A Return to the Face

The chapter assesses the American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd, who crafted prosthetic masks for facially mutilated soldiers in Paris. Rejecting the distinction between ornamental and functional prosthetics, Ladd regarded the face, be it of flesh or of galvanized copper, as a conduit for a person’s personality or spirit. This belief offered a stark contrast to the facial representations of surrealists like André Breton, who worked at the same hospital that supplied most of Ladd’s clients. Relying on vitalist principles similar to Henri Bergson’s élan vital, she therefore created the masks to give mutilated soldiers, many of whom suffered shell shock, the emotional confidence to reconnect with their past lives and to see themselves as active participants in the postwar world—finding employment, marrying, and even conceiving and raising children. Ladd’s efforts in Paris were similar to America’s rehabilitation program, which at the same time was being promoted in Carry On.