‘Caricature, Salon criticism, laughter and modernity’. Review of: Julia Langbein, Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France, London: Bloomsbury 2022, pp. 245, 43 col. plates and 46 b. & w. ills, ISBN 9781350186859, £ 85

Abstract

The book examines the genre of Salon caricatural, a special kind of Salon criticism which, made of rows of ‘pocket cartoons’ that poke fun on the art works on display, was a common feature of French satirical journals from the 1840s onwards. Looking closely at prints by Pelez, Daumier, Cham, and Bertall, while reading Baudelaire and other contemporary critics, the book examines its rise on the pages of Le Charivari until the end of the Salon in 1881. If French political caricature is characterised by violence and resistance against power, Salon caricature was never primarily oppositional, the book argues. Produced by caricaturists who shared training and pictorial references with Salon artists, it was aiming for laughter, generated by the very act of the translation of the medium of paint into drawing and print. Shifting reproductive technologies were part and parcel of the mechanisms of ‘repicturing’. As insiders’ views on practices of imaging, as well as social and cultural norms of the time, Salon caricatures share their approach with modern art.