Videos by Kathryn Desplanque
Video profiling PhD dissertation work at Duke University while a fellow in the Digital Knowledge ... more Video profiling PhD dissertation work at Duke University while a fellow in the Digital Knowledge lab at Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, 2016-2017 68 views
Webinar delivered for NVivo, QSR International on September 19th 2017
7 views
Talk delivered at Oberlin College, November 14 2019
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Articles/Chapters by Kathryn Desplanque
Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France, 2021
John Grand-Carteret, the turn-of-the-century French collector, historian, and popular culture ent... more John Grand-Carteret, the turn-of-the-century French collector, historian, and popular culture enthusiast, wrote prolifically on both caricatures and shop signs. In his 1902 L'enseigne. Son histoire, sa philosophie, ses particularités, he observed an instance of overlap between the historical shop signs at the center of his study and the subject of illustrations produced across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by artists such as William Hogarth, Anton Balthasar Dunker, Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, and Hippolyte Bellangé. 1 Illustrated in an age when shop signs still lined the streets of London and Paris, Grand-Carteret interpreted these images as though they were authentic depictions of historical shop sign painters. Vaunting their overlooked artistry, he described these cartoons as a "celebration of the open air artist" who turned to shop sign painting after having "shed the shackles of the corporations. " 2 His nostalgia for the lost art of shop sign painting is infused with the cultural agenda he promoted throughout his written work: a defiant celebration of the low and popular arts, and a cry for the democratization of artistic production and appreciation. 3 Caricatures of shop sign painters only play a supporting role in Grand-Carteret's text. Nonetheless, he overshadows the depth of these caricatures' satirical force by recruiting them to the role of historical document. Caricatures of shop sign painters in fact constituted a relatively distinct category of satirical production. They are one among many tropes nested within the larger genre of images that mocked contemporary artistic life in Paris and the structural transformations that its art world underwent as it modernized across political revolutions and changes of regime. 4 Late eighteenth-and early nineteenthcentury caricatures of shop sign painters did not mock this elusive category of 37431.
L'Image railleuse, 2019
This contribution examines the parodic frontispieces to satirical albums published in early ninet... more This contribution examines the parodic frontispieces to satirical albums published in early nineteenth-century Paris. Illustrators such as Hippolyte Bellangé, Auguste Raffet, and Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet collaborated with publishers, namely the Gihaut brothers, to produce satirical frontispieces that commented upon the popular printed image's participation in new consumer economies.
The Mediatization of the Artist, 2018
This chapter explores the image of the starving artist in early nineteenth-century Paris. We have... more This chapter explores the image of the starving artist in early nineteenth-century Paris. We have been more attentive to the image of the bohemian artist as articulated by Honoré de Balzac and Henry Murger. I demonstrate that these authors were indebted to a rich history of satirical imagery that preceded their landmark works.
Biblio 17. Voyages, rencontres, échanges au XVIIe siècle, Apr 2017
This paper discusses the parasitical nature of satirical production by examining Chapelle and Bac... more This paper discusses the parasitical nature of satirical production by examining Chapelle and Bachaumont's humorous and Frondeur travel narrative, Le Voyage d'Encausse (1656), and its relationship to French travel narratives in the seventeenth century.
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Oct 2016
This article analyzes an anonymous satirical image against the French genre painter Jean-Baptiste... more This article analyzes an anonymous satirical image against the French genre painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze. This image acts as a diagram to advance an argument for the decline of Greuze's reputation. In particular, it suggests that Greuze's wife, Anne-Gabrielle Babuty, is the catalyst for this decline, having encouraged Greuze to succumb to greed and employ illegitimate and speculative publishing practices in the production of reproductive engravings. Through an analysis of the way in which celebrity, the public woman, and print commerce intersect, this article demonstrates the value of integrating graphic satire into our study of celebrity culture and the art world.
RACAR, Jun 2015
This article looks at two 18th century french caricatures which were restruck several times over ... more This article looks at two 18th century french caricatures which were restruck several times over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries: Triomphe des Arts Modernes ou Carnaval de Jupiteur and L'Assemblée de Brocanteurs attributed to the Comte de Caylus. Borrowing methods from material and visual culture studies, this article examines the importance of the editorial gesture of restriking these plates. After examining the dense iconography of both images and relating them to their different publishing contexts, this article mobilizes Miriam Hansen's interpretation of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" in order to assess the importance of the materiality of the prints in every new restrike.
The Power of Satire, Oct 2015
This chapter analyses a caricature, produced in 1753 by the watercolourist Paul Sandby entitled B... more This chapter analyses a caricature, produced in 1753 by the watercolourist Paul Sandby entitled Burlesque sur le Burlesque. This caricature attacks the painter William Hogarth, in particular, his recently published aesthetic treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, and his stance in the English Academic debates of the 1750s – a series of events in which English artists debated whether or not they should migrate from private artistic academies to publicly funded and hierarchically organised arts academies on the continental model. The chapter explores the way in which Sandby targets his object, and through iconographical analysis, demonstrates how caricature operates visually as a literal puzzle that forefronts certain criticisms, and veils others.
Thesis and Dissertation by Kathryn Desplanque
This dissertation examines a corpus of 486 satirical images of artistic life in Paris. The Parisi... more This dissertation examines a corpus of 486 satirical images of artistic life in Paris. The Parisian art-world was regularly the subject of a form of satirical criticism conducted in visual media. More significantly, this satirical criticism was produced in the medium of print, and in its reproducibility, could broadcast its satire to large audiences. By doing so in the amusing and subversive tone of satire, it constituted a visual counterpart to art criticism. I examine what these images reveal to us collectively over time as they overlap with representations of the art world disseminated in other equally understudied popular media, namely popular theater (vaudeville and opéra comique) and panoramic fiction (physiologies, short fiction, and so on).
This project sits at the intersection of the study of graphic satire and visual culture, and several strains of the social history of art, namely institutional histories of Paris’ art world, and the study of the representation of the artist and of artistic sociability. I also employed Digital Humanities Methodologies, namely Qualitative Data Analysis using NVivo, to produce distant and close readings of this corpus of images.
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art-world caricature was preoccupied with the art world and its actors, such as artists, connoisseurs, art critics, Salon juries, art audiences, dealers and sellers, and patrons and buyers. Further still, art-world caricature was overwhelmingly attentive to the relationship among different types of actors as mediated by an invisible system of structural relations, made visible via graphic satire’s representational language. These objects thus collectively mounted a coherent critique of the shifting structural relations within Paris’ art world. This dissertation argues that satirical images of artistic life in Paris presented a social type designed to contradict images of the artist as exceptional and as genius. Instead, art-world caricature proposed the “inglorious artist,” or the mediocre, common, and ordinary artist who toils, struggles, and ultimately fails to succeed in an increasingly liberalized art world.
This thesis centres on the mid to late eighteenth-century French artist, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, an... more This thesis centres on the mid to late eighteenth-century French artist, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and more specifically, on the ephemeral print matter that he produced, that discusses him, or that represents him in caricature. In analyzing and contextualizing this print matter, this thesis seeks to explore the way in which he was represented both visually and textually, and to correlate this to the rise and fall of his reputation during his lifetime. I have attempted to demonstrate that, through their representations of him, Greuze's contemporaries defined positive and negative models of artistic behaviour, and debated topics of interest such as the boundaries between fame and celebrity, and their anxieties about the commercialization of the artworld. Each chapter centres on a different kind of printed object: periodical and pamphlet art criticism of the biennial Salon held in the Louvre, advertisements for Greuze's reproductive engravings in periodicals, and a libellous caricature, respectively.
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Videos by Kathryn Desplanque
Articles/Chapters by Kathryn Desplanque
Thesis and Dissertation by Kathryn Desplanque
This project sits at the intersection of the study of graphic satire and visual culture, and several strains of the social history of art, namely institutional histories of Paris’ art world, and the study of the representation of the artist and of artistic sociability. I also employed Digital Humanities Methodologies, namely Qualitative Data Analysis using NVivo, to produce distant and close readings of this corpus of images.
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art-world caricature was preoccupied with the art world and its actors, such as artists, connoisseurs, art critics, Salon juries, art audiences, dealers and sellers, and patrons and buyers. Further still, art-world caricature was overwhelmingly attentive to the relationship among different types of actors as mediated by an invisible system of structural relations, made visible via graphic satire’s representational language. These objects thus collectively mounted a coherent critique of the shifting structural relations within Paris’ art world. This dissertation argues that satirical images of artistic life in Paris presented a social type designed to contradict images of the artist as exceptional and as genius. Instead, art-world caricature proposed the “inglorious artist,” or the mediocre, common, and ordinary artist who toils, struggles, and ultimately fails to succeed in an increasingly liberalized art world.
This project sits at the intersection of the study of graphic satire and visual culture, and several strains of the social history of art, namely institutional histories of Paris’ art world, and the study of the representation of the artist and of artistic sociability. I also employed Digital Humanities Methodologies, namely Qualitative Data Analysis using NVivo, to produce distant and close readings of this corpus of images.
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art-world caricature was preoccupied with the art world and its actors, such as artists, connoisseurs, art critics, Salon juries, art audiences, dealers and sellers, and patrons and buyers. Further still, art-world caricature was overwhelmingly attentive to the relationship among different types of actors as mediated by an invisible system of structural relations, made visible via graphic satire’s representational language. These objects thus collectively mounted a coherent critique of the shifting structural relations within Paris’ art world. This dissertation argues that satirical images of artistic life in Paris presented a social type designed to contradict images of the artist as exceptional and as genius. Instead, art-world caricature proposed the “inglorious artist,” or the mediocre, common, and ordinary artist who toils, struggles, and ultimately fails to succeed in an increasingly liberalized art world.