Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Art Flashes

  • Battling poverty, injustice, ignorance and fear, and despair

    Tonse N. K. Raju Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States   Figure 1: Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza (1982), by Maurice D. Pearlman, MD (1915-1985), University of Illinois, Class of 1938. Donated in his memory by his daughter, Martha Pearlman. Assemblage approximately 7’ X 11’. This picture was taken when the statue was on…

  • Erich Heckel: in a lunatic asylum

      Erich Heckel (1883–1970) was one of the founding members of Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), formed in Dresden in 1905 as a bohemian group of artists in rebellion against the older, established norms. In this painting, he depicts four inmates confined to a mental institution for reasons not explained. The squalid and disheveled man in…

  • A very early Picasso painting

    Pablo Picasso was sixteen years old and obviously was not yet famous when he made this painting. His father, an artist himself, had encouraged his son to paint but favored traditional forms such as country scenes and conventional portraits. He himself sat as model for Science and Charity (1897) and is depicted as the conventional…

  • Beauty actualized

    Vincent P. De LuiseNew Haven, Connecticut “First of all, move me, surprise me, rend my heart; make me tremble, weep, shudder; outrage me; delight my eyes afterwards if you can . . .”— Denis Diderot What is beauty? Is it a thing or a thought? Can we touch it? Hear it? See it? Or is…

  • Arthritis in Albrecht Durer’s Praying Hands

    Ariana Shaari New York, New York, United States   Figure 1. Life of the Virgin 4: The Birth of the Virgin. Alfred Durer. 1503, Woodcut, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Source Albrecht Durer is considered one of the masters of German Renaissance art and has been dubbed “the da Vinci of the North.” He is especially…

  • Christ at the bedside

    Jesus sits by the bedside of the girl he has just raised from the dead. He is holding the girl’s hand and looks tenderly into her eyes. He has just truly affected a cure, unlike the physicians of old confined by necessity to the dictum of “guérir parfois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours”*—usually attributed to the…

  • Unnamed surgeon

    In this painting an unknown Netherlandish artist features some of the attributes of a surgeon’s profession: a skull, a tool for cauterizing skulls, a saw, and several keys on the surgeon’s belt. The unnamed surgeon seems composed, serious, with a firm jaw and wrinkled eyes. This is fitting of his position and reputation among the…

  • Lovis Corinth and the sick father

      Franz Heinrich Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) began his career as a realistic painter, showing things on canvas as they are seen in reality. Thus in His Father on his Sickbed (Stadel Museum, Frankfurt) we see the father in bed, sick but perhaps not mortally so. His loving daughter keeps watch by the bedside. She has…

  • Did Salvador Dali follow the prolactin discovery in his painting of the fountain of milk?

    Michael Yafi Houston, Texas, United States   Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society © 2019 The Fountain of Milk Spreading Itself Uselessly on Three Shoes by Salvador Dali remains one of his most enigmatic works. It shows a nude woman on a pedestal, milk flowing from her breasts, while an emaciated man is…

  • “The Sick Child” in Scandinavian art

    Göran WettrellSweden Within Western figurative pictorial art there has long been an interest in showing sick children, their psychological attitudes, the effects on the family, and indeed the very reality of disease. One of the best known works on  this subject is by Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) of the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Titled The…