ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network: The Illustrated Press in France: An Art of the Everyday
22 Jun 1600 (BST) / 1700 (CEST) / 1100 (EDT)
Newspapers and illustrated journals have an important place in the visual culture of nineteenth-century France. Many scholars have remarked on the mass newspaper as the quintessential modern and urban form. As Richard Terdiman has noted, the newspaper "became the most characteristic informational and commercial institution of the nineteenth century." Across the century, we find a broad range of artistic engagements with the printed press, from satirical journals and saucy magazines, to specialist women’s publications, illustrated supplements, and publications with deep political polemic. The variety of these publications are embedded within a nexus of commerciality, mass culture, advances in technology, politics, ideology, and promotion. Taking as its starting point the broad theme of the press in nineteenth-century France, this session will bring together scholars working on the illustrated press across these wide and varied publication types.
Details of Speakers:
Ane Cornelia Pade (University of Cambridge): The public lives of women in Journal des dames et des modes
The Journal des dames et des modes (1797-1839) was amongst the most popular and influential women’s journals of the early postrevolutionary era. The journal was published every five days and provided its readers with regular updates on fashionable life in Paris through articles, reviews, poems, satirical commentary, and fashion plates. The Journal des dames et des modes fashion plates dating from the Directory (1795-1799), the Consulate (1799-1804) and the First French Empire (1804-1814) provide a rare glimpse into the public life of women in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. The talk tracks the visual representation of women in Journal des dames et des modes between 1797 and 1814, exploring the fashion plates’ trajectory from public to domestic settings, from the active gaze of the citoyenne to the concealed face of the modest mother, illustrative of the changing role of women in the early 19th century.
Ane Cornelia Pade is a PhD-candidate in History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD research centres on Parisian public pleasure gardens in the early post-revolutionary era of 1794-1814. In 2020 she published the article 'Tivoli: Negotiating Directory Society in the Public Pleasure Garden 1797-1798' in Documenta. She obtained an MPhil in History of Art and Architecture from Cambridge with distinction and first in her cohort in 2020. Ane Cornelia holds a bachelor’s degree in History of Art from the University of Copenhagen (2019). During her bachelor's degree, she was a visiting student at Yale University (2017) and at Barnard College at Columbia University (2018).
Matthew French (University of Birmingham): ‘Multiple and frank, and not without satirical value’: Toulouse-Lautrec, Politics, and Promotion in the fin-de-siècle Satirical Journal
The final two decades of the Nineteenth-Century witnessed a boom in the illustrated and satirical press, with scholars estimating there to have been around two-hundred illustrated publications between 1870 and 1914 alone. For Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his circle - artists such as the Nabis (principally Pierre Bonnard, Henri Gabriel Ibels, and Félix Vallotton) Adolphe Willette, and Jean-Louis Forain - the illustrated and satirical press industry provided not only an important source of income but also constituted a space in which to exhibit and market one’s work. Writing about the satirical journal Le Rire (1894-1971), Gustave Kahn noted that the satirical press constituted ‘a salon’ for independent artists, in which every week across newsstands and booksellers there was a ‘polychrome glow’ that was ‘unceasingly renewed, multiple and frank, and not without satirical value.’ My thesis explores the ways in which caricature and the caricatural was a current in independent, vanguard art at the fin-de-siècle (particularly in the work of the circle around Toulouse-Lautrec and Ibels) and pays particular attention to competing manifestations of caricature and the caricatural across a range of media. This paper, taken from a chapter of my thesis, will briefly analyse the ways in which Toulouse-Lautrec and his circle engaged with the satirical and illustrated press. It will argue that this “golden age” of the satirical press was fundamental not only in caricature’s adoption by young artists, but instrumental in the marketing of independent, vanguard art. Further, it will allude to caricature’s wider proliferation in which through the adoption of caricature, young artists allowed their art to proliferate across media and enter new spaces of production and exhibition.
Matthew French is a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham (UK). His thesis, The Limits of Legibility: Modernism and the Critical Edge of caricature and the caricatural 1881-1900, explores the use of caricature and the caricatural in independent, vanguard art and its wider proliferation across traditional distinctions of media.
Dr. Sofiane Taouchichet: Presse illustrée, Presse satirique illustrée, une histoire commune?
Numerous works on the illustrated press and the illustrated satirical press describe their historical development, the actors (human and non-human) involved, and their legislation. However, these works make a clear distinction between the illustrated press and the illustrated satirical press. And yet, when we look at the two media categories, we find common uses, shared actors, and convergent aesthetics. It may therefore be necessary to analyze the two genres mutually in order to shed light on the components of 19th-century visual culture. This paper re-interrogates the two media genres in order to highlight a shared chronology, common practices, and, finally, the fact that the illustrated press and the illustrated satirical press belong to the uses of media culture, which in turn determined a universe.
Dr. Sofiane Taouchichet works on the history of representations, media cultures, and political and social imaginaries. He completed his thesis jointly between the universities of Paris Nanterre (Pr. Ségolène Le Men) and Montreal (UdeM, Pr. Todd Porterfield) on the illustrated satirical press and colonization (La presse satirique illustrée et la colonisation (1829-1990)) in 2015 and continues to analyze the structures and uses of visual culture, whether they concern the illustrated satirical press, the legislation of images, or contemporary imagery. In 2022, Sofiane published an article, “Le Débardeuse et son pantalon,” in Apparence(s), and contributed another, “Les représentations satiriques de la misère; Le cas de Gil blas illustré, entre pathétique et rejet,” to Alain Bonnat and Natacha Coquery’s volume Les marchés de la misère: contrôle, exploitation et représentation des classes miséreuses du XVIe siècle à nos jours.
This is a virtual event - the Zoom link will be sent out on the day. For any technical issues, please get in contact via email and we will try and help as best we can.
The network will meet (roughly) once a month virtually via Zoom. It is open to current PhD and research students as well as ECRs who have recently graduated and are making their way in the world of academia/museums/education/arts or heritage. It is global, open to those located anywhere in the world who wish to join. Feel free to join and participate; we hope to create an engaging, diverse, fun and rewarding community.
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