Introduction
Figure 0.1. Jan Josef Horemans the Elder, L’Atelier du peintre, early 18th century, oil on canvas.
The Artist’s Studio is quiet and sparse, his tools few but each essential: light from a window, a canvas on an easel, a palette, a brush, and himself. He needs nothing but a quiet space where he can release the genius that courses from his mind and his heart to his fingers, his brush, then the canvas. Called to the fine arts, he abandons his care for the material world in favor of the worlds he creates. The artist is poor but noble, starving yet industrious. He is so absorbed by his calling that he has not the time nor the inclination to fuss over the quotidian details to which the rest of us devote most of our attention.1
This fantasy of the artist has been embellished by the Western imagination for centuries in a procession of drawings, paintings, stories, and poems that celebrate the artist for his thrift, his solitude, his toil, and his perseverance.2 Jan Josef Horemans the Elder’s L’Atelier du peintre (The Studio of the Painter) provides an eighteenth-century template (Figure 0.1). To the left, students study a nude posed model. A young assistant, perhaps a pigment grinder, hovers by the easel with a question or an offering. Figures from the outside world intrude through the door to the right of the canvas and mingle, chattering in the background. Within this whirlwind of activity, the painter remains an island of stillness. His absorption in the act of painting is unshakable.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits of the artist tighten the frame. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Autoportrait aux bésicles (Self-Portrait with Glasses, 1771), produced in the intimacy of pastel, captures the artist in a state of undress or déshabile, as though we have interrupted him mid-creation (Figure 0.2). We can imagine him pivoting in his seat to peer down his pince-nez and commence creating his next work of art.3 Ary Scheffer’s Portrait d’un artiste (Portrait of an artist, 1830) pulls the frame back only slightly from Chardin’s tight focus to make more explicit that the self-portrait has interrupted the solitary act of art-making (Figure 0.3). Engulfed in darkness, Scheffer’s face and eyes are illuminated. As we approach his spotlighted face, the painting’s otherwise visible brushwork crystallizes into a smooth and finely worked invisibility, as though coming into focus. Scheffer stares slightly further, beyond his portrait’s audience. He is transfixed, yes, but by the worlds of his own imagination, intellect, and genius, which he transcribes onto the canvas. We are not the object of his attention.
This vision of the artist and the construction of his social status developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In this critical period, a modern image of the artist and his relation to the art world emerged, marking a decisive shift from an early modern model that is now increasingly alien to us. The artist, once likened to the craftsman or professional, was elevated to the status of the vocational artist.4 The early modern model of genius was that it was a gift from God that could be unlocked by the artist’s careful cultivation of his role as a vehicle for its expression. This was replaced by a modern model in which genius was seen as innate and its expression tempestuous and particular to each artist.5 Accordingly, critics and experts invested the artist’s signature and name with great import, and the art object increasingly became an object of speculation whose market value relied, above all else, on the renown of its creator.6 Art education fractured, with more individualized instruction within a prominent artist’s studio eclipsing centralized academic instruction on the Italian model.7
Figure 0.2. Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Autoportrait aux bésicles, 1771, pastel.
Figure 0.3. Ary Scheffer, Portrait d’un artiste, 1830, oil on canvas.
This monumental moment of transition in Europe was punctuated by an especially turbulent and abrupt set of passages in France from early modern to modern, absolutism to republicanism, mercantilism to financial capitalism, rural to urban, an agrarian to an industrial economy, and corporate or guild labor to a free market. Every generation, France’s political orientation radically shifted. Upon assuming the throne in 1774, Louis XVI abolished France’s dense network of guilds and corporations, reinstating them in 1776 but with massive reforms. The 1789 French Revolution unseated France’s Bourbon monarchy, replacing it with France’s First Republic and plunging France into years of constant warfare. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France, but in 1815, he was replaced by the Restoration of the Bourbons, who reigned as constitutional monarchs. They were unseated in 1830 and replaced with the more liberal July Monarchy. Then, in 1848, France witnessed its short lived Second Republic, which was usurped by Napoleon III’s Second French Empire in 1851.
These political and economic transitions were paralleled by institutional changes to arts administration, exhibition opportunities, arts education, and patronage. The French art world underwent the same transformations as the broader French economy, transitioning from a corporate to a free-market model that brought with it a growing emphasis on speculation, finance, and competitive individualism. And yet, as Pierre Bourdieu has revealed, the art market was one in a class of practices “in which the logic of the pre-capitalist economy lives on.”8 One of the ways this was, and still is, accomplished is by the erection of a false binary between the aesthetics of disinterestedness and those of self-interest; in this case, by devising ways of negating art’s status as a commercial object.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists demonstrated a nuanced awareness of these transitions, their implications, and the paradoxes they created. Artists prolifically and vociferously criticized the impact of such changes on them, on the art object, and on the art world. But their protests have entirely escaped our notice, having been conducted in a medium that has been marginalized or overlooked in the field of art history: the satirical image.9 The genre I call “art-world satire” spans the storied emergence of political cartooning as a staple of modern culture and politics. I have constituted a corpus of 532 images that satirize Paris’s art world and range from eighteenth-century loose-leaf etchings and engravings, to Revolutionary and early nineteenth-century satirical images in albums of etching and lithography, to those of the lithographic satirical periodical press established around 1830.10 Advancements in print technology coupled with the growth of consumer culture flooded Paris with political and social satire created by aspiring or practicing fine artists.11 These artist-illustrators regularly turned their attention to the art world as a satirical target. They were complemented by the literary and theatrical world’s popular genres that paralleled each other by trafficking in similar tropes and satirical narratives: comic opera, vaudeville, and panoramic fiction (physiologies, short fiction).12
Artists charted and criticized the liberalization of the Parisian art world through satirical representations of its artists, art students, art amateurs, patrons and connoisseurs, the art market, exhibitions of contemporary art, museums and galleries, art audiences, critics, and administrators. Broadly, art-world graphic satire presages Howard S. Becker’s inclusive definition of the art world as consisting of “all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.”13
Overwhelmingly apparent across art-world satire, however, is a profound disinterest in debating the topics that tend to preoccupy art historians. Art-world satire very rarely directly lampoons individual artists, schools or styles of art, or aesthetic debates. It is, first and foremost, interested in examining the art world as a cultural field and in undermining idées reçus (unexamined ideas or stereotypes) concerning the status of the artist. In this, it evokes Bourdieu’s explorations of the cultural field’s idiosyncratic political economies.14 Art-world satire approaches the art world in terms of gatekeeping and position-taking, recognition and renown, membership and exclusion. It endeavors to make visible invisible structural relations.15
In my research, I have found that satire is extremely creative in its destruction but not very constructive in its criticism. The medium of satire is perhaps even incapable of or at least disinterested in recommending solutions or remedies. However, it excels at highlighting the absurdities and hypocrisies inherent in political, social, and cultural structures. Art-world satire casts a spotlight on the acrobatics required to avoid characterizing the artist’s or the art world’s activities as commercial in a world increasingly dominated by free market logics—logics of creation and destruction, novelty and annihilation, crisis and renewal, and individual competition throughout. We still have no solutions or remedies to the paradoxes inherent in artistic production in the age of capitalism, but we have much to learn from this biting and prolific corpus of images, which were the first to virulently and collectively inventory its absurdities.
Art-world satire’s protagonist is the starving artist, so well-known to us now but invented in this era of transformation.16 In response to the glorified image of the artist as a struggling yet noble genius, satirists presented a remarkably quotidian and common “inglorious” artist who struggles foolishly or helplessly to adapt to institutional change, economic fluctuations, and the paradoxical expectation that the artist must rely upon the private market while operating outside of the logics of commerce.17 This corpus of art-world satire reveals that our modern conception of what we call the “starving” artist might more aptly be labeled the “inglorious” artist, and as such, I will use the terms interchangeably to imbricate the more apt “inglorious” with our narrower but more commonly used “starving.” Rather than substituting the term completely, I would prefer we deepen our understanding of what exactly we mean when we say “starving.” Whereas the term “starving artist” refers only to the poverty of the artist, we tend to use it to refer much more broadly to portray the artist’s deplorable and liminal status, perhaps even an artist’s mediocrity or lack of talent, or, if talented, their lack of renown and the unlikelihood of their achieving posthumous renown. Only in our age of late-stage capitalism could we see poverty or starvation as cause for disgrace or a lack of glory.18
Importantly, both the artist as genius and his shadow, the inglorious artist, were always exclusively men across art-world satire. Though women were an increasingly visible presence within Paris’s visual arts landscape, representing greater and greater proportions of exhibiting artists at the Salon exhibition, they were fastidiously omitted from art-world satire. Where women artists do appear, they are wealthy hobbyists and amateurs. While art-world satire sought to make visible certain invisible structural relations, it also sought to make invisible a significantly visible demographic shift in the makeup of the art world.19
The Evolution of the Artist’s Social Status
Art-world satire’s inglorious artist was not created in a vacuum. It served as a satirical foil to the evolving cultural construction of the artist’s social status. An important component of satire’s critical and oppositional power is its tendency to behave parasitically—to identify a recognizable referent with high cultural currency to which it applies a satirical transformation, whether caricatural, parodical, or otherwise.20 Indeed, graphic satire thrives on these discursive battles over semantic territorial dominion. To build a strong foundation for our future exploration of the inglorious artist trope, we must first understand the evolution of the artist’s status and definitions of artistic genius and glory.
Nathalie Heinich’s influential two-part synthetic study of the artist’s social status in Europe, and France in particular, identifies the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries as the locus for two decisive shifts in how artistic practice was perceived—shifts that operated both discursively and structurally, although Heinich’s focus is on the former.21 Gradual processes of intellectualization, dematerialization, and individualization ushered in transformations whereby visual arts practice evolved from its original status as trade to a profession and finally to a vocation.22 These transformations are relatively recent disruptions to a very long-standing division of the liberal versus mechanical arts under which the visual arts were denied membership among the liberal arts.23 In antiquity, the study of logic, history, Greek and moral philosophy, poetry, music, arithmetic, and geometry were granted membership among the liberal arts. In the Middle Ages, they were joined by medicine and theology. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, writers like Leon Battista Alberti and Giorgio Vasari argued for the nobility of the arts and its principals, gaining a foot in the door for visual art’s membership among the liberal arts.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the process of academicization, the visual arts distinguished themselves from the guild or corporate model, redefining artistic practice as a profession rather than a trade or corporate practice. The Compagnia di San Luca (Saint Luke’s Guild) was restored in the 1560s in Florence, gathering visual artists together under one banner where they had been previously scattered across other guilds. In 1571, the Compagnia became a place of study and was renamed the Università, Compagnia, ed Accademia del Disegno (University, Guild, and Academy of Drawing).24 Nearly a century later, in 1648, French artists effected a similar split, divorcing from the Corporation des maîtres peintres (Corporation of Master Painters) and establishing an Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture).25
Art having been redefined as a profession, the Académie royale and its members were united by their occupation and a shared model of excellence, but each member was individuated in their practice. The professional model distinguished the Académie royale from the Corporation’s trade-based model: in France’s corporate world, kinship bonds, price of admission, and the history of trade were the terms of one’s “belonging” to the community, whereas the Académie royale emphasized individual merit instead, with no price of admission and no (apparent) special dispensation for the family of preexisting members.
We see these shifts in the status of the artist evidenced in portraiture of French Academicians. In an institution committed to erudition and excellence, their professional membership was visualized through the presentation of artists as intellectuals and nobility-adjacent gentlemen.26 In their portraits, we see Academicians adorned with wigs, festooned with medals, draped in formal habits of silk, velvet, lace, and embroidery, and carrying swords—a right reserved for nobility but permitted of Academicians.27 Their constructed environments gesture to their liberal arts erudition, evoke the primacy of drawing and its relationship to disegno (drawing or design), and point to their professional membership in the Académie royale. For instance, Donat Nonotte’s portrait of Sébastien Le Clerc le fils indicates the sitter’s role as a professor of geometry and perspective at the Académie royale, all while dressing him elegantly and formally in resplendent and ornamented fashion, topped with a powdered wig (Figure 0.4). The semantic density of these images advanced the project of elevating the status of the artist from that of an artisan practicing a trade to that of an Academician belonging to a profession. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, artists were increasingly valued for their originality, autonomy, and innovation instead of their institutional membership, respect for tradition, and erudition as a vocational model for the status of the artist emerged.28
Figure 0.4. Donat Nonotte, Sébastien Le Clerc le fils, 1741, oil on canvas.
In France, these shifts were precipitated by important juridical and institutional changes that I will address in detail in each chapter of this book, supplementing Heinich’s important discursive survey of the transformation of the artist’s status by providing a synthetic survey of the art world’s structural shifts in France. Suffice it to say here that the French Revolution brought with it the end of the Académie royale as it was known up to that point. As such, in the vocational model, artists were educated and organized much more loosely, forming independent intellectual and political circles called cénacles, and receiving their “practical” educations in the artist’s studio.29 Heinich argues that this produced an aristocratization of the artist. In their attempts to distinguish themselves from both of their former social statuses as workers and professionals, the artist became neither and floated above these categories in their own aristocratic class.30
The impact of this status shift on the representation of the artist has been examined by scholars such as Francis Haskell, Alain Bonnet, Thierry Laugée, and Mary Gluck, whose scholarship form the basis of the study of the representation of the artist as an important subfield in nineteenth-century studies.31 Collectively, they demonstrate how, under the vocational model, all was essentially reduced to the individual. Fundamental to this were shifting definitions of artistic genius, which pivoted in the late eighteenth century. Earlier models conceived of genius as a gift the artist was born with but could only express by honing and studying. Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genius was characterized as an indelible element of the artist’s essence that expresses itself in practically every way the artist appears in society. Whereas previously one had genius, in modernity one is a genius.32
The effects of this shift were visible in early nineteenth-century biographies of Old Masters. The biographical structure excluded exploration of the artist’s study and apprenticeship—key biographical details for a professional but not for supporting a vocational image of the artist. Instead, artists’ biographies emphasized the discovery of the artist’s prodigious talent in childhood, narratives surrounding the production of key artworks, artistic rivalries and patron relationships, and the artist’s tragic death.33 Similarly, in portraits of the artist, ennobling costume disappeared, pictorial space was stripped down, the artist’s institutional membership received no mention, and any emphasis previously placed on the hand of the artist and his tools was displaced to his head as the site of his genius through a focus on his gaze, as in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits mentioned above.34
Further along the continuum of art-making as a vocational practice is the artist as outsider. George Levitine first observed this phenomenon in a group of young artists who gathered around Maurice Quay (1779–1804) around 1800, and were named the barbus (bearded) by their contemporaries. Directory and Consulate fashion emulated English trends and favored double-breasted waistcoats and pantaloons paired with clean-shaven faces.35 The barbus instead mimicked historical costume, employing creative anachronism to render themselves visually distinct. They wore high trousers and waistcoats with short hair à la Titus (akin to Titus), a long beard, and a cloth draped over their shoulders, recalling both Revolutionary Jacobin and Classical Roman dress simultaneously.36 This distinctive mode of dress paved the way for the artist’s role within the urban landscape as a visible outsider. Historical modes of dress, in particular, remained a strategy for distinction.37 The artist’s body thus staged a performance of “being an artist.”
Bohemians of the early July Monarchy expanded upon the barbus’s preference for historical fashion. In concert with the popular taste for Troubadour imagery, Gothic novels, and melodrama, bohemians wore long hair and beards, which were both still out of fashion, and donned eclectic dress with Medieval and Renaissance styles of hats and jackets. As bourgeois style became increasingly uniform—black trousers, vests, starched collars or cravats, and coats with a silk top hat and cane—bohemian subculture con trasted with it all the more.38
Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and critics celebrated the birth of a new vision of the artist in the age of Romanticism.39 They have been followed by scholars who interpret the period’s structural changes as evidence of the artist’s liberation from the shackles of conservative patrons, guilds, and academies in favor of an individualized and expressive approach to creation more conducive to the production of avant-garde art: art that valiantly contradicts what are commonly perceived as the stagnant dictates of academicism. This triumphant narrative charts the artist’s growing independence. He abandons his reliance on the approval of institutional and financial power and as he becomes more and more of an outsider, he increasingly finds communion only among other artists and rebels. Despite, or perhaps because of, his out sider status, his vision anticipates the future and thus he becomes the mouthpiece of progressive society.40
Scholars such as Oskar Bätschmann and Martin Warnke have nuanced this thesis.41 Bätschmann demonstrates that the art market impedes the artist’s total liberation, though artists ingeniously leverage their own mythos and cult in order to triumph over it. To Warnke, the narrative described above (or “grandiose thesis”) is inaccurate and ignores the extent to which the authority of the aristocratic court persisted well beyond the eighteenth century, when the court is often characterized as having been gradually eliminated as an influence.42 Bätschmann and Warnke nuance the narrative of the artist’s liberation but nonetheless broadly uphold it.43 However, 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? Did the rise of modern art really witness a liberation of the artist or simply the emergence of a different art system? Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the artist’s status shifted so decisively, so too did many European political and economic systems, toward industrialization, economic liberalism, stock trading, and empire building—in other words, toward modern industrial and financial capitalism.44 Is not the archetype of the liberated visual artist just another means of molding artistic work to the ethos of competitive individualism?45
The Popular Printed Image and its Intermediality
Art-world satire emerged as a subgenre of Parisian social satire circa 1750 to 1850 for many reasons, including those discussed above. Notably, though, the emergence of industrially scalable, rapid, and more affordable and accessible printing and paper technologies, and the proletarianization and increasing precariousness of the artist’s economic status combined to create the ideal conditions for disseminating the image of the starving artist via graphic satire. Artists pursued illustration for artistic experimentation and financial gain, then trained their burins, etching needles, and lithographic crayons on the structural conditions that engendered this same pursuit, mocking the persistent romanticization of the artist’s social status and contrasting it to their experiences of increasing economic instability.
Art-world satire followed the current as new technologies were introduced and popularized across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, adapting from engraving to etching to lithography and experiencing its own wood engraving revival with the popularization of the periodical press around the middle of the nineteenth century.46 Of greater interest to me here, however, is the lesser-known story of the diversity of print formats for graphic satire in this period, which each chapter will discuss.47 We cannot say that the formats used changed over time, for none of them became obsolete. Rather they expanded over time, so that the range of formats available for the consumption of graphic satire multiplied across this generative century.
We begin in the eighteenth century with primarily clandestine and looseleaf prints, to which were added series of prints with publishers’ names attributed, and then albums of prints with which publishers’ and illustrators’ names were associated. Subsequently, in the 1820s, we begin to encounter images arranged along a grid on a broadside, which were called macédoines (cocktails) or petits sujets (small subjects), and are now more commonly known in France as Épinal imagery. The success of these commercial endeavors and the industrialization of paper production circa 1800 led to the first attempts to publish satirical periodicals in the 1820s, namely La Pandore, Le Miroir, and La Silhouette in Paris. These enterprises were short lived, but at the very end of the Restoration and throughout the July Monarchy, the Maison Aubert publishing house became a dominant printer and publisher of lithographic prints and satirical periodicals, most notably La Caricature and Le Charivari.48
A survey of the literature might leave one with the impression that French graphic satire barely existed before 1830, with the period of the French Revolution as an exception. The welcome outpouring of scholarship published upon the French Revolution’s bicentennial anniversary and the scholarship that Honoré Daumier’s career attracts has distorted our evaluation of what is available for study.49 We can also attribute these lacunae to something more mundane: it is much easier to catalog certain formats over others, with the result that anonymous and clandestine images, which dominate this corpus until the Restoration, can often only be found in thematic folios rather than in artist’s or publisher’s folios, making them significantly harder for scholars to find and especially to study in a discipline whose scholarship tends to orbit around the artist, their artwork, and their oeuvre.50
Despite the absence of scholarship on art-world printed satire, more has been done to study a nominally similar but otherwise quite separate genre—caricatura or portrait charges—which were hand drawn and often exchanged as a marker of friendship.51 My limited search has revealed some eighty sociable or private caricatures of artists produced in chalk, graphite, or ink on loose-leaf sheets sometimes pasted into albums. Their satirical mode is almost exclusively caricatural: they produce physiognomic distortions of a particular individual. We can usually establish a professional or personal relationship between the caricaturist and their sitter—they shared an institutional or social milieu.
This imagery was not intended for commercial distribution or wide distribution at all. Private caricatures made their way to public and private collections after the death of their authors, and when they did circulate, they did so as copied drawings that were generally distributed among those caricatured within a series.52 Their medium, their subject matter, limited distribution, and the relationship between the caricaturist’s target and the caricaturist themselves indicates that these objects were more sociable than oppositional; designed not to hurt nor criticize but rather to testify, in jest, to a shared bond.
These images were produced and circulated within contexts of professional and personal sociability, whereas art-world graphic satire was produced within the context of printed and ephemeral social critique. This social critique spanned from popular imagery and graphic satire to popular theater and panoramic fiction. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art critics were often also critics of literature and music, and the causes célèbres of the theatrical and literary worlds were populated by the artists, illustrators, and commentators of the art world. The popular printed image, with its fascination with the spectacle of urban living, participated in an increasingly visually focused consumerism, uniting creators and publishers, and unifying their subject matter and their perspectives on that subject matter.53
Given the fluidity and porosity of the image, stage, and page in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century artistic creation, art-world satire is also necessarily intermedial: the tropes, motifs, and strategies of the art-world’s satirical representation occurred across media simultaneously.54 Intermedial explorations of art-world satire are thus mutually illuminating, and through out this book, I will draw from a (less exhaustively) culled corpus of sixty-four objects from panoramic writing, short fiction, and popular theater, all of which also comedically or satirically represent Paris’s artistic milieu.
I do not, however, imagine that my textual sources are the basis or referent for my visual sources, as is often assumed. This study takes a transmedial perspective, meaning that we cannot attribute the origin of satirical strategies to one specific medium, and I am interested in exploring their appearances across all media without privileging one as the catalyst or originator.55 It is only by putting satirical imagery into conversation with other popular media and vice versa that we can develop a sophisticated and coherent set of historically contingent social types and tropes represented in those media. As the types and tropes that I examine grew, changed, and branched, they remained consistent across media—they complemented, rather than contradicted, one another.
Book historians have rescued literary ephemera from the margins of literary and historical analysis, highlighting the importance of ancien régime clandestine writing in the expression of political dissent. Everything from political pamphlets to art criticism were essential modes of dissenting popular discourse.56 Similarly, post-Revolutionary scholars, following the lead of Walter Benjamin, have discovered in panoramic or short fiction, like the physiognomies (physiognomies) pamphlet genre and beyond, an overlooked site for working through the internal contradictions of urbanization, the spectacle, and industrialization in early modernity.57
Lagging behind, however, is the incorporation of popular theater into this analysis, although it was, similar to graphic satire, a commercially driven, scalable form of cultural production that was simultaneously constructed in opposition to official (and canonical) cultural production. Also, like graphic satire, popular theater catered to a broad social stratum but targeted the middling and artisanal classes as its primary audience. In this way, intermedial art-world satire delivered its structural critiques of Paris’s art world on and from the margins of that world, thus reaching an audience of similarly marginalized and liminal eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art-world participants struggling to gain a foothold, but almost entirely escaping the notice of contemporary academics.
Art-world satire participated in a register of cultural production that was bawdy, satirical, and subversive because it eschewed contributing to the progress of the arts and aimed self-consciously at entertainment, humorous critique, and gestures that felt illicit or subversive when considered in relation to those subjects and genres of cultural production that could be described as official and institutionalized, such as opera, tragedy, history painting, or the novel. The pamphlet, the periodical, the vaudeville, and the graphic image cohere because they were serialized, brief, cheaply made and sold, and available in large numbers. Their materiality, as well as their frequently bawdy and satirical subject matter, exempted them from the criterion of distinction applied to pantheonize cultural production. Their actors, authors, and illustrators regularly betrayed their awareness that their participation in these genres compromised whether they could be perceived as contributing to the progress of the arts in other arenas.
Digital Humanities Methodologies
In all, this book examines an intermedial corpus of 596 objects. How is it possible to write a coherent book about such a vast body of work? A recovery of art-world caricature at this very moment has been enabled by a set of methodological shifts in the discipline of art history: firstly, by art history’s growing disciplinary flexibility as visual culture studies emerges from the groundwork laid by the social history of art;58 and secondly, by the emergence of the digital humanities as a constellation of approaches borrowed from library sciences and social sciences and incorporated into humanistic research, analysis, and research dissemination.
My own study began with a little-known collection of twelve folios: “Pièces sur les Arts.” It was likely constituted in the 1860s, around when the French National Library acquired forty-five thousand ephemeral images from Michel Hennin and Jacques Laterrade and exponentially expanded their now monumental Histoire de France (History of France) series. In the same decade, the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal were innovating their approaches to ephemeral and satirical images, which they deemed to be works of historical interest and thus of “documentary” value, signaling a broader shift in the institutional appreciation of visual culture.59
This shift, at least as it pertains to ephemera related to the art world, was perhaps instigated by the work of Philippe de Chennevières and Thomas Arnauldet, the latter a librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). In 1852, Chennevières’s Portraits inédits d’artistes français included caricatura or portrait charges.60 In 1859, Arnauldet published a chronological descriptive catalogue of all the art-world caricature he located, largely at the BnF, discovering thirteen seventeenth-century images and seventeen eighteenth-century satires.61
Shortly thereafter “Pièces sur les Arts” was constituted and, in 1895, when BnF librarian and curator Henri Bouchot updated the readers’ guide to the Dépar tement des estampes (Department of Printed Images), the folios were added under the call number Kc 164. Only a modest two folios were listed compared to the series’s current twelve.62 Art-world graphic satire reappeared in a series of scattered articles on the history of French graphic satire by André-Salomon Blum, who worked in the Musée du Louvre’s Cabinet des arts graphiques (Cabinet of Graphic Arts),63 and such satirical images received their first analytical treatment in a pair of 1914 and 1918 articles authored by Prosper Dorbec, a curator at the Musée Carnavalet, which embed them alongside some of their satirical brethren—libel and popular song.64
These librarians and curators, intimately aware of the treasures contained within those sections of their collections privileged for their “documentary” value, quietly monumentalized art-world caricature between 1860 and 1920, demarcating it as a discernible satirical subject. Nonetheless, art-world caricature has largely remained the secret treasure of Parisian librarians and curators, a notable exception being Laurent Baridon and Martial Guédron’s 2011 article “Caricaturer l’art,” which recommended its deeper study.65
My exploration of Kc 164, “Pièces sur les Arts,” catalyzed a search across French library and museum collections that returned 532 printed satirical images targeting art-world types and institutions. As I uncovered this staggering volume of images, I made a series of important choices that allowed me to contain my study while still rising to the challenge of examining such a large number of images within a single study, surmountable through the employment of digital humanities methodologies, to examine this genre in the aggregate.
My 532-image corpus contains only printed images that satirize Paris’s eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art world.66 As such, it does not include representations of the historical art world, art worlds recognizably not Parisian, or forms of connoisseurship adjacent to contemporary art appreciation such as antiquarianism. I also excluded two other prolific parallel genres: drawn caricatures produced in the spirit of amicability and sociability and more aptly labeled caricatura, and images that satirize individual works of art, a genre that picked up speed toward the end of the period I examined in the 1840s and is commonly known as Salons caricaturaux (Caricatural Salon).67
Many humanists already use relational database software, such as Microsoft Access and Filemaker, to store their library and archival notes. I opted for qualitative data analysis (QDA) software because it allows for the emergent nature of qualitative research.68 In other words, QDA software assumes a relationship between sources, their physical description, and their more subjective annotation. This permitted me flexibility and the kind of text-based and visual analysis that is required for this material.
The software that I have used, NVivo, has functioned for me as an augmented gallery management tool. I have been able to associate copies of images with bibliographic metadata. I could then “tag” or “code” regions of the image using a set of iconographic attributes that I determined. These include, for instance, identifying types of human figures in the image (visual artists, models, connoisseurs), the setting of the image (studio, Salon exhibition), and the activities that figures in the image engage in (art-making, romancing, quarreling). I also identified the objects, attributes, and symbols that constitute the visual logic of these images (for instance, the animal menagerie, allegorical and mythological figures, or clothing and fashion), and broke them down, permitting me to interpret their satirical elements and their targets.
I essentially produced my own customized thesaurus of research vocabularies tailored to my corpus, borrowing from the indexing methodologies of the library sciences, which use vocabularies or thesauri to make visual materials findable.69 This coding process was instrumental in helping me to engage closely with every individual image and facilitated, rather than detracted from, careful visual analysis. It also permitted me to later query my corpus so that I could determine, for instance, whether the artist was more likely to be depicted in images with the visual markers of poverty in certain periods over others. As such, qualitative data analysis and image databases became a means by which I could both look very closely at each individual image and also practice “distant looking” to consider what my corpus did in the aggregate.70
Despite what practices of “distant looking” are meant to accomplish, however, I am not able to make any positive research claims nor do I aspire to. Although humanists do not often account for their study limitations, my research methodologies invite such an acknowledgement in order to avoid any possibility that readers will interpret the visual effect of data visualizations as standing in for positive truth claims.71 There are two significant obstacles to the comprehensiveness of my image collection that limit the kinds of claims that I can make with the quantitative and qualitative data I have gathered. The first is that I have no way of knowing whether or not I have found all of the imagery published between 1750 and 1850 that satirizes Paris’s contemporary artistic milieu. My search for images was very extensive, but I will not claim that it was utterly exhaustive. I have no doubt that there are more examples of art-world satirical images, and in fact welcome their dis covery by my colleagues.
Even if I could ensure that my search was truly complete, I would have nothing to measure it against. I cannot know the relative proportion of art-world caricature to graphic satire in general, for we are unable to make any kind of estimate as to how much graphic satire was printed between 1750 and 1850. The often-clandestine nature of graphic satire across this politically turbulent century makes it impossible to estimate just how many satirical images were produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries since their publishers took care to hide their involvement. Even if we limited ourselves to those works submitted for legal deposit, we would be unable to determine the relative quantity of graphic satires among them without pulling out every image at the BnF deposited up to 1850. George McKee’s Image of France, 1795–1880 web resource, which provides a searchable inventory of La Bibliographie de la France, Le Journal général de l’imprimerie, and the manuscript registers of the dépôt legal (legal deposit), provide us the information declared upon deposit: the title of images, sometimes their illustrator, and sometimes the publisher. Titles are not a reliable means by which to determine the content of an image nor are consistent keywords employed that can be reliably correlated to graphic satire. Similarly, neither publishers nor illustrators worked exclusively in any one genre. And lastly, even if we could pull up every image submitted to the legal deposit and determine which were graphic satire and which were not, we would still be missing essential information: how many satirical images escaped the legal deposit?
The value of these digital humanities methods in my research is not to generate positive, factual claims about graphic satire writ large. Rather, these methods are a means to be more transparent about my research methodologies in my research communication, and to grapple with a large number of images in a single study as a means to destabilize art history’s tendency to prioritize the exceptional over the representative and to fetishize rarity and uniqueness. As I developed these methodologies, it was essential to me that I avoided depriving myself of what I enjoy about my field of research: looking closely and carefully at images.
These research strategies for working with objects of visual culture in high volume and interpreting them in the aggregate have dovetailed into two further methodological interventions in the field of art history. Firstly, on the STEM model, I have made my datasets publicly available by publishing an Omeka S database of all 532 art-world satirical images and appending an interactive Tableau utility so that users can query the data and probe visual cultural objects in new ways.72 Secondly, these research methods have allowed me to visualize the interconnected development of art-world satirical types and tropes of the starving artist, his antagonists, and the narrative devices that propel him to success. Unfolding over time, multiplying, converging, and diverging again, these interconnected tropes have here been visualized in the form of a tree. These parallel taxonomies produce a simple ontology of the trope of the starving artist and his environment (Table 0.1).
This book gradually reconstitutes this swelling and narrowing tree via an exploration of the representation of the inglorious artist, his antagonists, and his environment, and shifting narratives around artistic success and how to achieve it. Importantly, antecedents for the much better-known and studied trope of the mid-nineteenth-century bohemian artist emerge when tropes of the earlier nineteenth-century inglorious artist are closely examined. Indeed, the bohemian artist can be thought of as a compilation of several of these earlier types.
These cultural shifts in the representation of the inglorious artist and his environment critically respond to parallel structural shifts in the juridical and institutional environment for artistic education, art-making, art exhibition, and the art market across the century examined here. Sometimes these responses are direct, but often they manifest as subtle yet sudden shifts in the inglorious artist’s representation, antagonists, or path to success or cursus honorum.73 These changes are evidenced in the tension between the inglorious artist’s antagonists and dei ex machina. The antagonists introduced across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were united by their economic power over the artist: they were the artist’s patrons, lenders, or art dealers. The dei ex machina that appear in writing and on stage point to academically sanctioned institutionalized gatekeeping and markers of success such as Salon admission or winning the Prix de Rome. The ancien régime connoisseurial antagonist is even reimagined as a hero after the closure of the Académie royale, serving briefly as an anti-economic alternative to the bourgeois art patron.
Table 0.1. The evolution of art-world satire’s protagonists, antagonists, and dei ex machini by political regime.
Art-World Satire’s Ambivalence: Between Criticism and Complicity
Art-world satire reveals that artists were deeply aware that the emergence of a capitalist art market was not a universal good. Via this medium, they probe its complexities and internal contradictions. In the aggregate, art-world satire presaged Bourdieu’s observations around economies of symbolic goods: discursively, these economies do not value material gain and instead prioritize “anti-economic” goals such as “prestige” or authority, thus refusing to acknowledge that artistic labor is fundamentally and unavoidably economic.74 Economies of symbolic capital thus appropriate pre-capitalist discourse while operating in a capitalist landscape. At the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were perfectly placed to highlight this hypocritical dissonance, largely invisible to us today, so far are we from pre-capitalist economies that we have no embodied memories of them.
Art-world satire, however, did more than just presage Bourdieu. Indeed, it helped to fabricate this new kind of economy that Bourdieu later described. This is the critical moment at which artists were discovering, and creating, their redefined role within this emerging economy. Looked at one way, the trope of the inglorious artist is quite radical. It emerged as a vehicle to highlight the art world’s reconfiguration to cater to the buying power of a relatively new class of bourgeois capitalists and administrators, the latter of which were replacing artists themselves as authorities on taste and gatekeepers of success within the art world, disenfranchising artists in the process.75 However, the notion of the starving artist also seamlessly participates in a core demand of economies of symbolic capital: that artists participate in maintaining the unlikely fantasy that the art world is anti-economic in nature. Indeed, the inglorious artist lusts after prestige, not wealth, and is not interested in material gain or material well-being, so dedicated is he to his vocation. Both satirically and sincerely, depending on the cultural object in which he is portrayed, the inglorious artist happily accepts his role as mascot for anti-economic fantasies within a world increasingly dominated by industry, speculation, and those most adept at exploitative accumulation.
Art-world satire makes visible the normally invisible economy of symbolic capital and its relationship to capitalism, yet the notion of the inglorious artist occupies a strategically ambivalent position. The trope of the starving artist is both complicit with this emerging system, carving out an anti-economic role for the artist that does not chafe against the system’s expectations, while also retaining critical power to point out the hypocrisies inherent in it. For, to accept the position of anti-economic mascot and to treat material disenfranchisement as inevitable is to ape a discourse of radical positionality while exempting oneself from the expectation of effecting structural change. Indeed, as we will see, art-world satire popularizes the trope of the starving artist while carefully omitting women artists from satirical representation and ruthlessly lampooning the growing visibility of amateur artists within an increasingly unregulated art system. Though art-world satire criticizes the emergence of a capitalist art market, it nonetheless continues to gatekeep who merits the label of “artist.”
I have found it most helpful to think of art-world satire not as a radical retort to the emergence of a capitalist art market, but rather as its creators’ strategic retreat to a new position of relative power as a discursive, but not actual, outsider, embodied in the trope of the inglorious artist. If artists were required to adopt the position of anti-economic mascot for their bourgeois art buyers looking for at least nominal refuge from capitalist economics, then they could at least still retain the power to gatekeep who could occupy this strange new liminal positionality. As we will see, historic structural attempts to radically rethink and crack open the category of the artist tended to fail, evidencing a deep ideological commitment to the preservation of this new economy of symbolic goods and its fetishization of prestige, which still dominates, and indeed limits, the art world today.
Understanding the material lives of art-world satire is a non-negotiable component of interpreting what this subgenre does in the aggregate, and helps us to appreciate the many vehicles that artists had, and still have, for mounting meaningful criticism of the world in which they operate. As such, each chapter of this book addresses the shifting structural histories of the French art world in parallel with the transforming materialities of the satirical image, both of which provide necessary context for the evolution of the inglorious artist trope. This Marxian use of the term “material” is complemented by anthropological notions of “materiality,” as in exploring the physicality of objects and the histories of their material creation and dissemination by acknowledging that visual objects are valuable not purely for their symbolic, intellectual, and cultural content, but because they lived (and indeed continue to live) material lives as things produced from matter that circulate as matter and whose accessibility is conditioned by their materiality.76 This book is methodologically dedicated to embedding cultural discourse and representation within material histories of structural change.
My examination of art-world satire proceeds chronologically through political periods to examine the ways in which the types and tropes that populate satirical imagery, theater, and writing changed over time, building and branching off of one another to adapt satirical vocabulary to match shifting structural conditions. Chapter 1, “The Artiste Libre in the Ancien Régime,” begins our journey through the corpus of art-world satire by focusing on the end of the ancien régime—the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, stopping short of the French Revolution. To understand art-world satire, we must weave a tapestry that bridges social and cultural approaches to the social history of art to understand how the structural constitution of the art world shifted and how ideas around the status of the artist, the status of art, and the relationship between viewer and artwork, and artwork and buyer, changed from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Beginning in this chapter, I present art-world satire as a prism that refracted these structural transformations by critiquing them. In so doing, this chapter reveals how the popularization of the trope of the inglorious artist correlates to an often overlooked but pivotal ramification of the Turgot reforms: the emergence of the artiste libre (free artist) category and the liberalization of fine arts production, where artists were suddenly no longer required to solicit membership in either the Académie royale nor the guild to create and sell works of fine art.
Chapter 2, “Revolutionary Instabilities of Liberty and Autonomy,” explores popular media and satirical imagery during the Revolution, Directory, and Consulate. Though satirists were not as prolific in their commentary from 1789 to 1803, they were exceptionally biting and incisive in their critiques and targeted specific cultural and political events for the first and only time in this century of art-world satire. This chapter outlines an especially pivotal but, again, understudied shift in the status of the artist. When examined through the lens of art-world satire, we are prompted to reevaluate the importance of debates around the replacement of the corporate system with a patente or licensing system. The trope of the inglorious artist was mobilized in these debates to argue for artists’ exemptions from the requirement of a license to establish a boutique or workshop to create and sell artwork.
Chapter 3, “The Starving Artist in the Salon System,” examines art-world satire in the Napoleonic Empire and Bourbon Restoration, which witnessed attempts to reincorporate elements of the ancien régime art-world system that positioned the Salon as a central gatekeeper to artistic success. Buoyed by the popularity of lithography, a surge of satirical images developed complex new versions of the image of the inglorious artist and new antagonists to pit him against. To the impoverished noble artist were added new and surprising subtypes, from the prostituting portraitist to the delusional shop sign painter. Reflecting shifts in patronage and the liberal market that followed the destruction of the French corporate system, the bourgeois connoisseur also emerged as an important type and, often, antagonist.
Chapter 4, “The Apotheosis of Bohemia,” ends where many studies of this kind would instead begin: with the figure of the artist as bohemian in the July Monarchy. The bohemian artist in fact consolidates many of the preceding manifestations of the inglorious artist type. Beginning with a rereading of Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1845–49) and ending with the short-lived Second Republic of 1848 as epilogue via social experiment, “The Apotheosis of Bohemia” explores Republican and proto-socialist responses to the figure of the inglorious artist, ending on a failed attempt to respond to a century’s worth of satirical criticism of the French art system.
In France, the transition from a pre-capitalist to capitalist economy occurred in fits and starts, punctuated haphazardly by political revolution and, with it, the often-aborted hope for a radical reimagining of Paris’s art world. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, art-world satire, and graphic satire in particular, was the favored vehicle for commenting upon this transition and its impact on art, artists, the public, and the art system as a whole. The medium of satire delights in highlighting hypocrisy, and indeed, the impact of capitalism on Paris’s art market provided artists with quite such hypocrisy as they reveled in pointing out the acrobatic cognitive somersaults required to sustain an economy of symbolic capital.
Collectively, the images of art-world graphic satire contrast pre-capitalist and capitalist notions of the liberal and liberté (freedom). A pre-capitalist notion of the art world is one where the fine arts are treated as a liberal art: selected practitioners whose genius draws from the mind and not the hand are supported and patronized so as to be liberated from their material concerns while producing works that testify to the (cultural and intellectual) wealth of the nation. But in a world dominated by liberal economics and competitive individualism, one’s material well-being becomes the sole responsibility of the individual, who must ensure their success by competing for scarce, but universally available, resources. In the aggregate, art-world satire draws attention to the circuitous expectation that artists do the latter without drawing any attention to it, instead pretending they still benefit from the former. The irreconcilability of this expectation creates a cognitive dissonance that satire, as a medium, is perfectly suited to expose. Across centuries and continents, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art-world satire has much to say to both historians and to members of today’s art world. Finally, we are listening.