Studio Practice, Art, and Caricature

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, caricatures of works of art became familiar to the art-loving public and were especially ubiquitous around the time of Salon exhibitions. Charles Leger’s pioneering Courbet selon les caricatures et les images, published in 1920, was the first study of such images.1 He proposed the topic as an important area of investigation because these caricatures, ridiculing both subject and style, show us how works of art appeared to contemporaries, and often are more revelatory than written art criticism. These cartoons usually appeared first in the periodical press but were frequently later reprinted in small livrets resembling the official Salon catalogue.2 But, whether they were published in periodicals such as Le Journal pour rire or Le Charivari, or issued as livrets, they satirized the entire world of art, including artists, works of art, the Salon jury, and the art-viewing public. Caricatures of works of art were always the most popular; Cham’s send-up of Manet’s Olympia (fig. 1), shown in the 1865 Salon, is a well-known example of the genre, but the nineteenth-century public took an avid interest in the lives of artists as well as in the works of art they created. Henry Murger’s Scenes de la vie de Boheme, which he began publishing in 1845, popularized this new media attraction and inspired what might well be the most influential depiction of artists’ lives, Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Boheme (1896).3 There has been a growing interest in this subject, th [...]