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About
Dr. Frank Netter
Frank Henry Netter (1906-1991)
studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students’
League, and by the mid-1920s he was a successful commercial
artist for publications such as The Saturday  Evening
Post and The New York Times. At his mother’s
urging to follow a more ‘serious’ career, he
entered medical school at New York University, where he
received his medical degree in 1931. During his student
years, Netter’s notebook sketches caught the attention
of various medical professors, allowing him to supplement
his income by illustrating lectures, articles and textbooks.
While in private surgical practice, he accepted art commissions,
but eventually this artist-cum-surgeon gave up his medical
practice altogether, in favor of a full-time commitment
to art. The result was Netter’s legendary ability
to comprehend thoroughly as a physician before liberating
the potent creative forces of the artist.
As an army officer in WWII,
he illustrated several manuals on first-aid for combat troops,
sanitation in the field, and survival in the tropics. In
the late 1930s, shortly before his military duty, he had
already begun what was to become a rewarding and prolific
45-year partnership with the Ciba Pharmaceutical Company
(later Ciba-Geigy, which in 1996 became Novartis), which
resulted in thousands of designs for the serial Clinical
Symposia and what has become his opus magnum, The
Ciba Collection of Medical Illustrations (13 volumes).
The latter illustrates the most important systems and diseases
of the body in painstaking, brilliant detail and remains
one of the most famous medical works ever produced. Netter’s
Atlas of Human Anatomy, first published in 1989
(and translated into 11 languages) presents anatomical paintings
largely culled from The Ciba Collection and is
currently the anatomy atlas of choice among medical and
health professionals the world over. Nearly all the original
works in the current exhibition originate from these published
sources.
Although created for their
intellectual content, Netter’s paintings are appreciated
for their aesthetic qualities, such as their ability to
depict the functionality of organs in a strikingly animated
manner. Although the study of anatomy dates to the ancient
Egyptians, the art of medical illustration did not truly
emerge until the Renaissance, when artists such as Leonardo
da Vinci and Michelangelo created drawings based on cadaveric
dissections. The stringent clarity, stunning accuracy, and
beauty of the works of this ‘Michelangelo of Medicine’
– as a 1976 Saturday Evening Post article
described Netter – follow solidly in the tradition
of this marriage of science and art.
One of the most important blends
of this tradition occurred in the sixteenth century, with
the publication of De Humani Corporis Fabrica in
1543. A collaboration between the anatomist-physician Andreas
Vesalius and the artist Jan Stefan van Kalkar of Flanders,
De Fabrica was the standard anatomy atlas for centuries,
to be enhanced or supplanted only when technological discoveries
(such as the invention of the compound microscope in the
17th century, or the discovery of X-rays in the 19th century)
revealed new knowledge about human anatomy. In the spirit
of collaboration, it is useful to recall that although a
physician/surgeon himself, Netter consulted dozens of medical
experts throughout his career as he conceptualized his paintings.
This is especially true for design projects documenting
new discoveries in medicine, such as computerized axial
tomography (CAT) scanners, joint replacements, and the first
artificial heart transplant.
Always drawn to the complexity
and diversity of people, Netter strived to create faces
and bodies in his work that mirrored their individual personalities.
The result was that disease and trauma are viewed humanely,
that is, as a complex life challenge faced by people rather
than an isolated intellectual puzzle. Netter’s sense
of humanity and empathy for patients is one of the most
distinguishing features of his paintings; as he said, “I
always tried to make [the subject] look like a living patient,
with proper facial expression and so forth, to show that
this is not a machine we are dealing with. We’re not
repairing a television set when we’re treating these
patients.”
Netter spent far more time
researching a subject and planning an illustration than
in executing it. After absorbing from a multitude of sources
as much information as necessary, he typically created pencil
sketches, which were then copied and transformed into finished
designs in gouache – a watercolor technique –
to which he often added opaque paints, colored pencils,
or pastels, for shading and fine detail. Nearly half of
the works in the current exhibition appear with their original
mylar overlays which contain text and additional graphics
that supplemented or completed the paintings in their final,
printed form.
© 2005 Netter Illustrations
used with permission of Icon Learning Systems, a division
of MediMedia USA, Inc. All rights reserved.
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