Julia Langbein
"Caricature and Comic Criticism of the Paris Salon 1840 - 1870"
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Abstract
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A great deal of scholarly attention has focused on the written criticism that surrounded the French state-sponsored exhibition of painting and sculpture known as the Salon, which occurred annually or biennially in Paris from the early eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the identity of the Salon shifted, and while still in state hands, it evolved into one of Paris’ leisure destinations, moved from the Louvre to a large building on the Champs Élysées, and attracted as many as 10,000 visitors per day. Beginning in the 1840s but reaching its peak during the Second Empire—a roughly thirty-year span— a new type of critical output joined the fray: Caricatures of Salon paintings themselves appeared in inexpensive journals such as Le Charivari and Le Journal amusant, broadcasting comic lithographs of the Salon paintings to a readership that expected and relished this annual mockery of high art. This research project will take as a point of departure the idea that Salon caricature was far more than mere derision, and that it performed crucial negotiations between painters and a broadening Salon-going public. My research, drawing on the dense journal holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the archives of the Musée d’Orsay, will examine the insight of caricatures in their original context along with the boisterous, scurrilous written art criticism that often neighbored caricature in these journals. In so doing, my research challenges a traditional art historiography that looks solely to the academic discourses of professional critics and instead attempts to complete an account of the cultural significance of this European instutional beacon of ambitious painting from the point of view of a rich and revealing popular genre.
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