Anna Coleman Ladd and Francis Derwent Wood
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A number of artists were associated with the production of facial prostheses for servicemen whose injuries were so severe that they required partial masks to give the appearance of a ‘complete face’.
Whilst Coleman Ladd worked under the auspices of the American Red Cross at Val-de-Grace Military Hospital near Paris, Derwent Wood was attached to the Third London General Hospital in what became known as the ‘Tin Noses Shop’. Although the masks were uncomfortable and unpopular, the facial prosthetics were produced partly because of economic necessity. Injured servicemen needed to provide for themselves and their families after they left the forces and feel as included in society as possible. The Paris studio alone produced 220 masks between 1918 and 1919 and many masks covered only small portions of the face such as the nose or eye.
Derwent Wood said of his work,
‘my work begins where that of the surgeon ends. When the surgeon has done all he can to restore function, to heal wounds, to support fleshy tissue by bone grafting, I endeavour by means of the skill I happen to possess as a sculptor to make a mans face as near as possible to what it would look like before he was wounded’. Even so, the unmistakable sheen of oil paint on metal meant that many of the injured men still felt conspicuous which explains why may trained as projectionists in the new branch of the entertainment industry, cinema. Men could arrive at work before anyone else, spend their working day alone and leave at night once everyone had left. One could say that at the time, the masks were made just as much for the benefit of the viewer as the wearer.
