Department of Art History

Congratulations to department alumna Julia Langbein (Ph.D. ’14) for being the inaugural recipient of the Art History Former Visiting Committee Publication Grant! Funded by the department’s former Visiting Committee, this grant supports alumni with the publication of a first book manuscript with an academic press. Julia’s forthcoming publication, Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France, builds on the doctoral research she carried out for her dissertation, “Salon Caricature in Second Empire Paris.”

Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Press) is the first comprehensive analysis of an important genre of graphic art and art criticism known as Salon caricature. In the early 1840s, caricatures after the canvases concurrently on display at the Paris Salon began to appear in a handful of journals. Between the 1850s and the end of the century, a booming trade in cheaply-illustrated journals and albums broadcast these canvases-in-caricature or Salons pour rire to a readership eventually reaching the hundreds of thousands. These caricatures have traditionally been taken as evidence that a broad public was baffled by modernist innovation. Laugh Lines, on the contrary, pulls back the curtain on a robust culture of graphic comedy around fine art and its reception in nineteenth-century France, challenging assumptions about class and critical competence, the hierarchies of painting and press art, and modernist historiography.