To address the plethora of tools employed in art before the last century, in all their temporal and geographical variance, one must necessarily reckon with the human hand as––historically––the organic locus for engaging with instruments tout court, defined as they were in the 19th century as “intermediaries between the worker’s hand and the material used.” This contribution to the session on “Tools, Materials, and Processes” during the centuries of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions proposes to turn the focus to the hand itself as a tool, or, in the enduring formulation of Aristotle, as a “tool of tools.”
Recent scholarship in literary and cultural history (Capuano 2015; Briefel 2015; Capuano and Zemka 2020; Hörisch 2021) have emphasized that nineteenth century persons felt newly self-conscious of their hands. This hyperawareness of the hand arose in a moment when new forms of industry drastically limited the human hand’s active participatory role in shaping the material world, while at the same time emergent theories of evolution underlined and re-articulated the hand’s long-privileged status as the marking trait of the human, now understood as an animal species whose evolutionary history was determined by the coming-into-being of an organic instrument for tool use. Despite the fact that works of art, from antiquity to the nineteenth century, conventionally served to epitomize the achievements of human hand-use (as, for instance, in Friedrich Engel’s allusions to “the pictures of Raphael” in his 1876 essay on “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man”), art history has yet to provide a comprehensive companion account for how actual artworks might have registered the nineteenth century’s evident estrangement from, and hyperconsciousness of, these distinct prehensile organs in the bipedal human body. This presentation will consider both figurative representation of hands in works of painting and sculpture as well as the visible or invisible traces of the artist’s hand in composing these representations (in, among others, the works of Georges Seurat and Auguste Rodin). In doing so, I aim to sketch some broad propositions concerning how the hand-as-tool achieved a new kind of hyperbolic visibility, whether through repeated finger-traces and motivic figurations, or through the hand’s perceptible disarticulation and effacement.
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen
Assistant Professor of Nineteenth Century Art, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU (September 2023-)
Associate Director, Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute (2019- 2023)
Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition (University of Chicago Press, 2021; Honorable Mention with Distinction for a Single-Author Work, Robert Motherwell Award, 2022; Finalist, Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize, 2022)
https://ifa.nyu.edu/people/faculty.htm
"Recent scholarship in literary and cultural history have emphasized that nineteenth century Europeans felt newly self-conscious of their hands. This hyperawareness of the hand arose in a moment when new forms of industry limited the human hand’s participatory role in shaping the material world, while at the same time emergent theories of evolution underlined and re-articulated the long-privileged status of the hand––that “tool of tools”––as the marking trait of the human. This presentation will sketch some broad propositions concerning how this historical estrangement of the hand made itself visible in works of art of the late nineteenth century. "