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These strange, exquisite artefacts are an object lesson in how the war-damaged face was understood at the time as a psychological and social wound. It wasn’t unusual for new patients making their way to Ladd’s Parisian studio to find themselves in rooms and hallways lined with row after row of plaster casts and masks in progress. Suzannah Biernoff looks back at the surgeons and sculptors involved in the experimental work of facial reconstruction. Before the modern age facial reconstruction and plastic surgery, Anna Coleman Ladd was one of a handful of unique artisans in World War I who created highly detailed masks to hide severely mutilated soldiers’ facial wounds. Little more than a thin curve of skin, it fails to do justice to Ladd’s artistry and her legacy in restoring self-respect and honor to those World War I soldiers with the “broken faces,” as captured in one patient’s letter to her: “The woman I love no longer finds me repulsive, as she had the right to do.
Nicholls and Wood were most likely unaware of this longer history of facial repair, but they would have been attuned to the stigma of the missing or sunken nose associated with syphilis. In Gaston Leroux’s ‘Phantom of the Opera’, the Phantom‘s disguises include a “long, thin, and transparent” nose and another made of pasteboard with a moustache attached. Ladd made it her mission to fashion masks so those soldiers could once again appear in public without shocking and being subjected to the horrified stares of passersby. Maynard Ladd, was appointed to a post as medical advisor to the American Red Cross at the French front lines. In 1932 she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor — the highest French decoration and among the most famous in the world.Each plate was effectively a part-portrait of the sitter, meticulously brought to the verge of life. And while most prosthetic masks were held in place with wire-rim eyeglasses, thin wire or ribbon could also be used. Tonks never thought of these intimate drawings as ‘war art’, but they portray the violence of war – and the transformative impact of injury – in a way that still has the power to shock. Though short-lived, the portrait mask experiment shows facial injury and repair being collectively managed, by surgeons and artists, in ways that challenge our assumptions about the purpose of both science and art.
A talented young sculptor, Anna Ladd delighted in creating light hearted scenes of children at play. Over the course of two years, Ladd’s studio produced 185 masks — a number that pales compared to World War I’s estimated 20,000 facial casualties. An official war artist for the Royal Army Medical Corps, Lobley portrays individual faces, some of them visibly scarred. Philadelphia-born Anna Coleman Ladd is best known for her neoclassical portrait busts and bronze sculptures of sprites frolicking in public fountains. Arguing that imperfection is a foundational modern idea, the book will suggest new ways of thinking about the cultural preference for flawless perfection.
Ladd recollected that the men, who often arrived with flowers, would stay on for a game of dominoes or checkers: “The blind ones played dominoes and the others checkers. While some masks were full-face, most covered just those areas that were damaged — perhaps a chin and one cheek, or a nose and an eye. A handful of these photographs record the laborious crafting of facial prosthetics undertaken by the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, who had persuaded the commanding officer of the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth to let him make bespoke masks for severely disfigured servicemen. Ladd and her associates took over a large fifth-floor artist’s studio in the Latin Quarter: a bright, high-ceilinged room decorated with posters, flowers and an American flag.
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