the visible man found

Early one Christmas morning back in the 1960s, I opened my pillow-case to discover a box exactly the same as this one.

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I thought the artwork on it beautiful… I still do all these years later… and that was before even I saw what was inside.

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The figure didn’t emerge from the box looking like this. It was in kit-form, and for even the most dextrous fingers and questing young mind, constructing it was a daunting challenge.

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The instructions began with the assembling of the skeleton…

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… moving on to first identifying and then putting together the organs…

… before the most difficult stage of getting them all snugly into place. It was quite disheartening to see them scattered on the table around the plastic casing of the torso, because it looked as though they’d never fit inside.

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There’s a second leaflet, An Introduction to Anatomy, to contextualize the model with descriptions of the body’s systems and how they work.

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The Visible Man was launched in 1959, and so was in the first flush of youth when he appeared that memorable Christmas morning in my pillow case. The model here is not the one I was given by my parents. (I don’t know where that went.) I’d been searching for many years when I came across this one being sold on a site in the USA. These figures are quite fragile and need either to have been very well-cared for, or kept unused in their boxes. This one had survived being assembled (some of the more delicate parts are easy to break) but had then been safely stored in its box, and so although the packaging is as worn at the edges as you’d expect after all these years,  the figure within has been perfectly preserved. Neither has it been painted in model-kit enamels, which suits me perfectly. I never painted my childhood Visible Man, liking him just the way he was.

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I’m quite sure it was this toy that helped form my interest in the body and how it works. And that interest channelled into my work, initially as a dancer and choreographer, and later as a painter. Suffice to say that when the model arrived in the post, its interior parts were a little jumbled. However after briefly reacquainting myself with the figure, I found that I was able to reorganise them correctly with practised ease. What the brain had forgotten, the hands remembered!

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I want to take this opportunity to thank Heidi Egan who was such a pleasure to deal with at her Etsy shop VintageShoppingSpree. Heidi swiftly calculated the cost of the postage, and meticulously packaged the model to send it safely all the way to Wales.

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The manufacturer was Renwal, Mineola. N. Y.

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The following are acknowledged on the leaflet for having loaned invaluable technical assistance:

Dr. Elliot Osserman

Dr. J. Lawrence Pool

Dr. Vito J. Kemezis

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But most of all, I celebrate the designer of The Visible Man:

Marcel Jovine

You did an incredible job Marcl!

The original The Visible Man, together with that of The Visible Woman, has been re-packaged and marketed through the decades, and indeed both are still available today, though the packaging is not nearly as beautiful. You can see how the kit has been marketed over the years HERE.