Art history essay

Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Dénicheur of Jules Chéret's Posters

Karen L. Carter

Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 41, Number 1 & 2, Fall-Winter 2012-2013, pp. 122-141 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI:

For additional information about this article

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https://doi.org/10.1353/ncf.2012.0036

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/488938

122 Karen L. Carter

Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Dénicheur of Jules Chéret’s Posters

karen l. carter

This article analyzes Joris-Karl Huysmans’s essay on French poster designer Jules Chéret (1836–1932) as an early example of art criticism devoted to mass- produced advertising posters. Huysmans’s “Chéret” essay, published in the col- lection of art criticism, Certains (1889), interpreted late nineteenth-century pos- ter imagery as capturing the sexual allure of the female fi gures represented. In doing so, Huysmans, a dénicheur—or cultivator of unconventional interpreta- tions of popular culture—wedded decadent themes of the comic and sexuality in order to challenge bourgeois morality and capitalist forms of culture.

In 1896 the conservative Catholic commentator Maurice Talmeyr (1850–1931) speculated in his article, “L’Age de l’affi che,” that a visitor from the time of Cardinals Richelieu (1585–1642) and Mazarin (1606–1661), who had slept for 200 years and awakened in modern Paris, would fi nd many landmarks and aspects of the city unchanged, while others things would seem very odd, even hallucinatory (201).1 In particular, the presence of omnibuses, stove pipe hats, and bicycles would alarm this would-be time-traveler, but, according to Talmeyr, the single feature of modern life that the visitor would fi nd the most fantastic, the strangest, and the one causing the most profound shock would be the “grimacing and licentious” spectacle of posters, which epitomized for Talmeyr, more than any other physical reminder, the transformation of every- day life and commercialization of the city space that had occurred in the late nineteenth century (208). Talmeyr portrayed the poster as a festering disease implanted by industrialists on city walls that marred the urban landscape, ob- scured the landmarks of earlier epochs and literally ate away at the surfaces of sturdy edifi ces and their corresponding moral values established in a grander, more religiously devout past. In Talmeyr’s analysis, the poster was the icon of the era, symbolizing the frenzied pace and promotional values of the fi n-de- siècle and epitomizing modern society’s crass and obvious commercial solici- tations that he maintained were tantamount to prostitution.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013 123

Although Talmeyr’s 1896 essay is a particularly evocative example, the con- sideration of the modern poster (and publicity in general) as an urban eye- sore and emblem of commercial values did not originate in the 1890s, but had actually been a staple of French literature and criticism since the early years of the nineteenth century (Thornton, Bowlby, Hahn). As Talmeyr’s re- marks attest, fi n-de-siècle writers often judged the poster as an aggressive, overwhelmingly ubiquitous and sexually contaminating symptom of deca- dent modernity and this negative interpretation has proven highly infl uen- tial for the current interpretation of the nineteenth-century poster (Verha- gen). Despite the persistence of charges in the 1870s and 1880s that the poster manipulated its spectators and marred the urban landscape (Zola, Garnier), the specifi c accusation that the poster disseminated sexual desire through its colorful images of appealing females can be traced to a fairly neglected essay written by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) on French poster designer Jules Chéret (1836–1932) that was published in his collection of art criticism, Cer- tains (1889).

The purpose, then, of this article is to examine Huysmans’s “Chéret” essay in the context of cultural commentary of the 1880s and 1890s and to trace its infl uence on the reception of the poster, which by the end of the nineteenth century, acquired a more explicitly articulated reputation as a morally cor- rupting force in French society. In the end, the construction of the poster as licentious and morally corrupt was cultivated by decadent writers, in particu- lar Huysmans and his followers, in order to ally the poster with male sexual- ity and distance its consumption from the feminine and bourgeois activity of shopping. My reading of poster criticism as presenting an anti-bourgeois appropriation of mass cultural forms and their attendant modes of con- sumption runs counter to the argument that Ruth Iskin presented in Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting, in which she portrays the female fi gure represented in poster imagery (“La Parisienne”) as the quintessential bourgeois consumer who mediated and instigated capitalist consumption (223).

j.-k. huysmans, art critic and dénicheur

Although Huysmans was undoubtedly one of the most infl uential writers to focus on l’affi che, he was among an entire generation of art critics in the late 1880s and 1890s to examine the poster’s visual appeal and sexual allure and his criticism no doubt helped instigate an avant-garde interest in this com- mercial and presumably “low” form of culture. The novelty of Huysmans’s “Chéret” article was that the topic of advertising (in the form of the publicity poster) became a distinct and independent subject of widely circulated cul-

124 Karen L. Carter

tural criticism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This body of critical commentary, which was circulated in both small reviews and larg- er newspapers, emerged in the 1880s and documented both the anxiety and wonder of viewing affi ches in the modern city of Paris as designed by Bar- on Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891).2 At precisely the same histori- cal moment that the avant-garde artist Georges Seurat (1859–1891) was col- lecting and studying the posters of Jules Chéret for the aesthetic secrets that the artist hoped to unlock for his neo-impressionist paintings (Herbert 157), Huysmans—as well as fellow critics Félicien Champsaur, Roger Marx, Félix Fénéon, Jules Claretie and Octave Uzanne—was writing about posters as pos- sessing a visual aesthetic that could be understood and appreciated by a public that was imagined as increasingly bored with Academic painting by the 1880s.

These decadent and symbolist writers championed Chéret not in rela- tion to advertising per se, but as a creator of erotic images that could subvert dominant notions of sexual morality. Huysmans, and other writers who dis- cussed the poster in the context of aesthetics and decadent modernity, can therefore be characterized as dénicheurs, a term used in the nineteenth cen- tury to describe those who discover or unearth curiosities or antiques (Littré). The word dénicheur was used in an anonymous article published in Le Temps in 1886 (“Les Lectures françaises”), in which the author speculated that fu- ture collectors would look to nineteenth-century posters to reconstruct a pic- ture of fi n-de-siècle Parisian life.3 Another contemporary reference speculated about which art critic had discovered (déniché) the latest master of the visual arts, in this case, Jules Chéret (Grand-Carteret).4 Using the term dénicheur in a more expanded sense, I interpret Huysmans and other poster critics as not only trying to discover new artistic celebrities, but also as looking to low, dis- carded and degraded forms of culture (in this case, the publicity poster) and reinvigorating them with new meaning in unexpected ways.

More recently British art historian David Cottington utilized the term dé- nicheur to describe the early dealers and collectors of Cubist collages—such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979)—who exercised “their independent aesthetic discernment in the discovery of contemporary maîtres” (Cotting- ton 132). According to Cottington, a dénicheur could develop a new aesthetic sensibility because he or she did not hold allegiances to artistic traditions or established notions of aesthetic refi nement. The dénicheur equally possessed what Pierre Bourdieu described in Distinction as “cultural capital,” a quality of individuals within social groups who fostered distinct identities through highly specialized and unorthodox aesthetic enjoyment in order to distin- guish themselves from dominant tastes. Quoting Bourdieu, Cottington makes the claim that the cultivation of mass culture by groups of artists, collectors

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013 125

and dealers within contexts other than modes of consumption dictated by dominant culture could be interpreted as a method of aesthetic innovation:

Liking the same things differently, liking different things, less obviously marked out for admiration—these are some of the strategies for out- fl anking, overtaking and displacing [the dominant fractions] which, by maintaining a permanent revolution in tastes, enable the dominat- ed, less wealthy fractions, whose appropriations must, in the main, be exclusively symbolic, to secure exclusive possession at every moment (Bourdieu, quoted in Cottington 223).

The cultivation of unorthodox tastes and newly discovered masters was at the heart of Huysmans’s essay on Chéret and the larger appreciation of the poster at the end of the nineteenth century by collectors, artists and art critics. By devoting an essay to Chéret, Huysmans focused attention on an overlooked artist much in the same way as he had accomplished with Odilon Redon (1840– 1916).5 As Dario Gamboni examined in his study of Redon, Huysmans—along with Félix Fénéon, Gustave Geffroy, Charles Morice and Gustave Kahn—was responsible for bringing the work of Redon to the public starting in 1885 (65). The same men, along with many others outside this “decadent” group, can be credited with bringing Chéret’s work (and color posters in general) to light in poetry and prose in the 1880s and later (Fénéon, Geffroy, Kahn, Morice). The case of Chéret introduced an element of a “popular aesthetic” to art criticism. Rather than promoting Redon, an ignored, presumably esoteric creator of moody and elusive monochromatic lithographs, poster critics instead defend- ed the ubiquitous and wildly popular posters that decorated urban streets but were rarely seriously considered. Instead of mediating Redon’s cryptic subject matter for the public, Huysmans, in his “Chéret” essay, explored an interpreta- tion of posters outside the realm of bourgeois commercialism and described an appreciation of poster imagery specifi cally for the eroticized images of women.6 More importantly, Huysmans identifi ed the sexuality of women rep- resented in posters as potentially opposing, rather than affi rming, the expected and predictable bourgeois consumption of posters. By appropriating the ap- pealing features of advertising for the sexual titillation of men rather than as models of feminine activities such as shopping, Huysmans asserted his sense of cultural capital as a dénicheur and consumed posters differently. The recep- tion of the poster (as a form of mass-produced culture) by Huysmans, Lucien Descaves and other decadent writers, therefore, can be interpreted, as Thomas Crow has written, as an instance in which an alienated subgroup “discovered, renewed or re-invented itself by identifying with marginal ‘non-artistic’ forms of expressivity and display—forms improvised [. . .] out of otherwise devalued or degraded materials of capitalist manufacture” (215).

126 Karen L. Carter

j.-k. huysmans and the modern poster

Huysmans has been credited with fi rst mentioning Jules Chéret’s name in commentary (Collins 159) and although the designer’s name was already known in Bohemian circles in the 1860s and 1870s, Chéret did not receive critical attention as the topic of ambitious art criticism until after Huysmans mentioned him in the review, “Le Salon de 1879,” which was published in Le Voltaire (17 May 1879). In this essay Huysmans decried the mediocrity and poor quality of paintings exhibited that year, specifi cally the “bondieuseries du temps passé” and “léchotteries à la [Alexandre] Cabanel (1823–1889) et à la [Jean-Léon] Gérôme (1824–1904).” Instead, Huysmans urged art lovers to look at Japanese prints and “chromos” by Chéret for an art that “pulsates” with life (OC 6: 14). In essence, Huysmans challenged the hierarchy established by the French Academy and defi ed the standards of the Salon, which did not allow color lithographs to be included in its exhibitions until 1899 (Cate 1; Prelinger 13). His reference to “chromos” (rather than affi ches) deliberately labeled com- mercial images in a derogatory manner and distinguished them from artists’ prints (Gascoigne 28b). In his reversal of artistic hierarchies, Huysmans por- trayed the color lithograph produced by an industrial process as possessing a higher level of originality than the historical paintings of two of France’s most eminent artists.7

With these short passages in his Salon criticism, Huysmans considered posters, along with Japanese prints, transgressive alternatives to the moribund tradition of Academic art that was regarded as having run its course.8 Rather than portray posters as simply manipulative or intrusive, as did many writ- ers in the Naturalist school (Zola), Huysmans saw posters as more vital and exemplary of Parisian modernity than Academic art.9 Critics who followed Huysmans’s example would pick up on this insurgent status of posters and in- terpret them as remnants of the “fl oating world” of Parisian spectacles much in the same way that ukiyo-e woodblock prints captured the ephemeral enter- tainments of the Edo period (1603–1867) in Japan.10

Huysmans further developed these ideas in his essay titled simply “Chéret” that was included in his second major collection of art criticism, Certains (1889). By the date that the essay appeared in print, there had already been many publications about the poster including newspaper articles by art critics, essays on poster collecting by bibliophiles and print historians (most notably Henri Béraldi), and a history of l’affi che illustrée written by poster afi cionado Ernest Maindron.11 However, Huysmans’s essay had a major impact on the reception of the poster in France. Critical essays published before the “Chéret” essay simply do not contain the same poetic language, vivid images and vio- lent juxtapositions used by Huysmans and his essay was widely referenced,

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013 127

quoted and plagiarized for the next twenty years.12 In particular, Huysmans utilized dualistic critical categories of joy/laughter and satanism/pathology— language that continued Baudelairean terms from the essay “De l’essence du rire”—in order to suggest the sexual desire he detected in Chéret’s posters.13 The criticism written by those who were infl uenced by Huysmans’s writing extended this duality to serve as a larger metaphor for commercial culture in the modern period as will be analyzed below.

The “Chéret” essay begins by characterizing illustrated posters as a color- ful antidote to the monotonous, bleak architecture that produced a prison- like urban environment, a theme that Huysmans seems to have initiated in poster commentary (Le Men 43; Locmant 10–11). He wrote that if he were Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand (1817–1891), who was in charge of completing Haussmann’s renovations under the Third Republic, he would have banned Chéret’s posters as a disruption of the “taciturne tristesse de nos rues” that had been the result of Haussmanization (OC 10: 47).14 He wrote: “Toujours est-il que sur cette teinte générale, d’un gris morose, les affi ches de M. Chéret déton- nent et qu’elles déséquilibrent, par l’intrusion subite de leur joie, l’immobile monotonie d’un décor pénitentiaire enfi n posé; cette dissonance compromet l’ensemble de l’œuvre réalisée par M. Alphand” (OC 10: 48). In Huysmans’s as- sessment, the principal opportunity for aesthetic pleasure for the beleaguered urban dweller who resided in the stultifying architecture of the gloomy city, was the occasional “intrusion” of color and joy via Chéret’s posters pasted on city walls. Paralleling the remarks in his earlier Salon criticism, Huysmans re- jected offi cial, presumably bourgeois, culture and architecture—sturdy, per- manent and imposing—in favor of its opposite, the ephemeral, “low” poster that many had found to be an eyesore or disruption (Garnier). According to Huysmans, the experience of viewing posters—through both their joy and eroticism—could break through the malaise of living within the monotonous and deadened public space of Haussmann’s Paris.

In addition to this contrast of vibrant ephemeral imagery and bleak ur- ban environment, Huysmans emphasized the comical and fantastic elements of Chéret posters from the 1880s. He analyzed in detail Chéret’s 1879 poster for the Folies-Bergère (fi g. 1), which represents one scene of a pantomime in which Henri Agoust, a French performer who collaborated with the English acrobats, the Hanlon-Lees, conducts an amateur and incompetent orchestra.15 Huysmans described the fi gure shown here with his wild tufts of hair, pointed coattails and exaggerated glee as enraptured in a state of demented and dia- bolical joy.16 Huysmans’s selection of posters (fi g. 2) with fi gures tumbling, twisting, somersaulting, and leaping through space as performing acrobats exhibited a preoccupation with fantasy and childish pleasure also found in his novels (Storey 214).

Fig. 1. Jules Chéret. Folies-Bergère / Do Mi Sol Do / Les Hanlon Lees, 1878. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes. BNF: Dc-329 (2)-Fol: G39015. Cliché cour- tesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Fig. 2. Jules Chéret, Folies-Bergère / La Musique de l’avenir / par les / Bozza, 1881. Biblio- thèque nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes. Chéret aff. toile XIII. Cliché courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

130 Karen L. Carter

In his descriptions of this enrapturing experience of joy, Huysmans por- trayed the sensation of viewing Chéret’s posters as a synaesthetic experience through fl amboyant language that alludes to the sound of music, the chirp- ing of birds, the sparkle of champagne, the fl aming vivacity of one color, the delicacy of another tone, the thump of a drum, the clang of homemade instru- ments, the taste of black pepper, and the gleeful laughter of a young child. It was in his analysis of the Folies-Bergère / Do Mi Sol Do / Les Hanlon Lees (1878) and Folies-Bergère, Musique de l’avenir par les Bozza posters (1881) that Huys- mans applied to Chéret’s work the critical categories of joy and sexual seduc- tion that Baudelaire had used to analyze caricature and comedy (fi gs. 1 and 2). In Baudelaire’s essay “De l’essence du rire,” he described laughter as the loss of innocence and used diametrically opposed images in his defi nition. In the “Chéret” essay Huysmans (following Baudelaire) evoked pantomime as the “es- sence” of comedy and used violent contrasts to present the fi gures as appealing and repulsive, satanic and innocent, and joyful and melancholic.17 Huysmans repeatedly emphasized the expressions of joy in Chéret’s fi gures, but noted that it was “la joie frénétique et narquoise, comme glacée de la pantomime, une joie que son excès même exhausse, en la rapprochant presque de la douleur” (OC 10: 49). The juxtaposition of extreme emotional and physical states—joy, pain, pleasure and disease—were presumably borne out in Chéret’s fi gures with their forced, exaggerated and even mocking smiles and artifi cial sense of glee exuded by the tumbling and twisting contortions of the fi gures.

The delight in joy and sensual pleasures presumably visualized in Chéret’s posters was, nonetheless, undermined by Huysmans’s critical language in which the fi gures were also described as “presque satanique,” “inquiet,” “név- rosé,” “joie démentielle,” and “hystérique.” This vivid language portrayed the poster, as a “symbol” of the modern age that equally contained a sense of pathology and madness. As Patricia Mathews notes, this language of de- generation and mal-de-siècle was a common motif in artistic discourses of the period that were appropriated by symbolist artists in order to assert their creativity and genius, despite their negative associations (46–63). The hysteri- cal female was more specifi cally associated with an over-exaggeration of the emotions and excitation of the nerves and Huysmans, by the late 1880s, was already reading on the subject of hysteria.18 The hysteria analogy, then, is used by Huysmans to evoke the extreme emotion in Chéret’s fi gures and especial- ly what was taken to be their accentuated sexuality. Chéret’s virtuoso draw- ing, the presumably quickly drawn lines, which often merely evoked, rather than delineated the anatomy in detail, also created distortions in the body with twisting and turning poses that suggest movement, but which could have been interpreted as the pathological poses and gestures of the female hysteric.

The last half of the “Chéret” essay focused on the fi gure of La Parisienne

Fig. 3. Jules Chéret, Bal / du Moulin Rogue / Place Blanche, 1889. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes. Chéret rouleau no. 7. Cliché courtesy of the Biblio- thèque nationale de France.

132 Karen L. Carter

who was portrayed as intoxicating the viewer with sexual desire. Huysmans openly discussed the seductive power that Chéret’s female fi gure produced in those who perceived her charms. He described her based on a representation from a book jacket of George Duval’s Paris qui rit (1886) but it is possible to apply his analysis to Chéret’s posters from the same period, for example his Moulin Rouge poster of 1889 (fi g. 3). Huysmans characterized La Parisienne by Chéret as a woman of loose morals and common origins (fi lle du peuple) who typifi ed the fantasy of female sexuality and was seized by a frenetic, ec- static, even orgasmic joy. In the Moulin Rouge poster, two fi gures are depicted as defying gravity as they kick their legs in the air, a pose that coincidentally provides a mildly alluring view of their legs.

Not only was Huysmans interpreting Chéret’s posters in light of larger societal views of hysteria, but Chéret himself may also have constructed his work in line with contemporary café-concert performances that often refer- enced hysteria. As Rae Beth Gordon has documented, the concepts of nervous pathologies, as developed by French psychologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825– 1893), were so popularized by the end of the nineteenth century that they were easily recognizable by the French public as part of the “iconography” of hys- teria that was replicated in the “grimaces, jolts and gestures” in café-concert performances (523). Since these gestures were utilized in performances as early as the 1870s, Chéret, no doubt, had learned to exploit these displays in a visual language that emphasized contorted poses and broken lines. The fe- male fi gures in his Moulin Rouge poster—deposited with the Bibliothèque nationale as required by the dépôt légal—was created only months after Huys- mans’s essay and seems to exhibit the “mask of joy” that he celebrated.19 Given that French café-concert performers publicized their former status as hysteri- cal patients as the basis of their dances and gestures—and exploited the en- tertainment value of pathology in their advertising—then many posters were no doubt constructed to convey this nervous energy to potential spectators. For example, Chéret repeated in many of his posters the arc-en-cercle pose that was associated with one stage of an epileptic-hysterical fi t (fi gs. 4 and 5). Huysmans, and critics who followed his example, detected in Chéret’s repre- sentations of performers with their “broken lines,” “nervous drawings” and contorted poses, the signs of hysteria associated with the presumably unbri- dled sexuality of working-class females.

Huysmans, however, was not simply detecting in Chéret’s posters the signs of hysteria, but was using the dualism of joy and pathology (coupled with satanism) in order to portray illustrated posters as a combination of both appealing and repressive features. Huysmans’s dualistic critical categories of joy, laughter, the diabolical and the pathological were used to suggest both his personal ambivalence to the expression of desire he detected in Chéret’s

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013 133

posters and as a larger metaphor for the duality of commercial culture as se- ductive and pathological. Thus, Huysmans applied the concept of pathology as a means of critiquing commercial imagery based on its dual character as simultaneously seductive and repressive and registered, albeit in a somewhat rudimentary form, the manipulative appeal to sexual desire that was palpable in advertising in the late nineteenth century. Therefore, he challenged the no- tion that posters were meant to provide only an inducement to consume and seemed to have suggested how advertising contained within it the seeds of un- dermining the very class that spawned commercial culture.

The autoeroticism latent in Huysmans’s analysis was brought to the fore by one of his close personal friends, Lucien Descaves (1861–1949). In a short story entitled “L’amant de l’affi che,” the eroticism present in representations of La Parisienne in posters leads a poster collector to tear them off walls and take them home (Descaves 2) for his own gratifi cation.20 Another writer Rodol- phe Darzens (1865–1938) wrote in an 1891 article titled “Pathologie de l’affi che” that the collecting of posters, referred to as “poster mania” or affi chomanie, developed from a “hypertrophy of artistic taste” and was practiced primarily not by amateurs but lovers (amants) of the poster, who wished to use them for autoerotic stimulation, or “solitary monomania” in the parlance of the day.21 In these writers’ views, the poster, with its images of enticing women, was ap- preciated by men to satisfy their sexual fantasies and was accused of having unleashed an irresistible, unbounded and contagious sexuality in the city.

This “mass” appreciation of posters and their promotion of sexual desire was unimaginable for Maurice Talmeyr, the writer who went further than any

Fig. 4. Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard. “Le corps se courbe en arc.” Iconographie photographie Salpêtrière, t. 2, 1878: 145. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, D3 4 T37 30. Cliché courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Fig. 5. Jules Chéret, Affi che pour Concert / des / Ambassadeurs, 1884. Reproduced in Maî- tres de l’affi che: publication mensuelle contenant la reproduction des plus belles affi ches il- lustrées des grands artistes [. . .]. 1896–1900. Art and Architecture Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013 135

other commentator to condemn all posters as a full-scale assault on the senses and a contemporary symbol of moral decay. Talmeyr was not only infl uenced by the commentary of Huysmans, but the two men were also lifelong friends and correspondents (Lambert).22 Yet whereas Huysmans delighted in the ef- fervescence, anti-naturalistic aesthetic and eroticism of the poster, Talmeyr did not tolerate these playful associations. By the 1890s, after Huysmans’s re- conversion to Catholicism, his ideas on contemporary culture and French so- ciety had become more rigid and although he never retracted his assessments in the Chéret essay, he was on record as equating contemporary life with sin, damnation and disease. It is within Talmeyr’s essay that the metaphorical lan- guage that had been initiated by Huysmans turned quite literal. This new type of commentary directed at publicity posters was particularly damning be- cause it reinforced the fears of French politicians who objected to erotic post- ers as a form of “license in the streets” (Carter).

As an early dénicheur of mass culture, Huysmans detected in Chéret’s post- er imagery a palpable eroticism and type of sexualized consumption avail- able to men that countered the more feminine modes of consumption associ- ated with shopping. A visionary cultural critic who recognized the seduction and promise of sexual liberation in mass marketing, Huysmans can be cred- ited with portraying the dyad of commerce and sexuality of modern public- ity as linked to artifi ce, corruption and pathology. Although this sexuality of the poster came under greater scrutiny by the end of the nineteenth century, Huysmans’s “Chéret” essay nevertheless marked a key moment in the history of modernism in which ephemeral, discarded and degraded cultural forms were analyzed and appropriated by dénicheurs for their own purposes. This reinvention and appropriation of marginal visual culture that Huysmans enacted through his art criticism—and included both repulsion and fasci- nation—participated in an avant-garde appropriation of mass culture that continued into the twentieth century and became a defi ning characteristic of modernism in the visual arts.23

Kendall College of Art and Design

Ferris State University

notes

1. For biographical information on Talmeyr (aka Marie-Justin-Maurice Coste), see

Revue biographique des notabilités françaises contemporaines, Curinier and Coston. For

information about Talmeyr’s opinions on the consumption of mass culture, see Wil-

liams 58–106.

2. See, for example, Champfl eury and Zola.

136 Karen L. Carter

3. “Dans quelques milliers d’années, lorsque Paris sera allé rejoindre les vieilles capi-

tales disparues, un antiquaire de l’avenir pourra, en retrouvant la liste des affi ches illus-

trées de Chéret, reconstituer la vie parisienne dans la seconde moitié du dix-neuvième

siècle. Ces affi ches seront pour les futurs dénicheurs de curiosité ce que sont pour nous

les calendriers si recherchés du dix-septième siècle que les graveurs du temps ont élevé,

comme on l’a dit ‘à la hauteur d’une institution’” (“Les Lectures françaises”). Art histo-

rian Bradford Collins attributed this unsigned article to Huysmans and claimed that it

was an early version of the “Chéret” essay; this attribution seems mistaken because the

language used in the Le Temps article differs radically from that in the Certains essay.

Since Huysmans included a description of the book jacket for Georges Duval’s Paris

qui rit (1886), the essay was probably completed between 1886 and 1888.

4. “Découvreur de célébrités, lanceur de talents, cela devient un métier frunctueux

à notre époque de Barnums, et, facilement, l’on se place sur un piédestal un passant

pour le monsieur qui a déniché l’aigle. Nous possédions déjà le monsieur qui a trouvé

Courbet, le monsieur qui a trouvé Manet: on aura bientôt le monsieur qui a trouvé

Chéret.” The article is part of a collection of press clippings about Jules Chéret held in

the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque National de France, Coupures de presse

relative à Jules Chéret, don de M. René Bordeau Yb3 1657, vol. I, 1884–1890. The author’s

name and the title of the article were printed on the page but the periodical title and

date have been written by hand in the margin. The author has been unable to verify

this publication information. The article, however, may be consulted in Coupures, BN

Est. The two multi-volume sets of Chéret coupures provide examples of the immense

body of material on the topic of posters published at the time.

5. For letters that document Huysmans’s fascination with prints in general and his

eagerness to praise unappreciated artists and writers, see Beaumont 28–29, 45 and 51.

6. Huysmans’s role as the originator of new aesthetic sensibilities has been thorou-

ghly analyzed especially in relation to the symbolist aesthetic initiated in his 1884 book

A Rebours.

7. Huysmans continued this line of critique in the next year’s Salon review (“Salon

Offi ciel en 1880,” OC 6: 186).

8. Although the Salon in France may have been characterized as moribund as early

as the 1830s, it was not completely dismantled, or rather, de-funded, until the Third

Republic (1870–1940). For an analysis of the decline of the Salon, see Mainardi.

9. Huysmans had been part of the Naturalist group in the 1870s, but his view of

posters in the late 1880s departs from that of Zola, his erstwhile mentor.

10. The correspondence between the late nineteenth-century poster and the Ja-

panese woodblock print (ukiyo-e) has been extensively discussed in scholarly litera-

ture. See, for example, Ives, Great Wave; Ives, Giambruni and Newman, Bonnard (14–

15); Ives, Toulouse-Lautrec (34–37); Castleman and Wittrock (11–14); and Wichmann

who includes other French poster designers (38, 62–64, 103, 248, 381). Bargiel and Le

Men note the similarities of an unsigned poster by Chéret and Japanese manga, 11.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 1 & 2 fall–winter 2012–2013 137

11. Poster commentary published prior to 1889 includes Béraldi, Champsaur, “Un

Flâneur,” Fustier, Maindron, Marcade, “Robinson,” and “Tout-Paris.” This last essay

was probably written by Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) who published articles in Le

Gaulois (1884–1885) under the pseudonym “Tout-Paris” (Michel). See also Coupures

de presse (BN Est).

12. La Plume 110 (Nov. 15, 1893) featured a subsequent re-printing of Huysmans’s

“Chéret” essay. Other writers utilized Huysmans’s critical language; see Dubreuil, Lor-

rain, and Marx. Champsaur wrote about the sexual allure of women in French carica-

ture and posters in 1885 (“L’Imagerie Parisienne”), but did not explicitly link Chéret’s

women to a nervous sexual desire until after the publication of Certains (“Masques

Parisiennes: Jules Chéret”).

13. See Hannoosh for a discussion of the dualism of allegory in Baudelaire’s work.

The essay “De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques”

was fi rst published in Le Portefeuille (8 July 1855) and in Le Présent (1 Sept. 1857). The

text quoted here was included in Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques: Salons

1845–1859, Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868. (OC 2, 1342).

14. Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand (1817–1891), engineer and administrator, served

as the Director of the Service des Promenades et Plantations and later as Director of

Travaux de Paris under the Second Empire and the Third Republic (van Zanten 58).

15. The French performer Henri Agoust traveled and performed with the English

acrobatic troupe the Hanlon Lees in the late 1880s before their very public falling out

(McKinven).

16. The art critic Gustave Kahn used similar references to sexual desire and sata-

nic imagery in his remarks about the fi gures in Georges Seurat’s painting Le Chahut

(1889–1890). “Seurat” (1891) translated and reprinted in Broude 20–25.

17. “Le rire est satanique [. . .], essentiellement contradictoire”; “l’élément angélique

et l’élément diabolique fontionnent parallèlement”; “C’était [la pantomime] vria-

ment une ivresse de rire, quelque chose de terrible et d’irrésistible” (Baudelaire, OC 2:

532, 533, 539). For an elucidating examination of Baudelairean themes and hysteria in

Huysmans’s pantomime, Pierrot sceptique, see Jourde.

18. In a letter to Camille Lemonnier (Autumn 1884) Huysmans wrote that he had

just fi nished reading Lemonnier’s L’hystérique, which had recently been published in

Le National belge (August 30, 1884). Beaumont, 60 and 251.

19. The recent catalogue raisonné of Chéret’s posters includes a color reproduction

of the cover for George Duval’s Paris qui rit (cat. no. 681) as well as one for the Moulin

rouge poster (cat. no. 395), which is dated 27 September 1889, after the publication of

Huysmans’s essay, Bargiel and Le Men, 190–91 and 234–35.

20. Descaves was a personal confi dant of Huysmans, served as his executor after the

writer’s death in 1907, and edited Huysmans’s Œuvres complètes.

21. For an analysis of the “problem with masturbation,” see Laqueur.

22. Talmeyr also wrote articles about Huysmans (copied here from Helen Trud-

138 Karen L. Carter

gian’s bibliography): “A Ligugé,” Le Matin (May 27, 1901); “Deux morts,” Le Gaulois

(May 18, 1907); “Du club au cloître,” Le Gaulois (July 8, 1909); “Souvenirs,” Le Corres-

pondant (Jan. 15, 1926); Souvenirs d’avant le Déluge (Paris, Perrin, 1927); “Huysmans,

rue Monsieur,” Figaro (May 14, 1927); “Huysmans,” Figaro (May 21, 1931).

23. For an opposing point of view, see Adamson.

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