The century of illustration

What does our visual culture owe to XIXe century? To understand it, art historian Patricia Mainardi goes back well before the invention of photography, and explores a vast collection of images of all kinds in a book that invites us to re-educate our gaze, far from screens.

This book would not exist if its author had not wanted to explore the ins and outs of the comic strip, born with Rodolphe Töpffer and the History of Mr Jabot (1833). As an American art historian who knows France well XIXe century, Patricia Mainardi quickly realized that, in order to interpret its contribution to visual culture, she had to visit many other areas of media modernity, generally treated separately as specialist issues. This observation results in a richly illustrated overview, often in color, whose ambition is to embrace the great century of the emergence of images, to reveal its modified visions, and to sketch its extensions. The chapter on comics rightly occupies the center without being the longest (40 p.). It is preceded on the one hand by the most substantial development (60 p.) on lithography and the multiple printed objects it generates; on the other, by a chapter on the education of new audiences through illustrated magazines and industrial image techniques (45 p.). And it bounces back on the new reading methods in illustrated books (34 p.), and the new – and unexpected – contribution of Epinal images, frozen by historiography in a role of retro popular imagery (42 p.). The surprising structure is part of a strategy that aims to re-educate the modern gaze through our illustrated past. It is associated with a very flexible argument and an excellent knowledge of the first half of the XIXe century. Of course, Another World brings to mind Grandville and his marvelous work of 1844 which multiplies visions, promotes transformations, and propagates fantasy. Mainardi’s book does not fail to devote several pages to the most inventive aspects of Grandville’s work, and not only to this work. But its aim is quite different, and multiple: to recall entire sections of visual modernity that OUR modernity has quickly absorbed – and forgotten; highlighting the changes in perception that the XIXe century has introduced through a host of shared, pleasant, and widely present images; sketch out lines of flight towards contemporary illustrated genres (graphic novels, comics, children’s books). Restore, in two words, a other history of the image XIXe century: not that focused on the photographic cliché, abundantly studied, but that of the drawn image, that of the graphic arts.

Pellerin, Le Plumet de Baldaquin, lithograph on paper, colored with stencil, 4e quarter of the XIXe century.

This investigation is a real challenge as it raises central questions of corpus and method. To achieve this, Patricia Mainardi succeeds in combining materials of a beautiful generic and formal scope (from large paintings to prints and sheets, from albums to illustrated books and press, from ephemera and caricatures to popular imagery), an open method, and an informed and sensitive understanding of materials. The new genres of print are all present (sheets, canards, macedoines, caricatures, topographical views, vignettes, almanacs, albums, illustrated magazines, keepsakes, collector’s books, mass-produced books, gift books, posters, advertisements, stories, sequence drawings, calligrams, popular imagery, preservation images). They are associated with an exploration of new techniques (lithography, pen lithography, wood engraving, metal stereotypes, mechanization of printing processes, coloring, chromolithography, gillotage, beginning of photomechanical printing, etc.), with several forms of drawing (caricatures, funny stories, serial stories, sketches, illustrations, fashion drawings), with inherited categories (genre painting, history painting, narrative cycles), with layouts and formats. A combination emerges in favor of a panoramic culture and literature, to use a term from Walter Benjamin qualifying the light publications that reviewed manners, customs, habits and characters with words and images.

P. Mainardi practices an art history resolutely turned towards visual studies, with a clear interest in social representations. She refutes the hierarchical divisions between high and low, great and small art, noble and ordinary genres, which have long left the culture of print and illustration fallow. Hence many advantages: she is interested in images of modern life, physiologies and types, costumes and fashion while addressing questions of education, reading and audiences. She can easily touch on ideology, examine the political scope of images and open up to ethnography. She also does not hesitate to leave her disciplinary field for incursions and brief literary parallels (picaresque literature, travel, Balzac, Stendhal, Thackeray, Dickens). This art historian therefore reveals herself to be a historian of culture, particularly of the first part of the XIXe century, between France and Great Britain. Any reader interested in the XIXe century will read this book for the many connections it makes between technological, visual, social and cultural aspects in a period of great fluidity and complexity. The practical conclusion opens up to the importance of social satire in the period under consideration, underlines the weight of industrialization, insists on the internationalized trade in images and on the graphic arts as the foundation of our gaze by raising other questions and gaps towards which future research could turn or which it is in the process of filling (one thinks of stereotypes).

Gustave Doré, Discomforts of a Pleasure Trip, 1854

This scholarly book is not, however, intended solely for specialists in XIXe century. A wider audience would find it enjoyable and beneficial. Mainardi uses a clear and concise style. She manages to summarize in a few sentences long researches – those of others and her own –, which explains the limited number of pages devoted to very complex questions, often re-specified or renewed. Her writing never loses sight of its main objective. And despite the diversity of objects and questions, welcome reminders guide the reader. She thus succeeds in tracing new paths in corpora unequally frequented by researchers. She works between two languages ​​and two cultures at a time when Franco-British exchanges, borrowings and transfers are fertile. Her translations are precise and lively; and although the mocking or allusive part of a name or an appellation is sometimes lost, French (which she knows well) is a constant contribution to the text, and especially in the captions and notes.

There are several books in this large cardboard quarto (26.2 ✕ 21.3 cm) with an illustrated jacket. The subject is enriched by a perfectly balanced iconography (200 figures for 244 pages of main text). The double reading that it encourages makes us experience the wonder (or frustration) of any reader of the XIXe century who reads a richly illustrated text. The images, of excellent quality, sometimes unique (many repositories were searched and the best copies selected), are so carefully reproduced that they can also be read on their own. One can therefore leave the main subject at any time to read in the margins: follow a particular artist; visit a story; gambol from image to image by taking side roads. The notes gathered at the end of the work (according to Anglo-American typographical habits) extend the reflection by referring to a hand-picked bibliography. An index intelligently established on Anglo-Saxon principles, and which is in no way a hasty compilation of names and titles like so many French indexes (when they exist!), allows for cross-sectional readings, centered on a genre, a technique, a question, a type of publication, an artist or an author.

Another World succeeds in offering a history of the diffraction of the gaze to the XIXe century by challenging the great stage, a dominant genre, inspired by history painting, ideologically or morally charged. The gaze, entertained and brightened, dawdles. Attention is enticed by a host of supports. Serial and sequential imagery also changes: movement and cadence are introduced, the subject is diluted into subjects, and the anecdote takes hold on the expansion of the vignette. The feeling of time is no longer the same: instead of a stopped time governed by the unstoppable law of the three unities, human experience is declined in variety and is inscribed in the ephemeral.

In this magic lantern of daily life and the public sharing of life, the projected light draws attention to many colored glasses. Some are expected: for example, the new logics of narration due to brilliant designers (Johannot or Grandville, Travel wherever you like Or Another world) ; or the new cultures of education, information and pleasure promoted by the illustrated press. But there are especially unexpected ones: the generic fertility born of lithography; the social rather than political scope of Senefelder’s invention; the plurality of images covered by the term caricature at the beginning of the century and the fluidity of genres; the influence of the caricature salon on comic strips; the contestation of the solely retro character of popular imagery, its industrialization and internationalization, the use of professionally trained designers; garish popular imagery proposed as a precursor to color comic strips; commercial imagery analyzed from above (luxury posters) and below (commercial imagery, caricature, satire), etc.

Pierre Nolasque Bergeret, The Musards of the Rue du Coq, hand-colored pen and ink lithograph, 1805, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The scope of these proposals is such that it may give rise to reservations, especially when the trajectory runs from the first XIXe century to modernism. Here and there, overly concise interpretations call for nuances, even revisions (p. 190 on rebuses, p. 191 on the simultaneous pleasures of text and image). The hypothesis according to which from the 1850s onwards illustration is an academic genre would need to be refined: painter’s etching is too quickly mentioned; the revival of penknife engraving around Félix Vallotton, Alfred Jarry and magazines is an absent stage, well before German expressionism; the explosion and rebellion of fin-de-siècle images are missing links. And it would be a shame if the flexibility of this reflection were to yield to systematization by stipulating two symmetrical extensions of the album of lithographic miscellanies – the illustrated book (with a surplus of text) and the comic strips (shortage of text) – according to a proposal that seems too formalistic (p. 54). These plural visual logics also invite new ways of approaching printed matter as cultural objects and call for a renewal of text-image approaches.

Yet this is not the task that Patricia Mainardi has set herself. We come away from the plural reading of her beautiful work better informed, and – and this is essential – with a different perspective. The scope and novelty of the subject, the precise and concise conceptualization, and the synthetic sweep compose here not an archaeology of images, but a revelation, a re-education of our jaded gaze towards this other world who founded it.