Ridiculing Human Limitations,Odious Interests and Ill Manners: Seriously Funny, Caricature Through the Centuries

Ridiculing Human Limitations, Odious Interests and Ill Manners: Seriously Funny, Caricature Through the Centuries

Artist: Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, French, 1782–1863; Printer: Peter Frédéric André, German, ca. 1804;

France, 1802–9, The Dawdlers of the Rue du Coq; hand-colored lithograph, ca. 1804

Seriously Funny: Caricature through the Centuries on view until January 27, 2019, celebrates the Yale University Art Gallery’s recent acquisition of several important 19th-century French caricatures and satirical prints. In the second quarter of the 19th century, well-known artists in France such as Honoré Daumier, J. J. Grandville, and Charles-Joseph Traviès crafted compositions that humorously responded to the political climate, social mores, and fashions of their day. These riotous prints lampooned their audiences’ foibles and famously tested limits with their visual commentary on France’s monarchy and government. As artists and publishers capitalized on the relatively new lithographic process — and the ability to quickly produce an abundance of impressions that could be rushed to a ready market — the popularity of these caricatures turned lithography from a once-fledgling medium into a flourishing one.

Seriously Funny aims to contextualize these French lithographs within the larger comedic graphic tradition in Europe and America by installing them alongside prints, drawings, paintings, and sculpture from the 16th to the 21st century. The 35 works on view are drawn largely from the Gallery’s collection with several exceptional loans from the Yale Center for British Art and private collections. With its jocularity often mistaken for triviality, caricature has long been misunderstood as inferior to artworks created in the classical Grand Manner, the large and imposing academic easel paintings that artists were trained to emulate. Though caricature may lack the refinement and lofty messages of so-called high art, its unique objectives and ambitions imbue the genre with its own power.

In its earliest incarnation, caricature was not wholly separate from high art; rather, both were products of the artist’s studio. Whereas painters and their apprentices aspired to create idealized portraits, landscapes, and religious and historic scenes, the practice of exaggerating physical features for a caricature proved to be a crucial exercise in imagination and artistic license. As caricature evolved as a genre, though, it progressed beyond the mere exaggeration of facial and bodily features. Just as Titian and Guercino — the creators of two of the earliest caricatures in the exhibition — manipulated the perfect bodies that had been a staple of their serious-minded repertoire as painters, soon other artists upended the heroic and moral subjects of Grand Manner art, creating decidedly more unconventional compositions that ridiculed human limitations, odious interests, and ill manners.

Pages: 1 · 2

Culture and Arts, Art and Museums, History, Culture Watch, Politics, Media, Senior Women Web, Articles, Sightings, What's New

Ridiculing Human Limitations, Odious Interests and Ill Manners: Seriously Funny, Caricature Through the Centuries

More Articles