Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture

423 Pages·2017·21.58 MB·English

by  Patricia Mainardi

Another World
Another World
NINETEENTH-CENTURY ILLUSTRATED PRINT CULTURE
Patricia Mainardi
Copyright © 2017 by Patricia Mainardi.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced,
in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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ISBN 978-0-30021906-7
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Jacket illustrations: (front) Grandville, Cast Shadows [Les ombres portées] (fig.
49); (back) Jules Gaildrau, Lighted Kiosks. New Stalls for the Sale of
Newspapers on the Boulevards [Kiosques lumineux. Nouveaux bureaux pour la
vente des journaux sur les boulevards] (fig. 83) Frontispiece: Charles-Joseph
Traviès, You Have to Admit That the Head of State Looks Pretty Funny (detail of
fig. 48)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Another World
1 Drawing’s Stepchild: Lithography and Caricature
2 Spreading the News: The Illustrated Press
3 The Invention of Comics: Stories in Pictures
4 Paths Forgotten, Calls Unheard: Pictures in Stories
5 The Curious History of Popular Imagery in France
Conclusion: A Complete Panorama
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Another World began as a study of the early years of comics. I soon realized that
they could not be considered in isolation because comics were part of a complex
of interrelationships among artists who worked in several media at the same
time, new technology, and new audiences. As I tried to understand the
beginnings of this new art form, my work on comics gradually expanded to
include other areas of illustrated print culture. This book is the result.
Along the way I have benefited enormously from the generosity of my peers.
I am especially grateful to the Research Foundation of the City University of
New York, to the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris, and to the
Yale Center for British Art for their support, which enabled my research over
several years. Colloquia and symposia gave me the opportunity to present the
earliest drafts of my work and to continually revise it. A special thank you to
Ségolène Le Men, whose writing has been an inspiration for my own, and who
organized the 2006 colloquium at INHA, Caricature: Bilan et recherche, where I
first presented aspects of this study. An appointment as Van Gogh Professor at
the Van Gogh Museum and the University of Amsterdam in 2008 provided me
with my earliest opportunity to survey the spectrum of nineteenth-century print
culture and begin to formulate the outline of this book. Kevin Murphy’s 2009
symposium Ephemera: Impermanent Works in the Literary and Visual Culture
of the Long Nineteenth Century at the CUNY Graduate Center enabled me to
discuss popular prints; Ben Katchor’s 2010 symposium The Artist as Author at
Parsons, The New School for Design, encouraged me to look at artist-driven
texts; and Jennifer Tonkovich’s 2011 Morgan Library symposium Drawing in
the Age of Revolution gave me the opportunity to formulate what became my
first chapter, “Drawing’s Stepchild.” Most recently Marie-Eve Thérenty’s 2015
colloquium on Presse et littérature du XIXe au XXIe siècle at the NYU Institute of
French Studies and Christiane Schwab’s 2015 Dissecting Society: Periodical
Literature and Social Observation (1830–1850) at NYU’s Center for International
Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (CIRHUS) permitted me to
discuss my work with specialists in these areas. I am also thankful for the chance
to offer lectures and presentations that contributed to this work at the Musée
d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania
Material Culture Workshop, NYU’s Maison Française, and, several times, at the
College Art Association annual conference.
Among the many friends and colleagues to whom I owe debts of gratitude, I
am especially grateful to Herman Lebovics, whose incisive reading has greatly
improved this text. Vanessa Schwartz’s and Ruth Iskin’s comments have proved
invaluable. Colleagues in art history and especially in the world of prints have
been generous with their time and advice: I thank warmly Philippe Bordes,
Veronique Chagnon-Burke, Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, Elizabeth Childs,
David Christie, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Therese Dolan, Stephen Edidin,
Madeleine Fidell-Beaufort, Gillian Forrester, Andrea Immel, Ben Katchor,
Diane Kelder, Lars Kokkonen, Marilyn Kushner, Heather Lemonedes, Karen
Maguire, Constance McPhee, Nadine Orenstein, Caterina Pierre, Mary Frances
Zawadzki. Friends, in particular Iska Alter, Faiza Bellounis, William Long,
Pamela Mainardi, and Jessica Robinson, have helped in numerous ways; at Yale
I thank Amy Canonico, Heidi Downey, Sarah Henry, and Leslie Fitch. In many
ways they are all coauthors of this project, and whatever value it has I happily
share with them.
Where known, I have included the names of engravers (engr.) and
lithographers (lith.), although they were not always identified. “Mr” as an
abbreviation for Monsieur often appears in titles of early comics, so I have left it
in my French citations wherever it occurs, while using “Mr.” for translations. All
translations are my own unless otherwise identified.
Introduction
Another World
Between the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, more
prints, illustrated books, magazines, and newspapers were produced in the
Western world than in previous centuries combined, an efflorescence
comparable only to the period following Gutenberg’s invention of movable type
when printed material first circulated widely in Europe. This book is about the
next wave of illustrated print culture, a tidal wave in comparison to the first, and
one that ushered in the modern world. To borrow the title of the 1844 visionary
novel by the artist known as Grandville, this period constitutes Another World,
adjacent to our own, both familiar and vastly different at the same time.1 Only
gradually did that other world become our world, where we are bombarded with
images on a daily basis. Not only was there a proliferation of imagery
throughout the nineteenth century, there were new kinds of images, or old kinds
of images in new media. Until recently only bits and pieces of this history had
surfaced, often in relation to high-art production, when a particular image was
discovered to have influenced a particular painting.
Much of this transformation took place in France, the epicenter of this media
explosion and the main focus of this book. Nonetheless, art was becoming global
in that period, as were steam shipping and the textile trade. International
exchanges of technology and genres informed the development of illustrated
print culture everywhere, and so this discussion must range across national
borders. This is not a book about “illustration,” however, if that word is
understood to imply a hierarchy between word and image in which images are
subordinate to text. Nor can this be an exhaustive study of illustrated print
media, which would necessitate numerous volumes. It is, instead, a book about
the development of the new graphic language enabled by advances in
reproductive technology, a vernacular language of drawing that developed
parallel to, and at times in opposition to, the language of high art. Rather than
offering the reader yet another theoretical analysis of popular culture, although
this literature has helped greatly in situating my theme, what I have written is
more in the nature of an archaeology of the stratum of visual imagery lying just
below the surface of high art.
In any study of visual culture, the prime question is always how wide a net to
cast. As Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski set forth in their essay
“Visual Culture’s History,” the two polar positions are to include everything
(visual culture), or to focus only on quality (art history).2 In this book I chart a
middle ground between the works of high art exhibited in the Salons and the
ephemera of everyday life that scarcely merited a second look. I have chosen
five key areas for discussion: lithographic imagery, particularly caricature; the
illustrated press; comics; illustrated books; and popular prints. The images I
discuss here were never considered high art, never destined for exhibitions, and
yet they were designed for visual pleasure. Their projected audiences ranged
widely. At one extreme were the illiterate or semiliterate classes who constituted
the audience for popular prints in which the image could carry meaning
exclusive of text. Caricature, which appealed to all classes, was always tightly
regulated in France because the authorities feared its perceived accessibility to
these same unlettered and potentially dangerous classes.3 Artisans and the petite
bourgeoisie could afford prints, some books, and the less expensive periodicals,
and the bourgeoisie and aristocracy constituted the audience for richly illustrated
and luxuriously bound publications of all genres. As a result, we cannot discuss
illustrated print culture as though it had a clearly definable audience but must,
instead, see it as a prism reflecting a multitude of facets.
Within the nineteenth century, technological innovation, motivated by the
drive to reach new audiences either for ideology or for profit, had transfigured
the world of the visual. Artists striving to reach wide audiences and to test the
limits of new media transformed the visual world in lasting ways. The new
graphic language that resulted, with its imaginative possibilities and visual
strategies, is like a submerged continent that we are just beginning to discover,
but which, when better known, will significantly remap our understanding of the
role of the visual in that century.
Because I am interested in the symbiosis between technological innovation
and advances in artistic expression, thence to the consumption of art, I have
organized this study chronologically to highlight the invention of each new
illustrated print medium. The fructification that forms the subject of this book
was initiated and enriched by this technology, resulting in a new system of
aesthetic production with specialists in each medium who catered to the tastes of
a segment of the newly enfranchised public. This book traces out the network of
alliances between new technologies, innovation, and new publics. By 1870,
when the Republic was permanently established, new art forms for new classes
of citizens were already in existence. The invention of lithography begot
caricature, as well as an enormous amount of printed imagery of contemporary
life and landscape; wood engraving made possible the illustrated press and
encouraged the proliferation of illustrated books as well as their new formats.
Both media made comics possible, at first lithographed, later wood engraved. In
the course of their history, popular prints utilized all available print media,
quickly abandoning each new process as it was replaced by something faster,
cheaper, simpler. Although vastly different in content, all these media—
caricatures, periodicals, comics, popular prints, and illustrated books and
journals—utilized similar reproductive processes, all invented or developed in
the course of the century.
I have focused on these major areas as the most fruitful for investigation
because each arose at the inception of a particular technological advance. I
highlight the ways in which technological developments informed and inspired
the various media, their integration into contemporaneous visual culture, and the
issues and arguments that greeted their early manifestations. In each case, the
technological, the aesthetic, the political, and the cultural were intertwined, as
each subsequent development interacted with what had come before. I focus
exclusively on the fecund moment of invention of both new technology and new
visualization because it is at this moment of inception and innovation that all
things are possible; later, each medium will, inevitably, settle into its defined
mode.
Were I to attempt to write a history of nineteenth-century illustration—even
limited to France alone—it would run to dozens of volumes. That is not my
intention here. I am interested in the moment of discovery or invention of these
new illustrated print media, as each was greeted with criticism, enthusiasm,
sometimes even euphoria, and as artists and publishers explored the limits of its
potential. In each case the euphoria lasted, at most, a few decades before each
new medium became assimilated and integrated into visual culture. It is my
thesis that during these early years, when each medium was defining itself and
finding its audience, many of the modes and tropes that subsequently became
ubiquitous were invented. My intention is to explore the optimism and energy of
these beginnings, as another world was rapidly becoming our world.
Several themes run throughout the entire book. The growth of the