Changing concepts of decorum and allure in the representation of teeth in art

During the twentieth century western attitudes towards facial beauty have been transformed by developments in modern dental science. The possibility not only of retaining one's own teeth in adulthood, but also improving their appearance, changing the position, shape and colour, altering the contours of the face, eliminating deformity through different kinds of surgery--all of these astonishing developments have brought about a fundamental change in the way we see the human face, and how we expect it to look back at us. This paper illustrates the extent of the transformation of western attitudes towards facial beauty in the twentieth century by examining the ways artists have represented or, more frequently, concealed teeth in European painting and sculpture at key points since the sixteenth century. It examines some traditional prejudices (which still flourished in Victorian Britain, for example) against the open display of teeth, long regarded as threatening, indecent, at times lurid, rarely beautiful. It explores the widespread belief that rotten teeth were synonymous with moral corruption. It assesses the impact of modern media upon recent and quite radically different canons of beauty--the twentieth-century emphasis upon facial symmetry, for example, a concept foreign to the European portrait tradition--and concludes by examining a unique collaboration between artists, patients and maxillofacial surgeons currently taking place in the Cleft Palate Unit at Guy's Hospital in London, a project organized by the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford University.