A Repository for Bottled Monsters: paintings

Showing posts with label paintings. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2009

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Today was a positively gorgeous day in these parts, which called for a little road trip to Richmond. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is closing next month for a year for a massive remodel and expansion (sigh with envy) and they have just about four galleries open.

Here's what I found in one of them:

Scene from the Epidemic of Yellow Fever in Cadiz,
Théodore Géricault,
ca. 1819

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

New Deal Art Registry

The Jack McMillen painting I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, which showed psychiatric patients at Forest Glen, Maryland, has been added to the New Deal Art Registry.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Jack McMillen painting

This 1944 painting by Jack McMillen was commissioned by the U.S. government for Walter Reed Army Medical Center as part of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) artists' program of World War II. It illustrates the historical function of the Forest Glen annex of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center as a holding and rehabilitation unit for medical patients, including psychiatric patients, during World War II.

This is a role the Forest Glen annex also played in subsequent wars. Psychiatric patients were identified, and to an extent stigmatized, by wearing maroon hospital clothing. For many years this painting was on display at the Forest Glen annex in Silver Spring, Maryland.
(from a publication by the Borden Institute)

The painting is egg tempera on canvas and measures 7 by 10.5 feet. It now is on display at the museum.

I also found a website while searching for whatever I could find on the artist. It's the New Deal Art Registry, a fun site to browse.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Eakins' The Gross Clinic

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will bring back The Gross Clinic this summer. According to the latest newsletter, it is "described by some as the most important painting by any nineteenth-century American artist." It will be exhibited in gallery 119 from August 2 until February 2009. Read more about the painting itself, including how it was nearly lost to Philadelphia, at wikipedia.

Who are we?

Mike Rhode was the chief archivist of the Museum from 1989-2011, and is the founder of this blog. I maintain an interest in the course of the museum, and will be posting relevant information.

The Army Medical Museum was founded in 1862 during the American Civil War. After World War II, a parent-child relationship was inverted and the Museum became part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Since then, the Museum has moved around Washington, stopping for years in Ford's Theatre, and on the National Mall where the building it shared with the National Library of Medicine once stood, until it was demolished in 1968 for the Hirshhorn Museum. For 35 years it was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and now is in Silver Spring, MD.

So what about that blog name?

It's historical. I found it in a quote from one of the former curators. World War II confirmed the Army Medical Museum's primary role in pathology consultation. James Ash, the curator during the war and a pathologist, noted, "Shortly after the last war, more concerted efforts were instituted to concentrate in the Army Medical Museum the significant pathologic material occurring in Army installations." He closed with the complaint, "We still suffer under the connotation museum, an institution still thought of by many as a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities. To be sure, we have such specimens. As is required by law, we maintain an exhibit open to the public, but in war time, at least, the museum per se is the least of our functions, and we like to be thought of as the Army Institute of Pathology, a designation recently authorized by the Surgeon General."

After the war, it evolved into the tri-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

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