Kathryn Desplanque: Art-world Satire in Print During the 18th and 19th Centuries

Our ideological investment in a narrative that aligns the story of modern art with the story of the artist’s liberation has a dark underbelly. Whom or what does this narrative serve and what does it obscure? Is not the visual artist liberated also another way of molding artistic work to the ethos of competitive individualism?

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries artists demonstrated a nuanced awareness of these transitions, and criticized their impact on the artist, art object, and the art world prolifically and vociferously. But their protests have escaped our notice, having been conducted in a medium marginalized or overlooked in the field of art history: the satirical image. This talk surveys the genre of art-world graphic satire—a corpus of 530 images that satirize Paris’ art-world and range from eighteenth-century loose-leaf etchings and engravings, to Revolutionary and early nineteenth-century satirical image albums in etching and lithography, to the lithographic satirical periodical press established around 1830.

Art-world satire’s protagonist is the starving or inglorious artist, which served as a vehicle to visibilize invisible structural changes in Paris’ art world. Through the inglorious artist and other figures, art-world satire explores the shift in the status of the artist, the organization of the art world from a corporate model to a free market, the emergence of a bourgeois market for art, and the unresolved debate on art’s status as a mechanical or liberal art.