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Size Matters: Imagery of the Fat Female Body in the Art of Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Toby Edison, Leonard Nimoy, and Laura Aguilar By Brittany Lockard Submitted to the graduate degree program in Art History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson David Cateforis, Ph.D. ________________________________ Marni Kessler, Ph.D. ________________________________ Charles Eldredge, Ph.D. ________________________________ Marta Vicente, Ph.D. ________________________________ Judith McCrea, M.F.A. Date Defended: April 10, 2012 Brittany Jean Lockard The Dissertation Committee for Brittany Lockard certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Size Matters: Imagery of the Fat Female Body in the Art of Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Toby Edison, Leonard Nimoy, and Laura Aguilar ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. David Cateforis ii Abstract Since the early 1990s, a number of prominent artists have begun to produce images of the nude fat body. This dissertation looks at the works of several of those artists—Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Toby Edison, Leonard Nimoy, and Laura Aguilar—seeking to discover what meanings each individual artist layers onto the fat body. Asking why these artists might be interested in the fat body may seem an unnecessary question, as anxiety about fatness pervades Western culture. It is impossible to watch television, listen to the radio, or even read a magazine without being inundated by this unease; whether in the form of advertisements for various weight-loss programs and products, stories about the “obesity epidemic” facing the West, or human interest stories about life as an obese American. Therefore, this dissertation situates artistic images within a larger cultural context. In attempting to understand the meanings layered onto the body in the works of Freud, Saville, Witkin, Edison, Nimoy, and Aguilar, the dissertation draws heavily from the newly developing discipline of fat studies. Authors in this field are challenging the unexposed assumptions that underlie contemporary anxieties about the fat body—that the human body is natural, and that thinness is its natural state—on a number of grounds. Although there is no one unified fat theory, just as there is no one unified feminism, those working in the field share an understanding of the human body as socially constructed, and an understanding of the fat body as the site of many converging discourses; the discourse of science and medicine, of religion and morality, and of gender, racial and iii class difference. Using this understanding of fatness to read images, the dissertation approaches artistic representations of the body from a new perspective. High art traditionally depicts images of the ideal body (there are, of course, exceptions, such as Velazquez’s paintings of court dwarfs) and there exist many art historical readings of this body. Contemporary art, however, has moved away from the idealized body to images of the grotesque: for example, Kiki Smith’s images of flayed or dismembered bodies. This dissertation treats the fat body, not as an example of the abnormal or grotesque, but as a marginalized body, and attempts to address the reasons for its growing prevalence in contemporary art as well as locate representations of fatness within contemporary discourse about the body. As such, readings of contemporary artists are supplemented with cultural readings of popular media. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank the chair of the art history department, Linda Stone-Ferrier, for all her help and support throughout my graduate career. I would also like to thank my advisor, David Cateforis, and all the members of my committee: Marni Kessler, Charles Eldredge, Marta Vicente, and Judith McCrea. They have been amazingly generous with their time and support. I would also like to thank the following people for their careful reading of this document, and their thoughtful input about its contents: Tera Lee Hedrick, Madeline Rislow, Maureen Warren, Amanda Wright, and Megan Young. I would like to thank my friends Sean Barker, Marwa Ghazali, Leslie Jumper, and Kimberly Skoch for their emotional support. And finally, a thank you to Maud Humphrey, without whom this document would not exist. You are missed. v Contents Introduction: The Growing Field of Knowledge: An Introduction to Fat in Western Culture................................................................................................................................. 1 Fat Medicine ................................................................................................................... 3 Applications in this Dissertation ..................................................................................... 8 A Brief History of Anti-Fat Attitudes in the West........................................................ 12 The Trend of Thinness Begins, 1830-1900........................................................................14 Anxieties Increase, 1900-WWII .......................................................................................18 Medicalization of Fat, 1950-1960 ...................................................................................24 Contemporary Attitudes Begin, 1960-1970......................................................................30 Organization of the Dissertation ................................................................................... 35 Chapter One: Nature Morte/Corps Mort: Fat, Sex, and Death in the Paintings of Lucian Freud ................................................................................................................................. 37 Freud the Painter/Freud the Persona ............................................................................. 37 Fat, Thin, Abject—Theory and Context for Freud ....................................................... 41 Sex and Death in Freud’s Thin Nudes .......................................................................... 44 Big Sue in Freud’s Words ............................................................................................. 50 Big Sue in Freud’s Works or Big Sue’s Big Nudes...................................................... 52 Big Sue’s Animal Appeal ............................................................................................. 59 Press and Critical Response to Freud’s Nudes ............................................................. 62 Big Sue’s Big Price ....................................................................................................... 68 Fat Context .................................................................................................................... 71 Continuing Antipathy.................................................................................................... 78 Chapter Two: Facing the Fat Body in the Early Works of Jenny Saville ......................... 83 Feminism and Formalism Meet .................................................................................... 83 Troubled and Troubling Feminist Readings of Saville ................................................. 85 Saville’s Nudes as Celebration ..................................................................................... 91 Plan, Body Image Disturbance Syndrome and the Conflation of Size/Scale ............... 94 Propped, and Saville’s Ambiguous Relationship to Fat ............................................. 101 Trace, Effacement, and Defacement........................................................................... 107 Branded and Contemporary Conflations of Fatness/Sickness .................................... 111 Closed Contact, Saville’s “Real” Body, and Fat as a Sign of Embodiment ............... 117 Gender Norms, and the Fear of the Fat Female Body ................................................ 123 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 126 Chapter Three: Contemporary American Culture, Fat, and Photographic Responses: Witkin, Edison, and Nimoy ............................................................................................ 127 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 127 Joel-Peter Witkin and the Obsession with Thinness ................................................... 128 Laurie Toby Edison, Debbie Notkin and Fat Fighting Back ...................................... 144 Notkin and Edison—Discourse that Questions ........................................................... 148 Edison’s Imagery ......................................................................................................... 151 vi Leonard Nimoy and the Ambivalence of Contemporary Culture............................... 157 Leonard Nimoy and the Discourse of Fat Ambivalence ................................................... 163 Nimoy’s Photographs................................................................................................... 169 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 175 Chapter Four: Full(ly) Figuring the Body: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Fat in Laura Aguilar’s Self-Portraits ..................................................................................................

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