Ausstellung: Health for Sale

April 1, 2011

From April 1 to July 31, 2011, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is exhibiting “Health for Sale”, a collection of antique medical- and health-related posters from the William H. Helfand Collection. One of the museum’s exhibits is “Der Mensch als Industriepalast”, a 1926 poster by Fritz Kahn that depicts the human body as a factory in cross-section. The lithograph is accompanied by a computer-animated visualization from 2009, based on the Fritz Kahn original, that shows the poster’s industrialized human-machine in motion. The visualization was planned and executed by German computer artist Henning Lederer. (The original poster and Lederer’s installation are both included in the first monograph on Kahn, Fritz Kahn – Man Machine.) The museum states that the exhibition exists to show how hygiene, medical conferences, public health campaigns, and cure-all medications were advertised in the early 20th century.
Exhibition information