female Nude, 1907-08, Pablo Picasso

However, during the 20th-century, largely replacing the nude painting came nude photography--some of it quite artistic, some...not so much. Although pornography had existed mostly in etchings and even in some painting for hundreds of years (thousands if you count the Greeks), photography allowed it to explode, first in Europe, then after the wars in the more prudish United States. First there were the imported French postcards, then cute, and relatively harmless pinup calendars, then in men's magazines, and now it literally pollutes the Internet to an almost unimaginable degree. What is more, with the advent of body building to a level that would have made Michelangelo rub his eyes in disbelief, the nude figure, of either gender, bears little resemblance to those in the past. Sexual elements, if not overtly exploited, lie just beneath the surface. Cabanel would have rubbed his eyes too. Yet as never before, figure painters have come to recognize the importance of accurately rendering muscle structure, whether in their "fine" art or the most disgusting examples of (mostly male) pornography. Full-frontal nudity is pretty much the acceptable norm, the line between that and pornography seemingly resting with the display of erect genitals. Within a century or less, this line will probably have moved further to depend only upon the operational status indicated.

Birth of Venus, 1863, Alexandre Cabanel--marshmallow soft.

Paint my muscles...please. The artist is listed only as Hughes.

 

Via 57 West

New York City's Via 57 West (center)--distinction amid monotony.

Vitruvian Man, Leonardo

This past spring as my wife and I gazed down from the observation level of New York's Freedom Tower at some two-hundred years of American architectural history spread at our feet, I was intrigued by a brand new, highly unique structure unlike any I'd ever seen before (bottom). The most common three-dimensional shape used in mankind's endless attempts to shelter himself is that of the cube. That is, of course, due to the fact that, while people are not cube-shaped, their range of motion, as Leonardo demonstrated with his Vitruvian Man etching, is best likened to a cube in conjunction with a sphere. The sphere not being a very practical nor stable geometric shape, architecture down through the eons has tended to default to the cube.

 

Via 57 West is situated on prime real estate, in the city's trendy Chelsey District, mid-town Manhattan, with a view looking out over the Hudson River.

From overhead, Via 57 West
takes on a presence never
before seen in American
architecture.

If the sphere is inherently unstable, the pyramid has, down through the ages, proven to be the most structurally sound shape to be found (just ask the Egyptians). The problem with the use of triangular shapes in domestic architecture is that the inhabitants keep bumping their heads into the obligatory sloped ceilings within. When con-fronted with these advantages and limitations, architects of the Danish-American firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) sought to combine the best features of both shapes. What do you do when asked to design a distinctively unique skyscraper amid the jagged teeth of hundreds of other similar structures marking the New York skyline? The firm's architects studied the scene not from the site between 57th and 58th Streets in Manhattan but from across the Hudson River in New Jersey. What they saw, among all the cubes, was a notable lack of imagination and specifically the absence of pyramidal shapes. Could they overcome the inherent difficulties of the pyramid, replacing vertical lines with diagonal ones? Look below; they could and would.

No one single photo can capture all the shapes and details of a structure on the scale of Via 57 West. The building changes shapes depending upon the viewpoint.

Technically, Via 57 West is not a true pyramid. A true pyramid demands a square base. However, the NYC street grid consists of blocks on a 1:4 or (at best) a 1:3 ratio of the sides. Thus the designers were forced to slice off a corner mass amounting to about one-sixth of a pyramid as their basic shape. Then, in order to accommodate a sunlit courtyard, they carved out another wedge starting on the fourth floor up through to near the tip on the 32nd floor, providing not just sunlight to grow some 43 trees in their mini-park but also providing a stunning view of the Hudson River and its Jersey shore.

With the sun from the south and the view to the west, the second "slice" from the pyramid not only made environmental sense, but also provided a highly distinctive shape.

Needless to say, the diagonal dictates of the exterior of the building created tremendous problems in planning the interior. The area overlooking the courtyard is basically an elongated "U" with the top opening facing the river (below). In order to maximize balcony views the apartments were laid out in a 45-degree herringbone pattern while being of a size to accommodate the highly competitive, high-end, New York real estate market. The result, however, made for some rather strange-shaped floorplans, particularly as seen in the studio and one bedroom apartments.

The pyramidal shape of the building demands that the floors towards the top become smaller and smaller near the point.

So, what's it like to live in a pyramid (or at least part of one)? Surprisingly the apartments look very much like what you'd find in any urban high-rise. There are no sloped ceilings to bump ones head into and, for the most part, the rooms are the same basic cube-shape we've become accustomed to down through the centuries. It's only when you step out onto a sometimes tiny balcony that you discover the diagonals and come to realize why you're paying $2,900 for a modest one-bedroom apartment (or studio). From that price, rentals zip upwards to $9,000 per month for a roomy three-bedroom plan (below).

Quite apart from the exorbitant rent, cutting corners takes on added meaning when you live in a pyramidal apartment complex.

The apartments inside Via 57 West are, by design, bland, allowing the occupants to impose their own personalities and lifestyles (or pay a designer to do so). The model apartments, shown to would-be renters, are designed in what the developers term a "Scandimerican" style (Danish-modern with an American flavor). The iconic luxury apartments at 625 West 57th Street feature floor-to-ceiling windows with captivating views of the Manhattan skyline and the Hudson River. Stylish Italian cabinetry, stone countertops, and Energy-Star appliances add culinary artistry and utility. Master bathrooms offer similar countertops and cabinetry, along with white-tile floors and walls. Many rentals have balconies and terraces that seamlessly blend outdoor and indoor space.

White and neutral colors predominate in the Scandimerican décor at least until the rental clients move in.

Via 57 West also provides state-of-the-art amenities for its residents, including a 22,000 square-foot courtyard professionally landscaped and brimming with dozens of native plants, as well as barbecue grills. A top-notch gym offers a swimming pool, dedicated studios, and an indoor basketball half-court. Even more, the residents lounges, reading rooms, screening room, game room, and event room offer plenty of exclusive recreation space. Located on the far west side, at 625 West 57th Street, the location is just a few blocks from the world-renowned Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, as well as a dozens of fine-dining restaurants and shops.

The Via 57 West pool is on the third level overlooking the Hudson.

Via 57 West is not massive insofar as New York architecture goes. It does occupy most of a full city block, but rises "only" thirty-two stories in competing for instant recognition with the likes of the Freedom Tower or the Empire State Building. For a building of such unique design, the public spaces inside on the lower floors are distinctively underwhelming (below). The Via 57 West is a hybrid between the European perimeter block and the traditional American high-rise. The building peaks at 450 feet at its north-east corner, thereby maximizing the number of apartments and graciously preserving the adjacent Helena Tower’s views of the river. The building's volume changes depending on the viewer’s vantage point. From the west, it is a hyperbolic paraboloid (warped pyramid). From the east, the "courtscraper" appears to be a slender spire.

The diagonal meets the cube.

In recent decades, some of the most interesting urban developments have come in the form of nature and public space, as designers reinsert them into antiquated post-industrial pockets. Examples include the pedestrianization of Broadway and Times Square; widespread bicycle lanes, the High Line Park, and industrial piers turned into parks. Via 57 West continues this process of greenification allowing open space to invade the urban fabric of the Manhattan city grid. In an unlikely fusion of what would seem to be two mutually exclusive forms--the courtyard and the skyscraper--the "courtscraper" is the most recent addition to the Manhattan skyline.

Views from the balconies of Via 57 West are just as impressive as those from the West Side Highway.

Via 57 West as seen from the Freedom Tower.

 

Robert Mapplethorpe

Sonia and Tracy, 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe's art
 at it's best (or worst, depending upon your side in the culture wars).

At the time of his death stemming from HIV/AIDS in 1989, Robert Mapplethorpe may have been the most hated artist in America. Why? His work speaks to that. The same artist who photographed the two figures above, also photographed the two faces below. That sort of juxtaposition, though taken from the broad scope of an artist's life's work, makes people nervous. Dozens of excellent, cutting-edge photographers from the latter decades of the 20th century have shot nudes, and quite a number of them are at least as erotic or homoerotic as those of Mapplethorpe. Likewise virtually every portrait photographer in the world takes pictures of children. But the fact that one photographer does both sets off alarms, even in the sophisticated high-culture world of fine art photography. And yes, before anyone asks, Mapplethorpe did, on rare occasions, shoot nude, un-posed, (non-sexual) images of children.

 

Honey                                                 Eva Amurri

Robert Mapplethorpe Self-portrait, 
1980

Robert Mapplethorpe came from a very ordinary, middle-class family in Queens, New York, one of six children. He studied graphic arts at New York's Pratt Institute but never finished his studies. It was there around 1970, Mapplethorpe first took up photography, not to become a photographer, but to use Polaroid prints he shot himself as part of collages he was making. Actually, very few of these early images actually became a part of his collage work. Instead he reveled in the new found artistic freedom afforded by the fact that with instant photography, there were no darkroom techniques to learn, nor was there any darkroom technician in a position to possibly censor his work. Given the instant feedback the Polaroid camera permitted, his style and technical proficiency in portraiture developed quite rapidly. Within a few years he'd purchased a professional Hasselblad, and was doing high-quality portrait and figural studies of his friends, including his live-in girlfriend, singer-songwriter Patti Smith. They worked together creating art until 1974 when Mapplethorpe decided he was gay. Though separated, they remained close friends.



Arnold Schwarzenegger was among Mapplethorpe's friends and models 
 at his first gallery exposure in New York as seen in this 1976 photo.

Mapplethorpe lived in his Manhattan darkroom studio but worked out of a top floor loft studio borrowed from a friend. He landed his first one-man show in 1977 where he first displayed some of his homoerotic works. Though later quite controversial, at the time, they barely raised eyebrows, perhaps because few people other than the artist's friends in the gay community came to see them. Among those friends, whom Mapplethorpe photographed at the time, were Arnold Schwarzenegger (above), Paloma Picasso, Truman Capote, and Andy Warhol (whom he'd met while studying at Pratt). A photo of Warhol shot by Mapplethorpe a few years later, recently sold at auction for $643,000--the highest price ever paid for a Mapplethorpe image.

Smutty, 1980, Robert Mapplethorpe.
Youthful beauty and androgeny are both major elements in Mapplethorpe's eroticism.

That kind of money comes with name recognition and in Mapplethorpe's case name recognition came with controversy. Homoerotic images, such as the aptly named Smutty (above), some of which Mapplethorpe himself deemed pornographic, are never easy for even the art world to accept. However, the art world knew his name as did what we now call the LGBT community. The rest of the world simply found it easier to ignore an artist whose work they found disgusting to even look at, much less try to understand. That is, until major museums in the U. S. and abroad began mounting traveling shows of Mapplethorpe's work, touting him as one of the most exemplary artist-photographers of the century on a par with Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, and Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Thomas, 1987, Robert Mapplethorpe
--classic human geometry reminiscent of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man.

Some of these museums were at least partially supported by tax dollars. And where there are tax dollars involved there are also tax payers and tax-payer-paid politicians all too willing to be shocked and appalled by most of Mapplethorpe's images. Censorship raised it's ugly head as did controversy involving federal funding for the arts. Shows were cancelled. Shows were moved to other venues. Such a howl of protest aroused public curiosity, having the effect of increasing the size of the crowds at museums and galleries brave enough to display Mapplethorpe's work. The critics were largely split along philosophical lines. However, positive or negative, their reviews served to make Mapplethorpe a household name and his art a lightning rod as well as an iconic standard of excellence in the field of figural photography. Today, the Mapplethorpe Foundation aims to manage both elements of their founder's art while raising money for research into, and treatment of, the disease that killed him.

Poppy, 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe. The artist seldom worked in color, but his fondness for flowers was the exception. Black and white flowers are rather...colorless.

Etch A Sketch Art

Famous Ohioans by George Vlosich. Each drawing takes about 70-80 hours.

When I was a kid my parents recognized my interest (if not my talent) in art. Every Christmas and sometimes on my birthday, I'd get some sort of art related gift. I don't remember precisely what year it was, but sometime in the early 1960s I got an Etch A Sketch. Actually, the whole family played with it. No one considered it an art medium, just a clever, fascinating, time-killing toy. I never got very good at drawing with it, though I did enjoy drawing freehand city skylines (quite easy with the simple, horizontal/vertical axis principle of the thing. Although somewhere around one-hundred million of these toys have been sold world-wide, for the benefit of those deprived of the frustration of trying to draw a neat diagonal line with two rotating knobs, I suppose I should stop here and explain what an Etch A Sketch is.

An Etch A Sketch autopsy. The knobs move the rods, The rods move the stylus.

First of all it's red. It looks a little like a fairly flat, black and white TV screen with two white knobs. One changes the channel the other turns up the volume (no, just kidding). One knob controls the vertical movement of an enclosed stylus, the other the horizontal movement (above) as it removes from the back of a plastic screen a thin line of extremely fine aluminum powder leaving a dark gray image with a light gray ground. It's a little like drawing with a soft pencil on light gray paper. As simple as that sounds, they're devilishly hard to master and probably one of the most unforgiving art media known to exist. If you make a mistake, you just turn the thing face down, shake it a few times, the image disappears. Then you're ready to make another "fatal" mistake. 

If Leonardo had owned an Etch a Sketch, he might have done something like this.
(Vitruvian Man, 1490)

The Etch A Sketch is made by a small toy company called Ohio Art in Bryan, Ohio (far northwestern corner of the state near the Michigan and Indiana borders). The company started out in 1908 stamping out metal photo frames, then moved on to cheap metal toys (windmills and the like) before graduating to faux wood grain metal sheets used to make faux wood grain metal picture frames. The original drawing device was invented by a French electrician named Andre Cassagnes in the late 1950s (the only electricity involved might be the static kind). He called it the Telecran. Ohio Art ended up with it through a complicated chain of events involving various Ohio Art investors. In any case, the first red plastic toy slid off their assembly line on July 12th, 1960. For all I know my mother may have bought the first one. I don't know what ever happened to it but I recall it lasted for years. As anyone who has ever tried to open up the back of an Etch A Sketch in an attempt to preserve their painstakingly drawn masterpiece will tell you, they're practically indestructible.

 

George and Greg Vlosich, ca. 1989.

I don't know who might have been the first to consider an Etch A Sketch as a valid, 20th-century drawing medium (I doubt Ohio Art even knows) but it was probably some ten-year-old kid from Cleveland like George Vlosich. Today, his Etch a Sketch original drawings bring up to $10,000. From his boyhood mastery of the device, George went on to study at the Cleveland Institute of Art and today owns a thriving graphic design firm featuring all things Cleveland, and any thing Etch A Sketch. He describes the process as first choosing a perfectly functional model, then completing a detailed rough draft on paper. Work with the device itself begins with a carefully manipulated line drawing. This is especially important in producing a portrait. Then shaded areas are developed much like the fine lines drawn electronically on an old black and white TV screen. Vlosich works from light to dark, drawing the lines closer and closer together to make them darker. Sometimes crosshatching is involved. Once the image is complete, the back must carefully be pried off, and all the powder and stylus mechanism removed before once more sealing up the case. From that point on the image is safe, even withstanding shipping by mail.


St. Basil, J. Labowitch

Taj Mahal, Ron Morse

Of course Vlosich is relatively young and the Etch A Sketch is relatively old so there were probably dozens of skillful artists creating these mechanical images long before he was even born; but today, there's little doubt he is among the best. As a child, Vlosich was so consistent in winning Etch A Sketch competitions sponsored by Ohio Art that the company sent a representative knocking on their door to ascertain in person that it was actually a young boy, rather than an adult creating the images. Having proven himself in their presence, they sent his work on tour to various museums around the country. Perhaps the greatest beauty of the Etch A Sketch is the range of skill levels through which its use may be enjoyed. The device is recommended for ages four and up but I can see no reason why a child of two or younger couldn't have fun developing the all important eye-hand coordination so vital to skilled drawing ability (or playing video games). Recently someone about my age noted that as he was growing up, the Etch A Sketch was his "computer." It had only one app--drawing.

President Obama, George Vlosich

Gone With the Wind, George Vlosich

------------------------------

Here's how it's done: