Body

Within Western art, the human body has never been a neutral given; it is a disciplined sign-system through which questions of mortality, power, eroticism, and interior life are negotiated. The symbols in this category—ranging from bowed heads and braced forearms to exposed ribs and clasped hands—register a long art-historical effort to make the body both subject and syntax. What shifts across periods is less the basic repertoire of limbs and joints than the psychic and social investments they carry: from early modern concerns with salvation and civic identity to modernism’s preoccupation with subjectivity, anxiety, and the conditions of embodiment itself.

Several entries here foreground the body as a site of mortality and existential exposure. The aged, decaying body and stringy hair makes time legible on the surface of the flesh, stripping away ideals of vigor to confront viewers with senescence. Although not yet exemplified in the current collection, this motif belongs to the long tradition of vanitas imagery, where bodily decay punctures worldly pretensions. Related, but psychically rather than physiologically inflected, is the androgynous skull-faced figure. The skull has long served as a memento mori, but in the late nineteenth century it acquires a new existential charge: by erasing gender and individual markers, the skeletal face becomes a universalized self in terror. The description of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) crystallizes this shift. The central figure’s skull-like, ungendered visage and elongated, mask-like head allow viewers to “inhabit the panic,” collapsing personal anxiety into a shared human condition. Here, mortality is no longer a didactic reminder of death’s inevitability; it is an image of ongoing psychic crisis, the self and world fusing into a single field of dread.

Basquiat’s practice in the early 1980s radicalizes this trajectory by treating the body as an X-rayed, electrically wired organism caught in urban pressure. In Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982), the boy’s torso is traversed by a white grid of ribs—an explicit x-ray torso that turns the body “inside-out to insist on mortality even as the stance claims space.” Exposed anatomy here does not illustrate medical knowledge in the didactic sense of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson; instead, it fuses vulnerability and assertion. The ribs and jagged red slashes function semiotically as both wound and current, fragility and charge. Likewise, in Dustheads (1982) the mask-like heads with concentric, target-like eyes and bared teeth border on the skull-faced—faces reduced to emblems of hyperarousal within a black, nocturnal field. If Munch’s skull-like figure universalizes panic, Basquiat’s dustheads particularize it as a street-specific, drug-inflected state of altered perception and survival. The skeletal and the mask move from a Christian-inflected meditation on death to a modern allegory of psychic overload in the city.

Running parallel to these images of exposure are symbols that construe the body as an instrument of knowledge and agency. Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) is paradigmatic. The exposed forearm tendons/hand appear as the pivot of the composition: Tulp lifts the cadaver’s flexor tendons with forceps while his own ungloved right hand demonstrates their function. This cutaway view of anatomy functions iconographically as an emblem of empirical inquiry—the “mechanism of action made visible.” Semiotically, the raised tendons bind book, body, and mind into a chain of signification: the body is not just object but text to be read, while the surgeon’s hands become the agents that translate flesh into knowledge. The cadaver’s foreshortened body, head in shadow, intensifies the paradox that knowledge is purchased at the cost of another’s bodily integrity.

In modernist portraiture, by contrast, the body often signals not public science but private interiority and composure. Several portraits in the collection deploy folded hands and disciplined posture to construct a quiet ethical and psychological poise. In Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (c. 1877), the sitter’s clasped hands at the base of the pyramidal figure act as a structural hinge between the cool blue-greens of her dress and the pulsing reds of the armchair. The entry notes that these hands stabilize the pose, converting likeness into built form. The gesture of folding—neither working nor reaching—semiotically marks self-restraint and interior steadiness; it literalizes the painting’s deeper project of equilibrium, where each chromatic patch “knows” the others. A similar logic operates in Modigliani’s Portrait of Paulette Jourdain (1919). Here, gently folded hands gather the body’s energy inward, echoing the mask-like almond eyes that refuse empirical description. The folded hands and elongated neck transform the sitter into a near-icon, an archetype of grace and inwardness; bodily stillness becomes the visual analogue of ethical reserve.

Van Gogh’s Portrait of Léonie Rose Charbuy-Davy (1887) places folded hands within a more explicitly domestic iconography. The sitter’s interlaced fingers, straight back, and high collar establish middle-class composure, while the adjacent cradle and hearth situate her as mother and guardian of the home. Yet van Gogh’s divisionist, “tremulous” strokes unsettle that stability. The body is at once anchor and flicker, its poised hands holding together a room whose spatial geometry is deliberately vague. In all three portraits, the folded or clasped hands are less anecdotal detail than semiotic node: they condense questions of respectability, self-command, and interior life into a readable, compact sign.

Other bodily symbols in this group emphasize relationality and mutuality through touch. Renoir’s Dance at Bougival (1883) and In the Garden (1885) each organize modern leisure around clasped hands as signs of courtship and provisional attachment. In Dance at Bougival, the couple’s interlocked, ungloved hands form the axis of rotation about which skirt, jacket, and arbor spin. The clasp is both literal and symbolic center: a public intimacy that would have read as flirtatious in the 1880s, yet one that Renoir shields with an orbit of circular rhythms and saturated color. In In the Garden, by contrast, the man’s fingers fold over the woman’s hand across a diagonally set café table. Here the clasp is lighter, more tentative—a “charged pause” rather than a sealed union. The table’s red trestle and the bouquet’s precarious placement on the lattice underscore the fragility and negotiability of the bond. In both cases, the hands carry the scene’s emotional stakes: they become a legible script of consent, hesitation, or refusal, while the rest of the body elaborates or masks what the hands already say.

Finally, several symbols address the body as a threshold: poised between states, testing limits of space or status. The cruciform, arms-flung pose in Basquiat’s Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump stages the wiry boy as a contemporary, secular analogue to the cruciform body. Arms thrown wide, shoulders squared, the figure “refuses containment,” claiming more space than his frame can comfortably hold. Unlike the explicit crucified Christ or veiled cruciform victims in political painting, Basquiat’s pose reads as both imploring and triumphant, an assertion of Black presence and survival in a hostile urban environment. The exposed ribs keep mortality in view, but the expansive gesture turns vulnerability into a stance of resistance. Similarly, the unshod feet and shallow or uncertain grounds that recur elsewhere in the corpus—whether the apostles’ bare feet in Titian’s Assumption or the foreshortened soles in other works—figure the body as a liminal object, at once anchored and on the verge of passage.

Taken together, the symbols in this category chart a historical migration. Early modern works, exemplified by Rembrandt and Titian, mobilize the body to articulate religious truths, communal knowledge, and civic identity. Anatomy and gesture render doctrine and empiricism visible. By the later nineteenth century, Munch and Renoir recast bodily signs as vehicles for psychological states and modern social relations—panic, flirtation, interiority—while early twentieth-century and postwar artists such as Modigliani, van Gogh, and Basquiat push further toward the body as site of fractured subjectivity, contested identity, and structural vulnerability. The body persists as the primary semiotic field, but what it signifies shifts from salvation and science to affect, race, gender, and power. Across these transformations, the underlying logic remains: artists treat posture, fragment, and touch not as neutral description but as a refined vocabulary through which the meanings of being human are continuously reimagined.