Anna Coleman Ladd
THE SCULPTOR WHO MADE MASKS FOR SOLDIERS DISFIGURED IN
WORLD WAR I
by Allison Meier on September
8, 2016
Any
enduring romanticism for war was obliterated by the industrialized
brutality of World War I, from which legions of soldiers returned
disfigured by facial injuries. The rise of Modernism in Europe from this carnage is
well-known, but in the United States it had a different impact, encouraging
both heightened patriotism and the emergence of symbols like the mask. One
artist, Anna Coleman Ladd, turned her neoclassical training
into a tool for sculpting new faces for the defaced.
In Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War, recently
released by Oxford University Press, Wake Forest University Professor David Lubin explores
Ladd’s work in the greater context of US artists working during and after
World War I. Beginning with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, an event used
in propaganda to galvanize American interest in the war, Lubin’s
research stretches up to 1933, with the emergence of the Third Reich and a new
military era. “The first World War was the first fully industrialized war,
and an important aspect of that industrialization was the mass production and
dissemination of war-related images,” Lubin writes. “They informed and
misinformed opposing populations about the need to go to war, the nature
of war itself, and the consequences of war.”
And one of those consequences
was les gueules cassées, or the “broken faces,” as
the hundreds of thousands of disfigured soldiers were called in
France. Medicine had improved enough so soldiers could survive previously fatal
injuries, yet those wounds were freshly horrific with machine guns and trench
warfare that often left the delicate facial tissue exposed. Noses were reduced
to holes, jaws broken beyond repair, eyes blinded, and whole physiognomies
blurred by ripped flesh. As Harold Gillies, a doctor who treated thousands of
facial injuries, said of his ward: “Only the blind keep their spirits up.”
Ladd was among several
sculptors who used their skills to fashion masks so soldiers
could more easily walk in public without shocking and provoking gawking.
The Boston-based artist joined others, like Francis
Derwent Wood, who were making prostheses out of copper or tin that could be
worn like glasses with spectacle bows over the ears. Through the American
Red Cross, Ladd set up her small Studio for Portrait Masks in the Latin Quarter
of Paris in 1917, its homey interior designed to give comfort and dignity to
her patients. Scarred veterans’ transformation began with a
suffocating plaster cast process used to capture each of their new
imperfections. (read more)
