Caleb Smith’s Michel Foucault, the Bogeyman of the Culture Wars in The Chronicle

One day in the mid-1940s, in the quiet French city of Poitiers, the Surrealist painter André Masson was invited by his doctor to take a look at a curious medical specimen: the preserved corpse of a stillborn human infant, afflicted by a lesion that had opened up its skull. Masson, who was known for his nightmarish images of disfigured bodies, was entranced. He drew a picture that has taken on a legendary status in some circles, though it remains in a private family collection. The artist presented the drawing as a gift to his doctor, the distinguished surgeon Paul Foucault, who held onto it until his death, in 1959, at which time he passed it down to his son, a young philosopher, Michel Foucault.

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