How media were made: chromolithography in Belle Époque France

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Notes

1. See, for example, Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution and Howard, The Book.

2. As David Edgerton convincingly argues, the history of technology has traditionally focused ‘on the early history of selected technologies which later came into widespread use, or which appear self-evidently important.’ This is especially evident in general histories of technology, which tend to always address the ‘usual technological suspects in the usual periods,’ for example, electricity and chemicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the atomic bomb, electronics, and computing in the World War II and post-war eras; communications and the internet in the late twentieth century. See Edgerton, ‘Innovation, Technology, or History.’ The hesitance of historians of technology to address aesthetic matters, including artists’ technologies and materials, is clearly demonstrated by the paucity of original research on this topic published in History and Technology and Technology and Culture. (A search using the Historical Abstracts database for articles with the subject heading ‘artists’ materials’ published in these two journals produces zero results.) Original research on design-related topics appears more frequently in the pages of these journals, but remains under-represented in comparison to other topics.

3. See, for example, Howard, The Book and Rhodes and Sawday, The Renaissance Computer.

4. Indeed, the type of integration I propose is already happening in the field of the history of design, namely in the work of Penny Sparke, Jeffrey Meikle, Christina Cogdell, and Regina Lee Blaszczyk. (See below, n. 31.) The impact of science and technology studies on design history is also evidenced by the publication in Summer 2004 of a special number of Design Issues (vol. 20, no. 3) dedicated to advancing ‘an STS focus on Design.’ In comparison, the impact of science and technology studies on art historical research is more varied and, as a result, much harder to chart, ranging from studies analyzing the influence of scientific theories on specific styles or artworks to, more recently, histories of vision grounded in the history of optics, physiology, psychology or visual technologies. Key examples include Kemp, The Science of Art and Crary, Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception. However, as I noted above, this scholarship and aesthetic considerations, more generally, still receive only marginal consideration from historians of technology.

5. Historians of technology have primarily focused on the history of dyes. These works include, for example, Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry; Ball, Bright Earth; Travis, The Rainbow Makers; and Travis and Reinhardt, Heinrich Caro. Research that fits more comfortably in other disciplinary categories, such as art history, art conservation, or specialized sub-fields such as the history of printing, textiles or fashion includes: Hermens, Looking Through Paintings; Gage, Color and Culture; Gage, Color and Meaning; Cate, The Color Revolution; Hudson, Design and Printing; Leprun and Lefêvre, Des cahiers d’Andrinople; Delamare and Guineau, Les matériaux de la couleur; and Kalba, ‘Outside the Lines.’ The oft-repeated characterization of modern world as colorless is found in number of primary and secondary sources, namely in the writings of Michel Pastoureau, one of the foremost historians of color. See, for example, Pastoureau, Couleurs, images, symboles, 61–3.

6. On the inferior status of color in Western philosophy and art theory, see especially Batchelor, Chromophobia.

7. Rickards, Collecting Printed Ephemera, 7.

8. Twyman, ‘Editor’s Introduction,’ vi.

9. Marx, ‘Preface,’ iv. This and all other translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

10. Bouchot, La lithographie, 293.

11. Several scholars do, however, chose to study them that way. Iconographic analyses of trade cards are especially common. See, for instance, McClintock, Imperial Leather, 207–31. In comparison to British and French historians, American historians have devoted more attention to how trade cards operated as a form of advertising and trade card-collecting. See, for instance, Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor chap. as well as Gruber Garvey, ‘Scrapbook, Wish Book, Prayer Book.’

12. On poster-collecting in late nineteenth century France and critics’ efforts to elevate the status of posters to that of high art, see the following sources: Carter, ‘L’âge de l’affiche’; Chapin, ‘Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’; Collins, ‘The Poster as Art’; Levin, ‘Democratic Vistas’; and Verhagen, ‘The Poster.’

13. Huysmans, ‘Le salon officiel de 1880.’

14. Ernest Maindron noted, for instance, ‘It is impossible to see one of his designs without immediately grasping the nature of the work he puts forward. If the eye is satisfied, the spirit is no less so. His posters stand out on the walls and command attention.’ Maindron, ‘Les affiches illustrées,’ 546.

15. Wolff, ‘M. Jules Chéret.’

16. Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, an architect and theorist known for his enthusiasm for modern, industrially produced materials, was among the first to explicitly articulate these views, confirming their properly technological parenthood. On this topic, see Hearn, The Architectural Theory of Viollet-Le-Duc, chap. 5.

17. Adeline, Les arts de reproduction vulgarisés, 329.

18. Indeed, number of poster promoters also took interest in the contemporary decorative arts revival as well as neo-impressionist and symbolist art movements. On the intersection between high art, decorative arts, and poster-collecting in nineteenth century France, see Carter, ‘L’âge de l’affiche,’ chap. 5, Collins, ‘The Poster as Art,’ and Kalba, ‘Outside the Lines, chap. 5.

19. During, Modern Enchantments, chap. 4; Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum, chap. 3.

20. Engelmann, Album chromo-lithographique, passim.

21. The Académie des Beaux-Arts offered a damning review of chromolithography in its Dictionnaire de l’Académie des Beaux Arts (1878). See Anon., ‘Chromolithographie,’ 16.

22. Art reproductions still required the use of hand-presses as did the printing of original lithographic artworks. On this subject, see Gilmour, ‘Cher Monsieur Clot.’

23. Commission d’enquête sur la situation des ouvriers et des industries d’art, Commission d’enquête, 179.

24. Ibid.

25. Moreover, a number of well-known poster artists, including Jules Chéret himself, also designed trade cards. Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle, 202. Another well-known poster artist, Théophile Alexander-Steinlen, designed at least one trade card, as documented in Bargiel and Zagrodski, Steinlen: Affichiste, 33.

26. Indeed, the Trésor de la langue française defines chromo in the following manner: ‘[Par abrév.] Chromolithography; p. ext., dessin de qualité médiocre.’ Anon., ‘Chromo.’

27. A direct record of the artist’s drawn or painted mark on the stone, a lithograph, for instance, does not have the same aspect as a copper engraving. Twyman, Breaking the Mould, esp. 5–9.

28. I borrow the concept ‘operational aesthetic’ from historian Neil Harris’s classic study of the popular appeal of American entertainer P.T. Barnum. Harris, Humbug, chap. 3. Michael Twyman points out the publication of books and articles illustrating the chromolithographic printing method in the USA and England at the same time. These include, for instance, Audsley’s rare and expensive The Art of Chromolithography: Popularly Explained and Illustrated by Forty-Four Plates (1883); British Museum’s Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Museum . . . With an Example of Successive Printings (1903); and an article published in the popular Strand Magazine titled ‘How a chromo-lithograph is printed’ (1904). These publications, Twyman notes, confirm the ‘[widespread] fascination for chromolithography’ at the time as well as printers’ desire ‘to emphasize the extraordinary effort that went into such productions.’ Twyman, Breaking the Mould, 105. Images en couleurs, also by Twyman, offers one of the best comprehensive histories of chromolithography.

29. On public displays of automata in eighteenth-century France see, Riskin, ‘The Defecating Duck.’

30. Wilson, ‘Visual Culture,’ 29.

31. Sparke, Modern Interior and An Introduction to Design and Culture; Meikle, American Plastic and Twentieth-Century Limited; Cogdell, Eugenic Design; Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution and Imagining Consumers.

32. Ferguson, ‘The Mind’s Eye,’ 831. Ferguson later developed his ideas about visual thinking in engineering in Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye.

33. Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Elkins, The Domain of Images; Stafford, Artful Science; Edgerton and Lynch, ‘Aesthetics and Digital Image Processing.’

34. Lees-Maffei, ‘Production–Consumption,’ esp. 36720139.

35. Chris Otter’s recent book, The Victorian Eye, has received mixed reviews, namely in the pages of this journal. Nonetheless, the book remains a valuable model for a new history of vision grounded in technological sources. Histories of vision that, in contrast, draw primarily upon the history of science, medicine, and psychology include, for example, Crary, Techniques of the Observer. The division between these two types of analyses is hardly absolute, but remains a useful one. For, although Otter also makes reference to the scientific theory of perception, his analysis focuses more on everyday practices in Victorian England and the technologies on which they depended: transportation, reading, institutional efforts to collect data, etc. In comparison, Crary struggles to demonstrate that scientific theories regarding the subjective nature of vision affected the popular experience of modern visual media. See, for instance, Burd Schiavo, ‘From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision.’