Weimar Bodies: Fantasies About the Body in Weimar Art, Science and Medicine

November 4, 1998 – January 10, 1999

Weimar Bodies brought together art works and other kinds of images to explore the range of popular ideas about the human body in Weimar German and to provide a sense of how the short-lived Weimar Republic (1919–1933) saw itself. The exhibition placed images of the body within a broad cultural perspective, and addressed the ways that vast and varied audiences responded to them. The exhibition included prints and drawings from the Smart Musuem and the Regenstein and Crerar Libraries, as well as contemporary anthropological, sociological and medical texts.

Curator: Weimar Bodies was organized by Sander Gilman, Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professor of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology, University of Chicago, and Stephanie D’Alessandro, formerly the Smart Museum’s Coordinating Curator of Mellon Projects, now Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Art Institute of Chicago.

Catalogue: A brochure with an essay co-authored by Gilman and D’Alessandro accompanied the exhibition; available for purchase.

Weimar Bodies was funded in part by a multiple-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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