looking at art

A few weeks ago I went to the Chicago Art Institute. I always feel rejuvenated after visiting an art museum. It pulls me out of my head and distracts me from all the mundane things I worry about unnecessarily on a daily basis. This trip seemed long over-do, and somehow reflecting on it now makes me realize how much this past month was recovering from the prior five.

I began by studying some photographs, comparing the differences between printing and developing methods, reading the name of each artist, title, and materials. Then I set out through the contemporary building and decided that I was not going to read anything. Instead I would just focus on the painting itself – I could only take in so many words and changing my focus constantly was becoming somewhat dizzying. Often though, I couldn’t help myself and I needed the curator’s enlightening descriptions. I made my way through a few connected rooms and, quite pleased with what I had seen, stepped back into the hallway. Suddenly overwhelmed by how much was housed in a single wing of this building, I considered calling it a day - until I thought of all the beautiful paintings that would be in the next room over, so many artists I love. I decided that I had to walk through a few more rooms, just to be in the presence of such beauty and wonder. I stood to look at a painting, but rather than study it I let the whole room flood over me, with such richness that it far surpassed any one masterpiece.

Somehow my few hours immersed in artwork mirrored my recent experiences as a third year medical student, at least in sentiment. I have many stories to tell, each of them great on their own, but all together they make up something greater. Something I don’t yet have the words for and maybe never will. But it is wonderful, this mixture of excitement and anxiety, sadness and relief, complete engagement and detachment. And there has been an overarching sense of being overwhelmed. Not in the way I felt overwhelmed by the massive amount I had to learn in anatomy, not a sense of something being unconquerable or time being too short, but such a flood of experience that I will need some time to pull myself up out of the water before I can reflect on it all.

In contrast to all that, my few days of Christmas vacation have been so beautifully simple. I’m back in Texas, and I think that adds to the feeling, both for its reminder of my youth as well as the basic kindness of strangers that goes hand in hand with southern hospitality. I’ve been relishing in walks through the neighborhood, blue skies, green leaves still hanging to trees, and lazy mornings with my family. I think it’s the perfect transition into the new semester, with a new confidence that I know what I want to do with my future, and a renewed connection with the idea of becoming not just a doctor but a healer.

I saw some art again today. This time it was the Menil Collection, a much more manageable, focused collection of art. I walked through the naturally lit rooms, surrounded by beauty, and felt like I was able to take it all in and process it to some degree. My last stop was the Rothko Chapel, and left with a profound feeling of peace.

I hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas and are filled with love and joy as we begin to look towards the new year.

anatomy and art

This summer has been a whirlwind. I feel like I have been not just in multiple countries or continents, but in multiple worlds. Now I'm back in Texas, visiting my family and trying to soak up enough heat and humidity to get me through  my next Chicago winter. I'm also trying to mentally prepare myself for second year, about which I have only gotten scary warnings. Actually, I should probably say prepare myself emotionally because I am not planning on doing any studying during these last 2 weeks of summer. I heard one friend mention his plans to review anatomy and physiology this month, while another one spoke of getting a head-start on studying for the Boards. I wish I had never heard them say these things - every time it crosses my mind I feel a tinge of both guilt and panic. Nevertheless, I refuse to pull out any textbooks or old powerpoints until at least the day before classes start.

Okay, now that I'm through with that, here's an attempt to push my mind back towards medicine. A vacation in Italy is actually a great place for this when you think of the earliest anatomists like Leonardo da Vinci. I even got to visit the church where Michelangelo studied cadavers, hiding himself from the rule of the Catholic church with the help of a priest. It is obvious that Michelangelo's anatomical knowledge allowed him to master the human form in sculpture and painting, but that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to show off a bit, so he snuck some neuroanatomy into the ceiling of the Cistine chapel. The amazing thing is that this was not noticed until the end of the 20th century. In 1990 a paper was published, noting that the cloth around God in the image of God Creating Adam is shaped like a sagittal cross-section of the right brain. More recently, it has been noticed that God's neck in The Separation of Light from Darkness is an uncanny depiction of the brain stem. For pictures and more, read this.

I love it when art and anatomy collide, and it's funny how medicine has changed the things I notice in art. For example, the veins of David's arm are much more interesting than I'm sure they would have been a year ago, and I was really excited when I noticed that this statue had a traumatic auricular hematoma, also known as "cauliflower" or "boxer's" ear.

In fact, it's something you can find all over the place. I came across a fun blog called Street Anatomy when I attended the opening of an art gallery that they hosted at the Museum of Surgeons last year. (I especially enjoyed this post.)

Here's another fun one that I noticed a few years ago on Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

the anatomy lesson

This is Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp:

It pictures many of the things we expect to see in such a painting: men with beards, exquisitely dressed, huddling around a dead body in a dark room, intently listening to Dr. Tulp. The instructor is demonstrating how when he pulls on the flexor digitorum muscles it will cause the fingers to curl, and he is mimicking this action with his own hand at the same time. This is something I found myself doing repeatedly as a student of anatomy. Moving my own body that is, in order to picture how the inanimate muscles would function. Sometimes I even tried to imagine staring down at myself lying on that table,  in order to keep right and left in their appropriate places. So, are we using ourselves to understand that body and science, or are we using science to understand ourselves?

It is interesting to note that the men are not looking at the cadaver, but just beyond his feet, perhaps at an anatomical atlas. Rembrandt alone is focused on the body of the dead man and the shadow of death cast over his eyes. A little bit of research will reveal that the cadaver is a criminal that has been recently executed for multiple charges of theft. This may explain why it is his hand that has been dissected first. In those days the guts were usually removed first to get the gross part over with before it really started to decay. Today we start with the back, where amateur medical students are less likely to slice through arteries, nerves, and tendons that must be preserved and studied.

The dissected hand also appears to be quite out of proportion, larger than the right hand. And there is an anatomical mistake - the muscles in the painting originate on the lateral epicondyle, but they should originate on the medial (the side of the elbow nearest the torso). We certainly don't want to assume that this was actually a mistake. Rembrandt was a meticulous artist and he was likely in that room himself.  In his lecture "Observing Reason: Critique of Scientific Stance", J.M. Bernstein of the New School for Social Research suggests that Rembrandt purposely drew the faulty anatomical details based on the illustration of the opposite hand in the atlas these other men are looking at. He further proposes that this illustrates how science attempts to understand our world and, therefore, ourselves. I must admit that at some point I find it difficult to follow what Bernstein is saying because I am not familiar with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Nonetheless, he raises a point that we can all think about. Perhaps the fact that we get caught up in this anatomical error further emphasizes what Rembrandt wanted to show us. The men in the painting see the atlas, the instructor sees the mechanics behind the movement, we see the dissected right arm, but nobody sees a man who has just died.

the heart of the matter

When I took Organic Chemistry I was fascinated by the fact that so many reactions were in fact poorly understood or controversial. This weak grounding was only subtly noted and quickly skimmed over. I noticed a similar thing while reading about how to perform the cardiovascular physical exam in Bates' Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking:

"An extensive literature deals with the exact causes of heart sounds. Possible explanations include actual closure of valve leaflets, tensing of related structures, leaflet positions and pressure gradients at the time of atrial and ventricular systole, and the effects of columns of blood."

Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy

Then Bates goes on to offer a simplified explanation, which is perfectly fine for the purposes of this textbook. It would have been so easy to pass right over this little bit, and under other different circumstances I might have done so. Fortunately, I picked up on it and gave myself a moment to be struck by wonder. I never knew there was still such mystery surrounding the heart. We can make mechanical replacement heart valves and recognize their clicking in chests. I am quite sure we know exactly what causes that clicking and the precise moment at which it occurs. But we cannot completely account for the natural heart sounds? The very same heart sounds that we can hear when we lay our head on the chest of our lover? The very same heart sounds that have been heard for millennia?

Leonardo da Vinci: The Anatomy of Man

We could certainly take this in all kinds of mystical and romantic directions. The human heart is more than it appears to be... man is an unfathomable creation... maybe the answers to our questions about love lie in those heart sounds.... But without going that far, we can simply appreciate the wonder. It may not hold as many questions for the world as it did before da Vinci drew it, or before Netter drew it - or for me before I held one in my very own hands - but there still is some mystery in the human heart. And a little mystery is a beautiful thing.

Auguste Rodin. The Kiss

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." - Albert Einstein

tuymans' diagnostic view

Since I began medical school, I have become increasingly interested in the way that medicine infiltrates the rest of the world, especially the arts. So, when I went to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, I was initially impressed by the Luc Tuymans exhibit, and then enthralled when I came to a series of paintings titled Der Diagnostische Blick. This is the name of a German diagnostic manual for physicians, which contains photographs of people with various diseases. The MCA had 4 paintings from this series on display: legs with eczema, a woman with anemia, a man with a facial droop, and a breast with signs of cancer.

The ideas behind these paintings, or rather, triggered by them, are pertinent not only to art but also to the practice of medicine. These images are based on photographs that were intended for instruction; therefore the people that posed for them are in fact insignificant, mere bodies. When Tuymans painted these images they lost all instructional value - his dabs of paint will not help me to recognize the defining characteristics of eczema. Yet the people are still reduced to mere bodies, maybe even less. Tuymans uses horizontal brush strokes, creating a distancing effect such that the viewer is unable to feel that he can understand what this person is thinking or feeling. Devoid of both life and instructional value, what is left?

In an interview Tuymans said, "I take all the ideas out of individuality and just leave the shell, the body." This is evidenced in his portrait of St. Ignacious Loyola, based on a photograph of the saint's death mask. Der Diagnostische Blick is also a series of de-individualized bodies. Now I must ask myself, when we diagnose people with an illness, do we leave their bodies behind as empty shells? Does that diagnosis reduce the body to another in a long list of bodies that could be photographed and placed in a diagnostic manual?  I think it is important that we  consider this, and what can be done to prevent it.

Another way to think about these paintings is not as a representation, but as an example of illness. These paintings, overlooking reality, are themselves lacking something vital. In so many areas of life it is easy to reduce a situation to a snapshot, forgetting to consider the whole person, overlooking the other people affected, or maintaining a very limited perspective on life. In fact, the evening I went to this exhibit I stepped onto the train worrying about whether or not I was doing all the "right" things for my future, and feeling a twinge of guilt for doing something fun. By the time I got to the museum I had completely changed my outlook on the world. As I saw all the people around me on the train, performers in the train station, urban bike-riders risking their lives on the daily trip home from work, I realized that I had reduced my world to a little bubble that surrounded only me and rarely floated outside of the school. For me, that is one of the wonderful things about art. It opens a whole new world to me and is a catalyst for me to consider how my own world fits into a much larger one.

Okay, I want to tell you about a few more paintings at this exhibit. First, another medical one:

The title of this painting is Lungs, and the placard states that it is an obscure view that most people would not recognize, since it is taken from the right side of the left lung, pressed up against the heart. Of course, if you are like me and happen to be studying anatomy you will be proud to recognize the main parts of the hilum: the bronchi, the pulmonary arteries and veins.... But then you might also miss the chance to think about the fact that Tuymans is a serious smoker. He says it is a part of his creative process and has no interest in quitting, but he certainly knows the damage he is doing to his own lungs.

Many of his paintings make striking political statements, from the concentration camps in Germany, Belgian Congo (Tuymans is Belgian), and the KKK, to Walt Disney, U.S. domestic idealism, and Condoleeza Rice. One of my favorites demonstrates a more intellectual aspect of his art that literally is completely unseen. In fact, I would have missed out on it all together if I hadn't been eavesdropping on a tour.

The title is Bridge. What makes it so fantastic is that it is a painting of a bridge in Baghdad, based on a photograph, which was a snapshot of a YouTube video, filmed and posted by a U.S. soldier in Baghdad.

This is the first full U.S. exhibit of Tuymans' works. If you have the chance to see any of his paintings, I highly recommend it. I am sure they will inspire much contemplation. If you are in the Chicago area, the MCA is free on Tuesdays! And, as always, I would love to hear what you think about it all.

art everywhere

This weekend I visited the Fort Worth Modern art museum. I don't know much about art beyond an introductory art history course, but I have always loved viewing it. I find it to be a wonderful catalyst for relaxation and thought. The architecture of The Modern alone provokes many questions. The majority of the interior rooms are traditional rectangular rooms with white or gray walls, but around the border of the building are rooms with walls made of glass, allowing sunlight in and a view of the outdoors. Walking from an inclosed room to one with only a single solid wall is quite a contrast, and it made me very aware of the extent to which my surroundings affect the way I see a piece of art - or anything else for that matter.  If there had been flowers blooming and leaves on the trees outside, I probably would have seen more hope and life in the artwork in these rooms; if it had been storming, more gloom or wrath. 

This phenomena also made me wonder why we tend to separate art from our surroundings and our daily lives? Most people would agree that art is a good thing - we derive pleasure from its beauty and it allows us to reflect on the state of our present world, learn about the way the world used to be, and contemplate the way that others see the world. It seems to me that not only do we separate these objects by placing them in special buildings, but that on a daily basis we also overlook the things they represent.  This is what I intend this blog to be about: recognizing the art that exists all around us, the sublime in the ordinary, the beauty in the everyday.  I don't think that these things are hidden from us, but rather that we need only take a minute every now and then to recognize them.  This is my attempt to be mindful of beauty in my own life.  I hope it will help you to do the same.