Carole A. Feuerman’s 1976 body part fragments

By Barbara Buhler Lynes

In the early 1970s, Carole A. Feuerman sought to move away from her career as an illustrator in order to establish herself as a sculptor in the arena of fine art. As she later remarked: “I found the medium of sculpture calling out to me, like some distant, mysterious call that went straight into my heart.”1 She regards her Self-Portrait, 1973 (fig. 1) as a transitional work that merges painting and three-dimensional forms: legs and shoes. Another work from the same period can also be seen in this light, the witty image, Nose to the Grindstone, 1975 (fig. 2). Commissioned by National Lampoon to create an image for the magazine’s cover illustrating the idiom for hard work, Feuerman produced a wax cast of a man’s head, with his mouth open as if in a scream, and she painted it with striking realism. The piece was photographed with a whirring grindstone cutting into its nose and chin, red paint was added to suggest bleeding, and the image appeared on the cover of the November 1975 issue. Feuerman recalls: “It was my first life casting,” describing it as a “bridge to [her] transition [from illustrating] to making sculptures.”2

By the late 1970s, Feuerman was creating sculptural fragments of athletes and swimmers — body parts such as feet, legs, and the shoes of ballet dancers — examples include the armless, high-relief bust, Catalina, 1978 (cat. 36). The realism of this late 1970s life-like fragment sculpture along with works from the following decade, such as En 2-0278, 1981 (cat. 50), and Innertube, 1984-1987 (cat. 53), is remarkable. They are meticulously painted, absorbing the viewer in the sensuality of colour, flesh, and other materials. These figures convey an intimate sense of  psychological and emotional self-satisfaction, while inviting the imagination to complete their missing parts. Feuerman explains: “I like the idea that my figures encourage the viewer to look closely at what stands before them. I want the viewer to complete the story.”3 These highly realistic works have been mistakenly associated with the Hyperrealist works of Duane Hanson and John de Andrea. As Demetrio Paparoni has recently shown, Feuerman’s work differs markedly from theirs and is best understood as Superrealism.4 Unlike the Hyperrealists, “Feuerman never wished for [her] subjects to be mistaken for real people.”5

Since the early 1980s, Feuerman’s art has been widely exhibited both in the United States and internationally.6 Yet, her 1976 body part fragments, which best represent her earliest explorations of this sculptural mode, have received scant attention and are the subject of the following discussion (cats. 6-9, 11-22, 24-26, 34, 48). Conceived to be installed on walls, these works engage the viewer as both sculpture and paintings; they are both three-and two-dimensional, and the following section situates their significance within the broader history of the fragment in sculpture and the two-dimensional media of painting and photography.

These 1976 works represent the realisation of a much earlier assignment at the School of Visual Arts. After being shown in class examples of “erotic art” in the work of both Asian and Western artists, students were asked to address the subject in their own work. At the time, Feuerman questioned the meaning of the term, as she later pointed out: “I started with the only homework assignment I had trouble with what is erotic art?” She questioned: “Is it sexy or is it intellectual? I quickly concluded it was both things.”7 She further explained: “I was always interested in the figure. But technically, I did my pieces [fragment series] because I wanted to start working with small shapes I could handle. I loved the beauty of the body, looking at the whole shape but focusing on just a small section.”8

She learned live body casting at Canal Plastics, New York, and from realist sculptor Ben Bianchi, who modelled for Duane Hanson Artist with Ladder (1972). As Feuerman explained: “After Bianchi taught me how to cast, I made my first sculptures. Panda (cat. 5), my very first piece was a little bit of my hip, a very tiny fragment with two male fingers on it. I did thirteen sculptures, all realistically painted. In all of these sculptures I used fragments taken from people” often assigning them witty titles, such as Red Tie (cat. 6), Jean Shorts (cat. 7), Kiss (cat. 11), Lace Panties (cats. 14, 16), Salutation to the Flowers (cat. 17), Three Hands (cat. 19), and Looking in the Medicine Cabinet (cat. 25).9

Writing about Feuerman’s earliest fragments, Eleanor Monro has stated: “The fragmenting, deconstructive program, from Cubism to Surrealism has been a theme of the twentieth-century art, and Feuerman’s plan to make ‘fine art’ out of the human body deconstructed to its sexual impulse was in line with the times.”10 Indeed, Feuerman’s fragments emerged not only within the context of new artistic movements, such as Pop-Art, Photo-Realism, and Hyperrealism, but also amid the political protests and the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The latter encouraged and empowered women to assert themselves in new ways, particularly regarding their bodies, physicality, and sexuality — issues Feuerman was eager to explore. Moreover, because her 1976 fragments present both female and male body parts, they directly engage with the question of gender equality, another fundamental feminist concern.

The depiction of body parts fragments in art dates back to ancient Egypt and has persisted throughout the centuries — in Roman death masks, votive reliefs and medieval reliquaries. And, of course, plaster casts of heads and body parts have long served as essential teaching tools for art students learning to draw and sculpt. Yet none of these were conceived as wall-mounted sculptures. As art historian Albert Elsen observed in reference to Auguste Rodin’s work, it was not until the 19th century that sculptural fragments came to be recognised as works of art: “That the torsos and smaller parts of the body should play an important role in the evolution of a sculptor’s work, be widespread in serious art, and as a motif have a rich secular as well as spiritual implication is a phenomenon in art history reserved for the last ninety years of western sculpture.”11

Rodin was the first to challenge long-held academic standards for sculpture. He sometimes broke apart existing works in his possession, emphasizing their evocative power as fragments. He also admired and collected fragments of Greek and Roman sculptures, using them as points of departure for creating his own fragment works that he exhibited as finished art, again challenging academic standards that considered fragments unacceptable for exhibition. Rodin’s ideas about sculpture and the expressive potential of fragments profoundly influenced many other artists, including artist Jacques Lipschitz who wrote: “Rodin was breaking sculpture, breaking away an arm, a leg or a head and I was wondering why he did it, because it was very attractive and it works, very effective; it gives to the work a kind of mystery, unfinished, so I understand that he did it intuitively. The real element that is needed in order to be effective in sculpture is mystery. Well, I adopted it.”12 Feuerman’s early sculptures have been discussed in the context of Rodin’s fascination with fragments as well as his place in the history of art, along with that of the unfinished works of Michelangelo, both of whom Feuerman acknowledges as influences on her work.13 Her 1976 fragments also relate to the sculpture of two of her contemporaries, George Segal and Bruce Nauman, both of whom incorporated body fragments into their artistic vocabulary in the 1960s. Nauman used the wax casting process to create From Hand to Mouth (1967), arguably the first three-dimensional sculpture intended for installation on a two-dimensional surface. It thus anticipates Feuerman’s exploration of the same synthesis in 1976. But unlike Feuerman’s fragments of that year, Nauman’s piece is a visual play on an idiom; the hand does not engage any other part of the body, and neither the work nor its edges are painted.

In the 1960s, Segal began using medical gauze and plaster bandages as art materials. He applied them to live models, creating full-body casts, leaving most unpainted, intending them to be seen in the round. They were often displayed in groups as tableaux conveying the essence of human existential despair. Although best known for these works, Segal used the same technique to cast body part fragments that he did not intend to exhibit at the time.

Rather, these fragments were later included in exhibitions after his signature pieces become well-known, “appropriating them [for exhibition] as if they were a sort of found object that he had created and then set aside.”14

Although aware of Segal’s signature works, Feuerman had not seen his fragments before creating Panda. The realism of this highly detailed oil on resin piece, cast from her own body, is amplified further by its meticulously painted surface. The male fingers touching a fragment of blue underwear painted so realistically that it seems to be soft cloth, call attention to female private body parts. The detailed finger and thumb are highly realistic at the same time that they become interlocking triangular and oval shapes. Both gently touch the edges of the triangle of cloth, whose texture is as palpable as the flesh of the hip. Again, quoting Feuerman: “I love the contradictions in this kind of work, between soft flesh and hard material, or half-abstract, half-real. I want to have something of a contradiction.”15

Other fragments from 1976 are frontal depictions of the torsos, buttocks or crotches of male and female bodies, either clothed in underwear or other garments or semi-nude, such as Red Tie, 1976 (cat. 6), Suspenders, 1976 (cat. 24), Jean Shorts (cat. 8), or Lace Panties (cats. 14, 16).

These images reveal Feuerman’s commitment to feminist aims — women depicting and thereby claiming control over their own bodies. They are highly sensual, fraught with the realism of meticulously painted fleshy forms, human hair, and varying cloth textures. As in Panda, however, these tangible and provocative forms also function as geometric, abstract shapes — ovals, triangles, and circles — echoing the formal play present in all of Feuerman’s body-part fragments, such as Red Tie, 1976 (cat. 6), Salutations to the Flowers (cat. 17), Three Hands (cat. 19), or Looking in the Medicine Cabinet, 1976 (cat. 25). The tangle of forms in Three Hands (cat. 19), for example, plays on gesture, touch,  and identity, offsetting the white triangle of underwear against the fleshy hips,  and the triangles and oval shapes of seemingly real fingers and thumbs that appear poised to move at any moment — compressed within yet extending beyond an overall oval composition. Similarly, the male body in Joe’s Belly, 1976 (cat. 26) is provocative: two female hands are included, one perhaps restraining the male hand from pulling the gun that he holds. Like all of Feuerman’s 1976 works,  these pieces are at once superrealistic and abstract, dynamic yet static, consistently revealing Feuerman’s intention of expressing contradictions between “soft flesh and hard material, or half-abstract, half-real.”16

By the mid-1970s, Segal’s cast sculptures of body parts and de Andrea’s full-body female nudes, such as Dorothy (1969-1970), had been exhibited in New York galleries, but Feuerman was unable to secure a venue for her 1976 works there, despite their being “in line with the time.”  However, they were shown in 1978 in Fort Worth, Texas, at the MSJ Gallery. The artist titled the exhibition, Fragments, Rated X, implying awareness of its provocativeness. The opening attracted no audience, was considered objectionable by the local community and closed almost immediately.17 Although the gallery exhibited the works at the Switzerland Art Basel Fair, they gained no traction. The sting of rejection prompted Feuerman to move in a new direction. As she stated: “I decided if the world was not ready for my erotic pieces, I’d take the least erotic subject I could think of, namely sports”, subsequently making swimmers, dancers, and other athletes the subjects of her work.18 Yet, in 1981, her early fragment sculptures captured the attention of famous entrepreneur, publisher, and art collector, Malcolm Forbes, when she did secure a New York venue for her work at the Hanson Gallery. “He bought all thirteen of my erotic sculptures. Somehow, he spied them in the back room of the gallery.”19 Thereafter, all of the works in the exhibition were sold, and Feuerman’s audience and recognition expanded.

In her essay, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment in Art as a Metaphor of Modernity, Linda Nochlin provides a succinct history of the appearance of body part fragments in nineteenth-century painting, from the Neoclassical period into the early twentieth century.20 She associates the fragment in painting with the new ways of seeing that photography provided since its invention in the 1830s. Nochlin discusses how photography not only challenged the art of painting, but that it captured the attention of painters whose works often included cropped forms as seen cut off or as fragments in photographs, such as Edgar Degas’ Ballerinas in Pink (1876, Hill-Stead Museum, fig. 3). Rarely did paintings isolate fragments of body parts as subjects. Arguably, one of the few earlier examples before the mid-twentieth century is Sarah Goodridge’s 2 5/8 x 3 1/8-inch watercolour on ivory, Beauty Revealed, 1828 (fig. 4).21

Although some nineteenth-century photographer produce images of human body parts, their focus was on scientific and medical studies. The first to explore body part fragments in photography was Alfred Stieglitz, in his celebrated portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, dating from 1918 to 1937. Interestingly, Stieglitz was a great admirer of Rodin, and as art historian Anne McCauley has pointed out: “If anyone embodied the aesthetic goals of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen during the pre-war period, it was the internationally celebrated French master, Auguste Rodin.”22 Steichen befriended Rodin in the 1910s, and his stunning photographs of the sculptor and of some of his works were published in the 1911, 34/35 issue of Stieglitz’s avant-garde journal Camera Work, along with essays by various colleagues praising Rodin.23

Moreover, in 1908, Stieglitz presented figures at his famous avant-garde gallery 291 — an exhibition that Steichen organised, featuring 58 Rodin watercolour drawings of erotic female nudes — followed by another in 1910. Stieglitz owned eleven Rodin works and could not have been unaware of the sculptor’s avant-garde ideas. Although no extant documentation confirms a direct influence of Rodin’s interest in fragments on Stieglitz, the visual parallels are evident in many of his photographs, especially those of O’Keeffe. Many were close-up, “straight” (sharply focused) rather than “soft-focus” photographs of parts of her nude body: face, neck, breasts, torso, crotch, legs, and feet, as in his Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait — Breasts, 1919 (fig. 5), which represents a milestone in the history of photography.24 These photographs capture fragments of O’Keeffe’s three-dimensional form while simultaneously reading as abstract compositions of ovals, circles, and triangles. Feuerman was unaware of Stieglitz’s photographs, or those of subsequent photographers who addressed the same subject, such as Ruth Barnard, Brassaï, Man Ray, Paul Strand, or Edward Weston. Yet the combinations of body part fragments in Georgia O’Keeffe — Hand and Breasts, 1919 (fig. 6) and Man Ray’s Violin d’Ingres, 1924 (fig. 7) uncannily call to mind similar synthesis in Feuerman’s 1976 body part fragments, such as in Hand on Bra, 1976 (cat. 13), Suspenders, 1976 (cat. 24) and Nude on Bicycle, 1976 (cat. 48).

Feuerman’s work, however, differs from theirs in key ways. When hands touch female bodies, they are often gestural and frequently male — sometimes interacting with female hands, as in Panda, 1976 (cat. 5), Red Tie, 1976 (cat. 6), and Kiss, 1976 (cat. 11) — thereby heightening the tension and ambiguity of what is seen.  Moreover, her works, as a three-dimensional wall sculpture, occupy physical space in ways that paintings and photographs do not, even though, like photographs, they are viewed against walls. Her body part fragments do not function as free-standing forms, but rather as hybrids — a synthesis of three- and two-dimensionality. Their shapes, colours, and textures engage us in a dialogue between what we see and how these forms resemble and yet differ from their own physical selves. They appear familiar yet foreign, occupying space as fragments of bodies that seem alive, soft, often touched by hands that suggest the potential of movement. They exist as dynamic forms frozen in time, synthesising the concrete and the abstract, prompting questions of how we see and perceive ourselves. They query what it is to be human, engage us in seeing the body in new ways, and perceive simple forms as complex and enigmatic, as evoking both emotion and the impulse to touch. They provocatively raise the question of what is real as we respond to forms that are intimately familiar to and yet separate from ourselves. 

Was Stieglitz’s exhibition of the provocative photographs of O’Keeffe censored, or those of similar subjects by other photographers, as Feuerman’s were when exhibited in Texas? Just the opposite. As art critic Henry McBride put it for Stieglitz’s exhibition: “It made a stir. Mona Lisa got but one portrait of herself worth talking about. O'Keeffe got a hundred. It put her on the map at once. Everybody knew the name. She became what is known as a newspaper personality. The New Yorker consecrated one of its ‘Profiles’ to her.”25 When Stieglitz organised his next exhibition of O’Keeffe’s recently made work in 1923, his photographs had already primed critics to interpret to celebrate what they saw through a Freudian lens — as an expression of O’Keeffe’s sexuality and gender.26

The difference between the enthusiastic reception of Stieglitz’s 1921 photographs of fragments of O’Keeffe’s and the censorship of Feuerman’s 1976 body part fragments decades later raises fascinating rhetorical questions. Would Feuerman’s 1976 work have been censored if shown in New York in the mid-1970s by a gallerist as influential as Stieglitz or if it had been the work of a male rather than a female artist? Would her 1978 Texas exhibition have been censored if it had included only female body part fragments? Would censorship have come into play if Stieglitz’s 1921 exhibition presented photographs of fragmented nude male body parts, or a combination of male and female body fragments?27 How might Feuerman’s career have developed had her 1976 works not been censored in 1978? Would what she has completed be included in the 2025 exhibition at the Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, Erotic City, curated by renowned feminist artist Martha Edelheit?

Yet the larger issue remains. As this discussion of Feuerman’s 1976 body part fragments — viewed within the broader history of sculpture, painting, and photography — has demonstrated, her work’s synthesis of abstraction and hyperrealism, and its unique simultaneity as three-dimensional forms conceived for wall installation, is without precedent in American art of the mid-1970s. It should be recognised for its significance as such. Nevertheless, these works remained largely unseen after their exhibition at the Hanson Gallery, New York, in 1981, until recently,  when they were exhibited again in the city — together with several of Feuerman’s later pieces — in the exhibition Carole A. Feuerman: Long Island Girl at the Museum of Sex (January 3–August 31, 2025). They will be exhibited, along with Feuerman’s more recent works, at the Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, The Body’s Voice, July 3–September 21, 2025. Although the 1976 works are decidedly engaging, enigmatic, ambiguous and provocative, are they erotic? The answer lies in the mind and emotions of the beholder.

1 - Carole A. Feuerman, My Hyperrealist Life and Legacy, Paramount Publisher, New York, 2021, second edition, p. 89.
2 - Ivi, p. 120.
3 - Eleanor Monro, “The Sculpture of Carole A. Feuerman”, in Carole A. Feuerman Sculpture, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1999, p. 24.
4 - Demetrio Paparoni, Feuerman: Superrealist Sculptures, Rizzoli, New York, 2024, pp. 11-52.
5 - Ivi, pp. 20-21.
6 - 1998, Queens Museum of Art, New York; 2001, Southern Alleghenies Museum, Loretto Pennsylvania; 2002, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; 2010, El Paso Museum of Art, Texas; 2008, Amarillo Art Museum, Texas, the same year her sculpture, The Survival of Serena (2007) won first prize in the 2008 Beijing Biennale. And more recently, her work has been exhibited at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy, in 2021, and in 2024, at the Giardini dellaBiennale, Venice, Italy.
7 - Feuerman, cit., p. 121.
8 - Monro, cit., p. 24.
9 - Feuerman, cit., p. 121.
10 - Monro, cit., p. 25.
11 - Albert Elsen, The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture from Rodin to 1969, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, 1969, p. 15.
12 - Jacques Lipchitz, A Retrospective Selected by the Artist (exhibition catalogue), University of California Art Gallery, Los Angeles, 1963-1964, p. 9.
13 - Paparoni, cit., n. 1.
14 - Paparoni, cit., p. 24.
15 - Monro, cit., p. 20.
16 - Ibid.
17 - After decades of being exhibited as some of the most highly important examples of contemporary photography, some of Sally Mann’s nude images of her children were removed from a 2025 exhibition at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, when the Dallas Express interpreted them as examples of child pornography.
18 - Monro, cit., p. 26.
19 - Feuerman, cit., pp. 124-125.
20 - See Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, Thames and Hudson, New York, 2001.
21 - My thanks to my colleague, Jonathan Frederick Walz, for bringing this image to my attention.
22 - Anne McCauley, “August Rodin, 1908 and 1910: The Eternal Feminine”, in Sarah Greenough, Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, Bulfinch Press and National Gallery of Art, New York and Washington, 2000, p. 71.
23 - Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, 34/35 (1911).
24 - In 1909, Stieglitz and Clarence White made a soft-focus image of the head and torso of a female nude published in Camera Work, 27 (1909).
25 - Henry McBride, “O'Keeffe at the Museum”, in New York Sun, May 18, 1946, p. 9.
26 - For a discussion of the critical reception of O’Keeffe’s art in the 1910s and 1920s and how O’Keeffe responded to it, see Barbara Buhler Lynes, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929, UMI Research Press, 1989; University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991.
27 - An exhibition of Robert Maplethorpe’s photographs of nude male bodies, scheduled for exhibition in the late 1980s at the Corcoran Gallery of Art never opened because its content was considered too controversial.