During the Great War, trenches exposed combatants’ faces to sniper fire and flying shrapnel. In previous wars such wounds would have proven fatal. Now, with improved medical and transport services, the wounded could be saved–but not necessarily their faces as well. Crudely patched-together and sent back to the front, or their families, men with “broken faces” were routinely ostracized. This lecture examines the humanitarian efforts of plastic surgeons to restore obliterated faces and sculptors to fashion prosthetic masks, while also considering the modern beauty culture that arose in reaction to wartime unsightliness.
David M. Lubin is the Terra Foundation for American Art 51ݶing Professor at Oxford University for 2016-17, as well as the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Professor Lubin is the author ofAct of Portrayal(Yale, 1985),Picturing a Nation(Yale,1994),Titanic(BFI, 1999), andShooting Kennedy(California, 2003), which was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum51ݶ Eldredge Prize for distinguished scholarship in American art. His latest book isFlags and Faces: The Visual Culture of America51ݶ First World War(California, 2015), and hisGrand Illusions: WWI and American Artis forthcoming from Oxford University Press.