Tooker depicted waiting for a more specifically governmental bureaucracy in his painting, “The Government Bureau.” In that painting, the waiting people are reproduced several times to emphasize their anonymity, and the multiple bureaucrats peer out from frosted windows with only their eyes and noses visible — bringing to mind the concept of the “medical gaze” promulgated by the French philosopher,  Michel Foucault.

In another Tooker painting, “Ward,” he renders patients’ anonymity and a sense of abandonment in the hospital setting–with government bureaucracy invoked by the American flags hanging on the wall.

Image Credit
The Waiting Room, George Tooker, 1959. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Image used for educational and critical commentary purposes.

George Tooker documentary videos from Columbus Museum

At age nine, first misdiagnosed and finally identified as having facial bone cancer (Ewing’s sarcoma), Lucy underwent several surgeries and more than two years of intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Pain and nausea, anxiety and fear of more pain and nausea were only part of the ordeal. The young Lucy became aware of what it is to be severely, chronically ill. Her sisters behaved differently toward her: they were polite. “Suddenly I understood the term visiting. I was in one place, they were in another, and they were only pausing.” Even her father felt uncomfortable at her hospital bedside, and Lucy was relieved that he came infrequently.

But being at home was worse: in the hospital the other patients and the staff expected little from her and she felt no guilt or shame; amidst her family, she blamed herself for the tension, arguments over money, and her mother’s depression, even though these elements had existed prior to her illness. Her hair fell out and she became dimly aware that people were staring at her face. Nevertheless, “I . . . was naturally adept at protecting myself from the hurt of their insults and felt a vague superiority . . . . “

Well enough to return to school, Lucy’s disfigured face drew taunts from classmates; she understood finally that she was perceived as ugly and that she would not be loved. Only on Halloween, when she could mask her face, did she feel free and joyful, unconcerned about her appearance, “normal.” Her moods now alternated between despair, determination, and escapism. She became convinced that only facial reconstruction and a restored appearance would make life bearable.

During years of reconstructive surgery Lucy evolved complex rationalizations to give meaning to her suffering. Two anchors had stabilized her existence throughout the misery: a passionate adolescent love of horses, and an adult love of poetry. Eventually outward appearance and inner life became harmonious. “The journey back to my face was a long one.”

Unfortunately, Lucy’s story does not end here. At age 39 she committed suicide. Soon after, her close friend, writer Ann Patchett, wrote a book about their friendship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, published in 2003 (HarperPerennial).

Lucy Grealy Interview in 1994 (20 Min.)

Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy
Houghton Mifflin 1994 Boston: 256 pages

1995 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction , Poetry: https://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/lucy-grealy
Web image generated from the book cover by Medhum.

At age 18, Frida Kahlo suffered a catastrophic accident that had lifelong consequences. The school bus in which she was a passenger collided with a trolley. Her spinal column was broken in three places, as were her collarbone, two ribs, her right leg and foot. The treatment was to lie on her back for one month, enclosed in a plaster cast. In addition, Kahlo had polio as a child, and one leg was shorter and thinner than the other.

This stunning portrait demands the viewer’s attention. A woman, Frida Kahlo, looms in the foreground, central to the painting, facing the viewer fully frontal, a few tears spilling down her face. She is nude, except for a sheet that is wrapped around her foreshortened lower body, and the widely spaced straps of an upper-body corset. On the one hand, the figure is passive, gazing at us almost without expression, completely still, acceptant of the scattered nails and rigid column that penetrate her body. On the other hand, the beauty of her perfectly formed breasts and well-formed upper body, the eyes that engage the viewer, subtly convey the energy of the figure’s spirit and will. At this point in Kahlo’s life, the painful physical problems that had plagued her on and off for years were becoming unrelenting. Doctors prescribed a variety of orthopedic corsets to support her degenerating spine. The portrait seems to personify pain and simultaneously some level of tolerance for pain.

Many who view the painting are reminded of images of Christ on the cross. Kahlo was certainly long-suffering and represented the physical and emotional aspects of her condition in many of her works (for example, “Tree of Hope” and “Henry Ford Hospital“), but the energy and originality of her personality and artistic vision shine through. For interesting commentary on “The Broken Column,” see Hayden Herrera. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: Harper Perennial) 2002, pp. 180-183. Also useful is Gannit Ankori’s commentary in her book, Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2002, pp. 114-119). Ankori points out that the vertical fissure of Kahlo’s body and the fissures in the earth surrounding her evoke violation — consistent with Kahlo’s statement that a metal rod had entered her hip and penetrated her vagina.

Web image from Wiki Commons

Soto explores his uncertain status in relation to his family, and to the larger society in “You’ve Gone Too Far.” Detailing the “evolution” of his siblings and cousins, who “were no longer Mexican rednecks,” but “held down jobs” and “stopped jamming parking meters for free time,” Soto describes how his family nevertheless feels uncomfortable about him. “My family feared that I had evolved too far.” Drunken Christmas horseplay with his brothers reveals their distaste and distrust of his intellectualism and sophisticated clothes. “They tore my book in half, / and stripped me of my Italian belt.” Only when they have succeeded in making him sick/drunk do they accept him (at least temporarily) back into the family fold. The poem illustrates well the difficulties that can arise when one member of a family elects to live life differently from the rest yet wants to maintain a relationship with its members. The situation has resonance for the children of immigrants, for children who are more educated than their parents, or for anyone who has chosen a life unfamiliar to family or friends.  

“TV in Black and White” focuses on the role of television (in the 1950s/1960s) in shaping, reflecting, and failing to reflect American society. Soto remembers his childhood in which “[we] were sentenced to watch / the rich on TV …”. Sitcom characters played golf, ate steak, and dressed fashionably (the Donna Reed Show, Ozzie and Harriet). “While he swung / we hoed / Fields flagged with cotton . . .”  

Now life is for many relatively luxurious, “Piano lessons for this child, / Braces for that one — “ “But if the electricity / fails in this town, / a storefront might / be smashed /” “and if someone steps out / with a black-and-white TV, / it’s because we love you Donna, / we miss you Ozzie.”  

Soto’s critique is still relevant today. The ubiquity of television and streaming, even in low-income households, confers enormous power on the images and narratives presented. Now there are many more options for viewers of different cultural and economic backgrounds. Yet the dominant culture still exerts a major influence. The gap between representation and reality continues to be an important source of social dissatisfaction and unrest. 

Gary Soto 
https://garysoto.com/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gary-soto#tab-poems

Mexicans Begin Jogging
Online: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/by-gary-soto/  
New and Selected Poems, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995, p. 51

You’ve Gone Too Far 
Published in Junior College, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1997, p.24

TV in Black and White 
New and Selected Poems, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995, p.50

Web image by Jr Korpa 

In this poem of high irony, 21 stanzas of couplets brilliantly spin out stereotypes of Indigenous people promulgated by white American culture. Among the stereotypes that Alexie develops: the tragic Indian; Indian women as sexual objects for white men; Indian men secretly desirable to white women; Indians as violent, alcoholic, childlike, mystical,” and members of a “horse culture.” But in addition, Alexie emphasizes how American whites have co-opted Indian culture: “white people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves” until finally, “all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” The poem is a painful reminder of how the United States has at one and the same time decimated indigenous people and their culture while exploiting those people and that culture for its own gain. It is a commentary on stereotyping, loss of identity, and loss of a people.

Sherman Alexie is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and film writer. He is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indigenous person and grew up on a reservation in Washington state. His work focuses on relationships between Indigenous people and white Americans and on life within a white power structure. Alexie’s writing is consistently humorous and ironic.

How to Write the Great American Indian Novel
Sherman Alexie
https://fallsapart.com

Source The Summer of Black Widows, pp. 94-95
Publisher Hanging Loose Press
Edition 1996
Place Published Brooklyn, New York
Alternate Source Native American Songs and Poems, pp. 28-29
Alternate Publisher Dover Thrift Editions
Alternate Edition 1996
Alternate Editors Brian Swann
Place Published New York

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image created by Medhum.org

More Posts from this Author

Two Paintings by Henry Sugimoto

07.01.25 902

Two haunting paintings by Henry Sugimoto capture the emotional weight and injustice of Japanese American…

Three Poems by Gary Soto 

01.10.26 964

Three poems explore cultural identity, family conflict, and the influence of media on class, belonging,…

The Waiting Room by George Tooker

06.12.26 262

George Tooker’s haunting painting reveals anonymity, isolation, and powerlessness within institutional waiting spaces.

The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo 

04.15.26 408

Frida Kahlo transforms personal trauma and chronic pain into powerful visual meditations on body, identity,…

On the one hand, if the doctor is physically unable to treat, then he is not responsible for withholding treatment. On the other hand, by being rendered professionally helpless, perhaps he is being punished for not taking a moral stance against his patient. This interpretation seems to have validity because the last line recalls Psalm 137, which warns, “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” 

For drawing attention to the biblical reference, I am grateful to Dr. Danielle Ofri (clinical professor) and Lara DeLong (Class of 2001), both at NYU School of Medicine. Dannie Abse (1923-2014) was a practicing physician and poet. 

Reading by Dannie Abse

Case History
‘Most Welshmen are worthless,
an inferior breed, doctor.’
He did not know I was Welsh.
Then he praised the architects
of the German death-camps–
did not know I was a Jew.
He called liberals, ‘White blacks’,
and continued to invent curses.

When I palpated his liver
I felt the soft liver of Goering;
when I lifted my stethoscope
I heard the heartbeats of Himmler;
when I read his encephalograph
I thought, ‘Sieg heil, mein Fuhrer.’

In the clinic’s dispensary
red berry of black bryony,
cowbane, deadly nightshade, deathcap.
Yet I prescribed for him
as if he were my brother.

Later that night I must have slept
on my arm: momentarily
my right hand lost its cunning.

Commentary

“Sometimes it’s very difficult to like some patients. Patients imagine that they’re always likable, but in fact there are some one has great difficulty with, I think. And indeed there was one patient that bugged me so sufficiently that I wrote two poems about him.”

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image created by Medhum.org

Dégas’ brilliant rendering of perspective pulls the viewer into the mystery of what has taken place in what appears to be a woman’s bedroom. At the foot of the single-width bed, a coat is thrown over the metal bedpost frame. In the right foreground a bearded man leans against a closed door. His shadow looms behind him, large against the door. His shadow is generated by the single small lamp set upon a small round table near the center of the room. On the floor next to the table lies a piece of cloth or clothing (said to be a corset, p.674 of reference below). 

Turned, bent away from the man, partially kneeling on the floor at the other side of the room, is a young woman whose left shoulder and upper back are bare. The short sleeve of her white dress (nightgown?) hangs off her shoulder. She clutches to her body a blanket or drape. In contrast to the man, who stands in semidarkness, the woman’s back is bathed in the light of the nearby lamp. 

Clothing strewn on the floor and the looming man posted against a door suggest an assault. Although early 20th century critics did indeed perceive the painting as depicting the aftermath of a rape, that interpretation is not a foregone conclusion. The Philadelphia Museum of Art notes that Dégas referred to this work as “my genre picture” (a picture showing everyday life). The museum states further that “an annotation in a notebook used by Degas in this period provides a clue as to his intentions: ‘Work a great deal on nocturnal effects, lamps, candles, etc. The fascinating thing is not always to show the source of light but rather its effect.’ ” For another discussion of this painting, see Body, Place, and Self in 19th-Century Painting, by Susan Sidlauskas (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 

Web image from wikicommons

In that drawing a mother leans back in her chair, surrounded by clamoring children who snuggle, kiss, pull at her. Clothing is scattered about – on the floor, on a basket. Several dogs lean toward the figures, adding to the domesticity of the scene. 

Web image from National Gallery of Art.

This thought-provoking poem is best read with a representation of the painting to which it refers in view (the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel, is reproduced in On Doctoring). Auden considers the nature of human suffering: “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking / dully along . . . . ” For each individual life affected by personal catastrophe (in the painting, Icarus falling from the sky into the ocean), there is the rest of humankind which must go about its daily business, either oblivious or unable to assist (in the painting, Icarus might almost be overlooked, flailing in the lower corner of the picture while the ploughman in the foreground has his back turned). Life, and death go on although the sufferer, and sometimes those who are paying attention, find this inconceivable. And what about the ship “that must have seen / Something amazing” but “had somewhere to get to”? What is the context in which suffering is noticed, what obligations exist, what can and cannot be remedied?

Source Collected Poems
Publisher Random House
Edition 1976
Editors Edward Mendelson
Place Published New York
Alternate Source On Doctoring
Alternate Publisher Simon & Schuster
Alternate Edition 1995, 2001
Alternate Editors Richard Reynolds & John Stone
Place Published New York
First published 1938

Image of Landscape of the Fall of Icarus from wikicommons
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

Japanese American artist Henry Sugimoto (1900-1990) depicted life in the Arkansas internment camps into which he and his entire family (including wife and child) and many others of Japanese descent were forced, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sugimoto’s life and painting were profoundly influenced by his incarceration. His subjects changed from landscapes to scenes of camp life and the Japanese emigration/immigration experience; these works often had social and political purpose. This scene is bleak, almost colorless; the sky is cloudy. Barracks stretch on either side of a narrow road in repetitive monotony. Too lone figures are the only people in sight and the only vegetation detectable, besides marsh grass, is the sketchy outline of treetops in the distance. Sugimoto told an interviewer that he used to go to the edge of the camp and try to imagine the Arkansas landscape beyond. 

Nisei Babies in Concentration Camp

Children were born during the 1940s internment of Japanese Americans – life went on. Second generation Japanese (Nisei) who were U.S. citizens by law were incarcerated along with their parents. Perhaps the children in this picture are faceless because Americans were treating people of Japanese descent as one deindividualized and dehumanized entity, to be viewed with suspicion and distrust. This painting juxtaposes helpless infants with military might and barbed wire. Sugimoto uses the term, “concentration camp” in labeling the scene, while the U.S. government called them “relocation camps” (people were relocated from the West Coast to the U.S. interior).

Harsh Canvas: Henry Sugimoto

An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Henry Sugimoto’s Self Portrait from Wiki Commons