Also this issue: Easy as (Pizza) Pie Nancy Heller comes up with a new, and delicious, approach to art appreciation. -Lori Hill Clothes-Minded Paul Fussell explores why how we dress is how we are. -Meredith Broussard Consumption Junction Thomas Hine on the future of shopping, and why the malls days are numbered. -Maura Johnston Children's Books -Harriette Behringer FICTION -Debra Auspitz, Justin Bauer, J.B, Elisa Ludwig and Alex Richmond NON FICTION -A.R, Nancy Armstrong, Brian Howard, Sara Marcus and Andrew Milner

December 5-11, 2002

cover story

Beauty Is...

Big books from two very different area museums have more in common than you might think.

by David Warner

Among the many coffee table tomes crowding the gift-book shelves this season are two with a Philadelphia pedigree: the catalog for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s spring blockbuster-in-waiting, Degas and the Dance, and the new compendium of images from the city’s favorite house of medical horrors, Mütter Museum.

Beyond the local connection, these books hardly seem comparable. Ballet traditionally presents the human form at its most idealized; the Mütter shows and even celebrates the body's anomalies. But there is a link. Both books are designed by the same woman, Laura Lindgren, and both have the power to challenge assumptions about the nature of beauty.

Lindgren's isn't the name in big type on either of these books. In the case of the Degas book, published by Harry N. Abrams, she worked with co-authors/curators Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall and editor Sharon AvRutick to fit text and illustrations (325 of 'em, many in gorgeous color) into 305 pages. But Mütter Museum is very much her baby. She fell in love with the Mütter upon her first visit in 1986, and went on to design seven of its celebrated calendars featuring vintage and art photos of medical artifacts. This year she and Museum Director Gretchen Worden decided it was time to showcase the calendar materials (along with some never-seen-before images) in book form. Worden wrote the text; Lindgren designed, edited, production-directed and published the book through New York-based Blast Books, which she runs with her husband, Ken Swezey.

"I like to say we publish Œperversely compelling' books," says Lindgren about Blast, borrowing a phrase once used by a reviewer. It's certainly an apt description of Mütter Museum. The cover image alone -- Arne Svenson's black-and-white photo of grinning skulls from the museum's Hyrtl collection -- grabs the attention with its macabre intimations of death and darkness.

But for Lindgren, it's not an image of death at all. "Yes, it's a fact that the original owners of those skulls are dead," she concedes, "but each one of those skulls belonged to someone, and the cards beneath each skull tell you who it was and what is known of their story." Indeed, the stories behind the 139 Hyrtl skulls are among the book's unexpected pleasures; Worden's highly detailed appendix tells us the occupations and causes of death for each, even including the reasons for the 16 suicides: "unhappy love affairs (two), weariness of life (one)..."

"With the Mütter," says Lindgren, "I'm not making any statements about life vs. death -- the whole museum is about life, it just happens to be about life past."

Nor does she consider any of the book's subjects to be ugly.

Take, for instance, the image on page 57 of a man horribly disfigured by a tumor of the jaw. "Ugly? Well, yes, it's not a condition that anybody in their right mind would welcome. But who am I to call that ugly? I don't mean to sound like a Pollyanna here, but isn't it more important to think about what is going on there? Who is this man? What was it like for him to live each day like this?

"Is it hard to look at him? Well, yes, but that's not important."

Worden, who says that one of her favorite photos in the book is a 19th-century portrait of a triple amputee, echoes Lindgren's point in the preface: "While these bodies may be ugly, there is a terrifying beauty in the spirits of those forced to endure these afflictions."

Which is where, believe it or not, we get to Degas. Just as there is beauty in the discomfiting images of the Mütter book, there are surprising moments of darkness in Degas' paintings of the Paris Opéra ballet. He, too, was fascinated by what the human body could endure.

The front and back covers of Degas and the Dance offer a case in point. The image on the front, a detail from 1899's Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts, is all lushly painted tutus and indistinct facial features, a gauzy vision of the ballet as a world of color and movement. But turn to the back and you see a detail from 1882's Dancer Stretching, a vignette that's anything but romantic; the dancer here is exhausted, maybe even in anguish, and the palette is a dingy gray-blue.

"Degas' critics frequently remarked on the ungainliness of the models in his ballet pictures," write co-authors Kendall and DeVonyar. Lindgren appreciates that aspect of his work. "It's only telling part of the story to show just the prettiness of dancers," she observes. "The only way truly to appreciate beauty is to know, at least a little, also what it takes to achieve it... I think it's great that Degas wanted to show the whole story."

If anything, though, he preferred not to show the whole story. "He preferred the fragment to the whole and the teasing glimpse to the instructive panorama," the book tells us. And he liked to stay behind the scenes: "To an almost perverse degree, Degas favored the backstage classroom over the performance and the bare corridor over the glittering crowd." This despite the fact that the Paris Opéra crowd was as glittering as any in the history of entertainment, it seems, and "the cult of personality that flourished around its leading performers" was comparable "to that of movie stars today."

Kendall and DeVonyar recreate this milieu in engrossing detail. But their book also makes clear that Degas edited out as much as he recorded. Despite (or perhaps because of) the four decades he spent in the ballet world, his approach was anything but straightforward. He adopted "motifs, structures, and viewpoints that were subversive of visual -- and certain kinds of social -- convention," and made pictures that were at times "willfully strange."

Not as strange, say, as Rosamond Purcell's ghostly photo of floating fetuses, or William Wegman's frisky juxtaposition of Weimaraners and human remains. But Degas, in his search for the telling detail, his willingness to confront his subjects from a slightly skewed angle -- not to mention his fascination with the human form -- is arguably their aesthetic ancestor.