Blair's classically remodeled heads made their way into print between 1907 and 1909. The following year, Henri Matisse began producing Jeannette I-V, a series of heads whose increasingly ugly incarnations look like a slow motion reversal of the beautification sought--and achieved--by contemporary surgical sculptors (see fig. 10). Modeled between 1910 and 1913, Jeannette 's progressively deformed features mark Matisse's formation of features as forms, as pure shapes apart from and irreducible to parts of the face. Over time, the nose lengthens and broadens, losing its bone structure as it becomes a hunk of tubular clay. The mouth flattens and stretches; no longer cut with the clarity of lips, its edges blur into the surrounding material. The hair morphs into two hard knobs and then simply disappears. And the forehead bulges into a blob that blends into the bulky ex-nose. The eyes are particularly telling, widening and separating so far that they are finally only visible as suggestions of eyes, as abstracted, abstracting studies in volume, arc, and line. No longer representations of the windows to the soul, they are instead representations of what can be done to clay when mind, knife, and hand are free from mimetic constraints. Together, Jeannette's serial deformations bespeak the artist's desire to separate form from human form, to abandon the notion that the human figure is the proper subject matter for sculpture and replace it with the idea that sculpture's best subject matter is simply matter: the play of stuff in space.

That Matisse should turn to the human head in order to turn away from it, that he should, in other words, sculpt the face not as face but as the form of form, is at once entirely paradoxical (why sculpt something in order not to sculpt it?) and wholly appropriate to the particular problems then facing modern sculpture. Sculpture, perhaps more than any other medium, had been bound for centuries by classical ideals of form. Those ideals--themselves originally, definitively framed by Greek statuary--equated aesthetic beauty with bodily beauty, collapsing the formal dimensions of sculpture so forcibly into an idealized physical form that a statue's beauty was synonymous with the beauty of the body it molded. Consequently, coming to terms with those ideals was one of the major aims of modern art. Some felt that these standards had to be rejected wholesale if a truly modern art were to have a chance: in 1911, Kandinsky announced that "Efforts . . . to apply Greek principles, e.g. to sculpture, can only produce forms similar to those employed by the Greeks, a work that remains soulless for all time." Others believed that all new art must originate in mastery of older traditions and techniques. In 1919, Giorgio de Chirico exhorted would-be painters to learn their craft from the close study of statuary:

We, who were the first to set a good example in painting, summon those painters who have been or can be redeemed to go to the statues. Yes, to the statues to learn the nobility and the religion of drawing, to the statues to dehumanize you a little, you who in spite of your puerile devilries were still too human. If you lack the time and the means to go and copy in the sculpture museums, if the academies have not yet adopted the system of shutting the future painter up for at least five years in a room where there is nothing but marble and plaster statues . . . . Buy your plaster copy, and then in the silence of your room copy it ten, twenty, a hundred times.

As these divergent attitudes suggest, modern artists were divided on the subject of the Greeks, whose statuary sat at the center of debates about the future of representation. The relics of another era's fantastically successful aesthetic synthesis, at once soulless and the soul of art, classical statues were both symbols of what must be discarded and models worthy of emulation. Nowhere is modern art's ambivalence toward classical statuary more visible than in modern sculpture. As the plastic art most directly descended from the defining aesthetic moment of ancient Greece, early twentieth-century sculpture came face to face (there is no other way to describe it) with the overwhelming prerogatives of the past. Matisse's series bears the imprint of this traditional pressure. As the heads abstract themselves, they move away from mimesis, ceasing not only to copy human form, but ceasing also to copy time-honored techniques for modeling the human form. And in so doing, the heads look toward a palpably new thesis about the purpose of sculpture--that any sculpted form must be understood as a sculpture of form, that even these statues of a named female head are finally essentially a composite portrait of their own sculpting, of the pinching, punching, slicing, sliding work of fingers and chisels on clay; of the hard, bright capture of that work in cast bronze. Effecting that shift as an elemental regression (so that form gradually bodies forth from a face deforming), Jeannette I-V may be said to turn away from the classical tradition in order to turn that tradition against itself: one way to read the series is to see it as the result of accepted formal principles taken to their logical extremes, to see Matisse as bluntly recording the basic manipulations that classical sculpture works so hard to smooth over, and in the process reducing that tradition to a false start. In this reading, modern sculpture is the thing classical statuary would have been if only it had understood its own medium.

As Matisse's series indicates, modern sculpture met the challenge posed by classical statuary head on: during the early years of the twentieth century, it began molding new ideas about form in the shape of atypically modeled heads. Indeed, the rise of modern sculpture might be said to emerge from a revision of the human head. In the variously flattened, simplified, angled, and effaced heads of early abstract sculpture, we see a conscious effort to divorce the aesthetics of form from the idealized human figure, an effort whose formal expression takes shape as a reformation of the very concept of the face. This reformation took many shapes: Modigliani and Brancusi, for example, used the head to stress the relations between volume and line. Modigliani's angular vision turned round facial features into edgy profiles of themselves (see fig. 11), while Brancusi's softer touch simply erased the face gradually over time (see fig. 12). By contrast, Picasso and Matisse concentrated on proportion, distorting the symmetry of the face in order to emphasize the forms of individual features. Like Matisse, Picasso forms by deforming: his 1932 Female Head is clearly descended from Jeannette I-V (see fig. 13). For artists such as Picasso, Brancusi, Matisse and Modigliani, an art of form is born out of the distortion, disfiguration, and even disappearance of facial feature. Casting heads as clusters of shapes rather than as realistic images--casting heads, in other words, as embodiments of shape rather than as backgrounds for the face--enabled sculptors to begin to pry apart what they saw as a limiting and misguided identification of formal and physical beauty, and so to recast the face as a metaphor for form, a figure whose ultimate point of reference was to an aesthetic outside itself.

Picasso makes this heady reconfiguration most clear: his 1931 Head of a Woman dispenses with resemblance entirely, instead simply naming a collage of metal parts in such a way as to stress the sheer randomness of resemblance (not to mention nomenclature) (see fig. 14). Without the title, there is no sense of the sculpture as a head. With it, there is a sense of the strain involved in finding a correlation between work and title--are the colanders the skull? Is the fork a wisp of hair? Is the flat disk the face, or is it a hat, or even a palette, hoisted by a spindly arm onto a narrow shoulder? Are the three bent pieces of the base the body--in which case, why do the breasts point in three directions? or are they legs--in which case, why are there three of them and why does the head sit directly on the pelvis? or are they just the base, just three iron supports forming a pedestal for an abstract bust? As the possibilities listed here indicate, the problem of seeing work and title as references to one another exists alongside the Head's bald assertion that such correlations can always be imagined easily enough. Picasso's "head" is thus largely a front for a point about heads. In its three-legged stance toward mimesis, its iron-ic components face the fact that more recognizably modeled faces mask: that the face is only ever a useful abstraction.

Taking the face apart in order to reconstruct it along traditional lines, plastic surgery might be said to practice a sort of utilitarian modernism, an extremely conservative aesthetic that broke with the face in order to cement its place in history. As such, plastic surgery might be seen as a mirror image of modern sculpture's aesthetic break. Its faith in the ability of antique statuary to guide its distinctly modern practice was total. Its belief in the redemptive power of the beautifully molded face was complete. And it saw the artist's mission as the restoration--not destruction--of facial expression. Where the face was at odds with modern sculpture's expressive mission, then, it was the subject matter of surgical sculpture. Surgeons operated on faces in order to produce on them images of faces; they turned the face into a representation of a face in order to restore the essence of the face to individual faces; and they believed the essence of the face lay not in the faces of human beings, but in the idealized representation of the face first sculpted by the Greeks. In short, as sculpture proper abandoned classical ideals, surgery took them up as its own proper purview. And in so doing, surgeons situated themselves--however unknowingly--as part of the aesthetic revolution that was taking place within the plastic arts during the early years of the twentieth century.

On the surface, surgical sculpture and modern sculpture appear to be worlds apart. Their subject matter and their aesthetic aims are wildly different, their cultural positioning and their politics virtually antithetical. But as "art" committed to revising antiquated assumptions about what is--or can be--beautiful, the two seem at points to speak through, if not actually to, each other. Their forms overlap: Matisse's Jeanette V and Picasso's 1932 Female Head look like they are recovering from flap nose jobs (see fig. 15). Even their languages converge: Apollinaire's 1912 comment that "A Picasso studies an object the way a surgeon dissects a corpse" finds its plasticine precursor in Blair's less well-known 1907 statement of surgical aesthetics: "There's nothing prettier than dissecting" (quoted in McDowell, 310). The two are in turn peculiarly sutured by Lautreamont's classic description of surrealism as "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table." Developing alongside modern art, and passing through its stages of technological development as Victorian realism ceded to modernism, plastic surgery was a form of modern art in its own right, an aesthetic response to the perceived character of a newly modern, modernizing world that took human flesh as both its medium and subject matter. In 1912, the dramatist Edward Gordon Craig wrote that "If you can find in nature a new material, one which has never yet been used by man to give form to his thoughts, then you can say you are on the high road towards creating a new art." Such was aesthetic surgery, which found in bone, cartilage, and tissue the means of realizing on human beings an aesthetic that had been for centuries a purely marble fantasy. Moreover, when surgeons began creating an archive of remodeled heads to rival the classical figures of antiquity, they created themselves as modern sculpture's practical counterpart, the place in culture where traditional concepts of beauty were not only not outmoded, but were positively useful as pragmatic means to a measurably important end.

As Matisse's increasingly distorted Jeanettes reveal, a willingness to produce ugliness was perceived as essential to rendering the pure beauty of plastic form, so much so that writing about the modernist mission explicitly cast deformity as the formal essence of art. Cezanne, wrote Maurice Denis in 1907, "deforms his design . . . by the necessity for expression . . . . What astonishes us most in Cezanne's work is certainly his research for form, or, to be more exact, for deformation." Decades later, Paul Klee invoked the same terms: "The creation of a work of art . . . must of necessity . . . be accompanied by distortion of the natural form." Deformity was no metaphor to plastic surgeons; it was a devastating reality. And beauty was all the more beautiful for being blissfully constant over time. Seeking to alleviate deformity by reshaping asymmetrical and disproportionate facial features along the clean lines of classical statuary, plastic surgery operated according to an aesthetic literalism, a belief that real ugliness could be made into real beauty simply by shifting the contours of the face, that realizing a representation of a representation of beauty (sculpting a face that looks like a sculpture of perfect looks) in human flesh would make that person beautiful, inside and out. That literalism was in turn entirely pragmatic: it was justified because it worked. Kandinsky wrote that emulating Greek aesthetics was a deadly exercise, one whose products would be left forever "soulless." Such concerns could not enter into plastic surgery's worldview for the simple reason that surgical sculpture saw itself as operating on the soul. To reshape the face was to recast the mind; to recast the mind was to minister to the human spirit. Where sculpture used the face as a metaphor for a too-static form, surgery saw the face as a form whose plasticity contained within it the promise of a happy, meaningful life.

Embracing the classical ideal at the moment that it was being explicitly rejected by many modern artists, plastic surgery's was in some ways a reactionary aesthetic, one whose express design it was to copy an antiquated tradition. But plastic surgery was no antiquated practice. It was not nostalgia for a lost aesthetic that permeated its interest in classical statuary, so much as a deep conviction that the art of the past would provide the template for the face of the future. (In this, plastic surgery embodied Eliot's 1919 dictum that the best art is that which most fully reconciles tradition and the individual talent.) Picasso once insisted that "there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was." Certainly this was the belief of plastic surgeons. Treating the face as the living surface of tradition, plastic surgery brought the past to life in the shape of remodeled noses, eyes, cheeks, and chins. In the process, it saw itself as correcting not only damaged features, but a damaged artistic tradition--one whose deformations it blamed on that moment in 1865 when Rodin dared to sculpt a man with a broken nose and call it beautiful.

...time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

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Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight