Frederick Coates: First World War ‘facial architect’

Abstract

The role of artists in the First World War is often understood only in terms of their artistic response to the conflict in paint, music, or sculpture. In fact, artists’ contributions were also engaged at an applied level, for example in the areas of propaganda, camouflage, and map-making. Beyond this, a small number participated in repairing the damage caused by the conflict. Frederick Coates, a British-born sculptor who emigrated to Canada in 1913, enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force and worked alongside surgeons and other artists to try and help give new features to facially injured combatants. Drawing upon unpublished photographs and scrapbooks, this article investigates Coates’s war experience and his contribution to the reconstruction of broken faces. Through a close examination of this ‘facial architect’, as Coates was called, this article gives an insight into the work performed in maxillofacial hospitals and underlines the importance of cross-national, multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Keywords:

• Disfigurement
• Epitheses
• First World War
• Sculpture
• Maxillofacial hospital

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an ERDF INTERREG IV grant [number SX-06038].

Notes on contributors

Marjorie Gehrhardt

Notes on contributors

Dr Marjorie Gehrhardt is lecturer in French History at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on war and its representations in twentieth-century Western Europe, with a particular interest in the reintegration of veterans and the role of charities in wartime. Her book The Men without Faces: Gueules Cassees of the First World War came out in 2014.

Suzanne Steele

Suzanne Steele is a practising artist and a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Her thesis on The Art of Witness: Truth, Process, and Form in the Great War Narrative of Robert Graves, Mary Borden, and David Jones looks at the ethics and aesthetics of witness in the theatre of war.