Laugh Lines

This is the first book-length study of a practice known as âSalon caricature,â a practice that flourished in the Parisian illustrated press in the second half of the nineteenth century. Salon caricaturists â" art critics who used both picture and text â" published comic, graphic versions of the canvases concurrently on display at the Paris Salon. As a novel approach to Salon criticism, this practice opened a passage between the illustrated press and the art market, and can be viewed as an early example of the modern culture industry. Supported by ample primary sources, from Baudelaire and Champfleury, to Grand-Carteret and Duret, as well as archival material in the Biblioth¨que Nationale, Laugh Lines questions the dominant role of the individual artist imposed by modernist art history.

Beyond caricature studies alone, the book explores issues surrounding reproductive technologies, the practices of physiognomy, photography, and Salon history, as well as into curatorial history and the role of humour in nineteenth-century French culture. 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.

In doing so, Langbein 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.