Print Culture of Enlightenment: The French Print as Agent of Social, Cultural, and Political Change (ARTH 673)

This seminar addresses etching, engraving and associated techniques in eighteenth-century France to explore how an artistic medium may not merely serve social and cultural needs but cause change at all levels of society and culture—and even engender revolutions. The richness of the period—the last great manifestation of printmaking before the tectonic shifts caused by the emergence of lithography and photography—allows the seminar to explore such phenomena as the rise of new techniques including extremely sophisticated colour printing imitating painting, the proliferation of ‘crayon’ and ‘pastel’ manner prints imitating drawings, and of inexpensive dark or ‘English manner’ prints feeding new audiences and new national tastes; the European expansion and reorganization of the print market implicating new national and international representations and exchanges; a rapidly expanding and evolving culture of visualization bringing together high and low subjects, audiences and markets not least through the periodic Salon exhibitions that prints publicized and in which prints figured; the subversion of existing social and cultural orders and the proliferation, particularly during the Revolution, of alternative models of public art through satire and caricature; the visualization and dissemination of knowledge as components of and complements to such projects of Enlightenment as the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert; the revitalization and reshaping of visions of society through the dramatic rise of genre prints and multiplication of Cris de Paris; the expansion of vast cultural fields through fashion prints, trade cards, maps, letterhead, printed buttons, games, paper dolls, etc. Relevant questions include how prints changed processes of pedagogy and socialization; the visualization of and relationships between social orders and classes; the visualization of the nation, the city, and the country; the relationship between art and commerce; the relationship between artistic media and practices of everyday life; the visualization of ideology and the ideology of visualization.

View complete course outline: ARTH673B2011 [.pdf]

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