Laugh Lines

Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France is the first book-length study of a practice known as "Salon caricature," a practice that flourished in the Parisian illustrated press in the second half of the nineteenth century. Salon caricaturists, art critics who used both picture and text, published comic, graphic versions of the canvases concurrently on display at the Paris Salon, the most important exhibition of fine art in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The booming trade in cheaply-illustrated journals and albums broadcast these canvases-in-caricature to a readership eventually reaching the hundreds of thousands that expected and relished this annual comic inversion of high art.

A survey of Salon caricature in art historical scholarship tells a skewed and partial story. The first writers on Salon caricature were advocates of Manet, who cited these caricatures as evidence that a broad public was simply incapable of understanding modernist painting-painting that emphasized form and facture as their own ends, rather than catering to the public's sentimental tastes. Still today, authors of nineteenth-century monographs on canonized "modernists" (e.g., Manet, Frederic Bazille, Henri Fantin-Latour) include nuanced readings of individual examples of Salon caricature, yet this nevertheless reinforces the view that future modernists were the only ones mocked. In contrast, Laugh Lines draws back the curtain on a robust culture of comedy around fine art and its reception in nineteenth-century France, one in which artists of every stripe, including the most sentimental or conservative, were ripe to be made hilarious.