FINAL with abstracts SYMPOSIUM: CARICATURE IN THE MODERN WORLD, 1700-1900 The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University Saturday, February 18, 2006 9:15 to 10 AM Breakfast Reception, Museum Bookstore/Lobby 10 AM to 5 PM Pick Laudati Auditorium 10 AM Welcome and Introductory Remarks – James Cuno, Art Institute of Chicago and Hollis Clayson, Northwestern University 10:15 – 10:45 AM Shearer West, Professor of Art History, University of Birmingham, UK Eccentricity and Celebrity in Georgian Caricature This paper will consider the relationship between the proliferation of caricature in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England and the advent of a modern concept of celebrity. The focus on exaggerated physical features in caricature accompanied a fascination with singular, unusual or „eccentric‟ aspects of public character—a tendency that reached its peak in the Regency period. Using specific examples of public figures, the paper will examine how caricature engaged with these changing discourses of public and private character. 10:45 – 11:15 AM David Bindman, Professor, Department of History of Art, University College London Caricature and ‘Race’ in the late eighteenth century The lecture will look at the way in which English caricature contributed to the process of racial, national and ethnic stereotyping in the late 18th century. Gillray and Rowlandson will be considered in particular. 11:15 – 11:45 AM Todd Porterfield, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, Département d’histoire de l’art, Université de Montréal James Gillray and Marriage, Once Again, à la Mode This talk will explore marriage scenes in the oeuvre of James Gillray (1757-1815). It is hoped that there will be an art historical interest in placing some of Gillray‟s prints in a tradition of marriage pictures; that there will be an historiographical interest in challenging the caricature literature‟s habitual distinction between the social and the political; that there will be a theoretical interest in considering marriage pictures in light of performative theory‟s identification of the marriage act as a barometer or even basis of
FINAL with abstracts political power and representation; and that there will be an historical interest in considering the images in light of controversies over marriage in Britain around 1800. 11:45 – 12:15 Panel (morning speakers and moderators): questions to morning speakers
12:15 TO 1:45 LUNCH BREAK
Afternoon program begins at 1:45 PM 1:45 – 2:15 PM Tom Gretton, Professor and Head, Department of History of Art, University College London Too much of a good thing: lithography, wood-engraving and the commodity forms of caricature in the 1820s and 1830s. Lithography and wood-engraving transformed the way caricatures were published and valued in these decades. Charlet‟s lithographic portfolios of the 1820s thematised the devastation that the profusion of lithographs brought to the market. The paper will look at the many ways that English caricaturists, with a much better-established audience than in France, responded to the challenge which these cost-cutting and print-run-multiplying changes posed. It will also look at French responses, and at the emergence and triumph of the caricature-periodical, in different forms, both in London and in Paris. 2:15 – 2:45 PM Ségolène Le Men, Professeur d’histoire de l’art contemporain à l’université de Paris X-Nanterre, membre de l’Institut universitaire de France Victor Hugo and Caricature Victor Hugo has made an important contribution to the romantic theory of caricature. He also practiced caricature, as a writer draughtsman, at various stages of his life. After this general setting, the presentation will focus on two types of examples. The first one relates to his novel Les travailleurs de la mer, and analyses the complex genesis of a finished drawing, the “roi des Auxcriniers” which involves a mixture of sublime and grotesque, and blends various sources (from an illustration of Champfleury‟s History of Caricature to the sea photographs by Le Gray) in a single work. The second group deal with “ready made” anthropomorphic images which stress Hugo‟s play with imagination and relate to blotting and silhouette techniques. Both practices demonstrate Hugo‟s experimental conception of drawing and caricature. 2:45 – 3:15 PM Michèle Hannoosh, Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
FINAL with abstracts Caricature, Parody, and the Politics of Representation This paper will examine a special sub-category of the genre of caricature which is universally recognised but little studied: caricatures which parody well-known works of art, not to lampoon the works themselves, but rather to make a politically topical point 3:15 – 3:45 PM Amelia Rauser, Associate Professor, Art History, Franklin and Marshall College Caricature Unmasked: Natural Language, Representation, and the Modern Self This paper will argue that caricature is a visual language particularly well suited to representing the modern self. As a language of unmasking, caricature operates by deforming the exterior of a person in order to reveal truths about his character. Thus it trusts the private and internal far more than the public and external, and calls attention to the inauthenticity of much representation. And yet caricature also strives for the possibility of authentic representation, casting itself as an unmediated revealer of truths: a natural language. 3:45 – 5:00 PM Panel (all speakers and moderators): speakers field questions from the floor, one another & moderators