Time: 5:30 pm Eastern time
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE

This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 2:30 pm EST the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. Video recordings are valid for 30 days after the date of the lecture.

Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 3 pm EDT on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.

PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded and available for free for our Patreon members at $5/above. Become a Member HERE.

Sometimes the stately evolution of Art is interrupted by an aberrant mutation. Imagine for a moment that in the early 20th century Modernism and Abstraction had not happened, and instead sculpture followed a different course inspired by Aztec and Northern Gothic, that the dominant form of artistic expression became the tortured anatomy of hybrid offspring of YETIS AND HUMANS, that a sculptor uncovered the truth about the origin of language and that immense monuments were raised in honour of cruel and austere political fantasies?

This is no hoax but an introduction to the true story of Sculptor-anthropologist Stanislaw Szukalski, born Poland 1893 died USA 1987, one of the most talented and furiously committed modelers and draughtsmen ever to fill a gallery with their heady creations, who dreamed of prophetic sculptural apocalypse and died in relative poverty and obscurity surrounded by models of unmade monuments. As a young man in Warsaw he had his own museum, he published a 40 volume of Pseudo-Anthropolgy claiming degeneration in evolution caused by interbreeding between the human and the Yeti, and achieved other surprising things which will be revealed as Eleanor shares her admiration of his sculptural uniqueness and her dismay at his political and anthropological aberrations.

“However prejudiced, distasteful and deluded Szukalski’s beliefs and paranoias were, he expressed them in a powerful and masterly visual language which is really unmatched in 20th-century figuration, almost free from the clichés of fantasy art and the predictability of academic modelling. The first time I came across them I recognised their terrifying beauty and ambition, their Nietzschean arrogance and their morbid elegance, and was filled to the teeth with sculptural envy,” says Eleanor Crook. “And I look forward to introducing him to Morbid Anatomy’s audience, in a way Szukalski’s ideal but unknown public, who I feel certain are best able to appreciate him properly.”

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor and wax modeler who works between the UK and several international medical museums. She is an art tutor at a number of the UK's major art schools and an art educator in various European medical museums. She trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools, working from life and as a medical artist in the dissecting room. She is artist in residence at King’s College’s Gordon Museum of Pathology and the Vrolik Museum Amsterdam. Her work is in the collections of the Science Museum London, Gordon Museum of Pathology Guy's Hospital, the Museum of Pathology at the University of Padua, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society London and the Hunterian Museum Royal College of Surgeons of England. Her specialism is handmade effigies, baroque bronze and eerie lifelike waxes.

Top image: Szukalski’s Mussolini monument

Bottom image: Szukalski’s Yeti emblem