Caricature in France
The use of caricature to comment satirically on politics and society was extremely popular in the early nineteenth century. The artist Honoré Daumier had already raised the genre to a new level, and there were lots of magazines with caricatural illustrations.
Daumier was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for fin-de-siècle printmakers, many of whom also worked as illustrators, including Henri-Gabriel Ibels. They were the first to apply elements of caricature on a large scale in ‘high’ art.
Modern style
It was not only in France that printmakers found inspiration for a caricatural style — Japanese woodblock prints, which played a defining role in the development of fin-de-siècle printmaking, also frequently include grimacing figures in absurd poses.
The Nabis in particular assimilated the Japanese manner of exaggeration and stylisation in their representation of people. Pierre Bonnard was the absolute master in this regard. His figures have a witty, flat and decorative appearance: they are, in a word, modern.
Henri Gabriel Ibels, Ouvrard, 1893
Pierre Bonnard, The Grandfather's Song (La chanson du grande-père) from the series Petites scènes familières, 1893
Hermann-Paul, Poster for the 17th or 18th Exhibition of Salon des Cent at La Plume (Paris, January 1896), 1895
Further reading
- Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th century Paris, London 1982
- Judith Wechsler (ed.), ‘The Issue of Caricature’, Art Journal 43 (1983), no. 4
- Patricia Eckert Boyer (ed.), The Nabis and the Parisian Avant-Garde, New Brunswick 1988