Grandville

The title of this article is ambiguous. Additional meanings are listed under Grandville (disambiguation) .

Self-portrait, around 1833

Grandville (born September 13, 1803 in Nancy ; † March 17, 1847 in Vanves near Paris ; actually Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard ) was a French lithographer, painter and draftsman, whose professional career was closely linked to the troubled political conditions in the first half 19th century France. During the July monarchy , he worked with great success as a political cartoonist for the opposition magazines La Caricature and Le Charivari in Paris. After 1835 he made a name for himself as an illustrator of classical and contemporary literature. His main formal motif was the anthropomorphic depiction of animals and plants: he drew mixed creatures from parts of humans, animals and plants in order to characterize certain properties of the depicted. Grandville's oeuvre consists of around 3,000 drawings. His private life was unhappy, the early death in mental confusion was preceded by a series of deaths in the immediate family.

Historical overview

In 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor Napoléon I. After his abdication, France returned to the rule of the Bourbons in 1814 , Louis XVIII. was installed as king. The Congress of Vienna negotiated the reorganization of Europe in terms of restoration . Political repression increased in France from around 1820 and censorship was reintroduced. In July 1830, Charles X , king since 1825, passed laws further restricting civil liberties. This led to the outbreak of the July Revolution . Charles X retired to England, the new king was Louis-Philippe I , initially with a liberal demeanor and a government that favored the upper classes. As early as 1831 restorative development began to increase. The beginning of industrialization resulted in the impoverishment of the workers, and individual uprisings were bloodily suppressed. The repressive “ September Laws” of 1835 brought the end of freedom of the press. The following period of forced relative calm led to the bourgeois revolution of 1848 .

Private life

Youth and education

Self-portrait, around 1820–1822

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard was born the son of the miniature painter Jean Baptiste Mathias Gérard Grandville (1766-1854) and his wife Catherine Emilie Viot in Nancy in northeastern France. He had two brothers and two sisters. His grandparents had adopted the stage name "Grandville" as an actor, his father used this name as an addition to his family name in order to differentiate himself from his older brother, who also worked as a miniature painter.

In 1815 Grandville attended high school in Nancy. Despite tutoring, he remained a mediocre student. In 1817 he became an apprentice to his father. He was not very successful in miniature painting because he could not understand how to flatter his customers. However, he drew a great deal, with a noticeable tendency towards caricature. Even then, the first animal figures with human features ( hommes-bêtes ), a common motif in his later works, were created. As an autodidact, he learned the technique of lithography , which was still in the early stages of its development (in later years he only provided the preliminary drawings for his work; professional lithographers transferred them to the stone and took care of the printing).

Marriage, sickness, death

On July 22, 1833, Grandville married his cousin Marguerite Henriette Fischer (1810–1842) in Nancy and moved into a new apartment with her in Paris. Their first son Ferdinand was born in 1834 and lived only four years. The birth had permanently weakened Henriette. Her health deteriorated after each subsequent pregnancy. A second son, Henri, was born in the fall of 1838; he died in 1841 when he choked on a piece of bread in the presence of his parents. Henriette did not recover from the birth of her third son, Georges, in July 1842; she died in the same month of peritonitis . In October 1843 Grandville remarried, as Henriette had wished. Armand, the only child from his marriage to Catherine Marceline ("Celine") Lhuillier (1819–1888), was born in 1845. In January 1847, Georges, the third son of Grandville's first marriage, died after a brief illness.

Grandville had lost his wife and three children in ten years and was broken both physically and mentally. He fell ill several times at short intervals and firmly announced his imminent death, although the doctors were not yet seriously concerned. A friend told how after a stroke and because of increasing confusion he was taken to the madhouse ( maison des santé ) of Vanves , where "the unfortunate man breathed his last breath after a terrible agony that lasted three days and three nights" Grandville died on March 17, 1847. In Saint-Mandé , the family's holiday resort to the east of Paris, he was buried next to his first wife and their three sons. He had formulated his epitaph himself: “Here lies JJ Grandville. He inspired everything and, according to God, made everything live, speak or walk, but he himself did not know how to take the right path to his happiness ”.

work life

1825 to 1830

In 1825, Grandville's father was visited by a colleague from Paris who was so impressed by the son's drawings that he invited him to work in his studio in the capital. Grandville found family connections there with his cousin and her husband, director at the Théâtre Royal de l ' Opéra-Comique . Even in Paris he could not make friends with the profession of miniature painter. Before returning quickly to Nancy, he was saved by an order from the Opéra-Comique in 1826, for which he made 22 colored lithographs of opera costumes; he was owed the fee. He first became famous in 1827 with Chaque âge a ses plaisirs , an album of 12 lithographs, in which the “four seasons of human life” are depicted.

In 1828 the order for a second album with 12 color lithographs followed ( Les Dimanches d'un bourgeois de Paris ou Les Tribulations de la petite Propriété ). The income made it possible for the draftsman to give up his dark hotel room and rent a light attic near the Ècole des Beaux-Arts . Here he received his friends, including the cartoonist and journalist Charles Philipon (1806–1862) and the novelist Alexandre Dumas the Elder (1802–1870). Dumas described him as follows: “Grandville laughed little, declaimed little, smoked little, and drank little. He sat at his table, a sheet of paper in front of him, a pen or a pen in his hand, sometimes he smiled and he kept drawing. What did he put on paper? He didn't know himself. A whim that bordered on madness led his pen. "

In 1829 six lithographs appeared under the title Galerie mythologique , then the series of 72 color lithographs Les Métamorphoses du jour , which marked the final breakthrough for Grandville. In this work he continued earlier attempts, he drew animals with human characteristics and properties to illustrate certain aspects of coexistence - a technique that he used repeatedly in his political caricatures and illustrations. After the success of the Métamorphoses , he was always adequately supplied with orders. That same year he started working for the satirical magazine La Silhouette , the forerunner of La Caricature and Le Charivari .

1830 to 1835

Resurrection of censorship , 1832

Great Crusade Against Freedom , Sheet 1, 1834

Around 1830 a period of stormy development began for the press and publishing industry in France. The political background was the defense of civil liberties, including the freedom of the press , which had just been achieved in the July Revolution. Technically, the recently developed lithography brought great progress, the newspapers could now appear with large-scale, also colored illustrations. These pictures were often hung up as single sheets in Parisian art dealers and thus became important even for the non-literate population, who could see their allies in the artists.

Grandville also took part in the barricade fighting of the July Revolution in Paris in 1830. In the autumn of the same year, Charles Philipon, previously a cartoonist at La Silhouette , founded the weekly La Caricature , which appeared until August 1835. She printed caricatures and comments on the current political situation, the editor-in-chief was initially Honoré de Balzac , and Honoré Daumier was one of the staff . Grandville was the magazine's most prolific artist, delivering 122 lithographs out of a total of 524 published sheets. As a special form, he developed series of images ( Processions politiques ) in which he critically portrayed public figures over several issues. In November 1831 Philipon was sentenced to six months in prison for insulting the king. In the course of this process, the caricature of Louis-Philippe became the symbol of the July monarchy as a “pear”, regardless of all penalties.

Since December 1832, Philipon published Le Charivari (Katzenmusik, Rous), a somewhat cheaper daily newspaper in a smaller format. It was supposed to "  wage the daily war against the ridiculousness of everyday life in the breaks between the great battles of the Caricature [...]." The main objects of the mostly black-and-white lithographs printed there were fashion, theatrical performances and social events. Louis-Philippe, caricatured as “pear”, also appeared in this newspaper, which earned Philipon a heavy fine. Grandville worked here only occasionally, but provided a total of 60 drawings.

After a failed republican uprising in the summer of 1832, La Caricature , like other opposition magazines, was hit by new repression. Grandville addressed the controversy between the liberal press and the authorities in a seven-part series of color lithographs entitled Great Crusade Against Freedom ( Grande Croisade contre la Liberté ).

At Philipon's suggestion, Daumier modeled a group of 36 terracotta busts in 1834 with the satirically deformed physiognomies of contemporary politicians. While Daumier and other collaborators at Caricature and Charivari used to take their bearings from Grandville's work, these terracottas now served as models for Grandville and the other draftsmen. As a result of the September Acts of 1835, 30 newspapers and magazines were discontinued, including La Caricature . In Le Charivari , instead of political questions, only general social issues were dealt with. Grandville drew the series of images Les Parisiens pittoresques ( The picturesque Parisian population ) (12 lithographs) as well as Types modern, observations critiques, le dedans de l'homme expliqué par le dehors (9 lithographs).

1836 to 1847

Illustration from Gulliver's Travels , 1838

Illustration from Hundred Proverbs , 1844

The year 1836 was a turning point in Grandville's professional orientation. He was no longer able to use his special skills as a political cartoonist because of the restrictive press laws. At Le Charivari , he felt neglected towards Daumier. The illustration of literary texts became a new focus of his work. In around ten years he created an extensive body of work in this field, which, alongside Gustave Doré, earned him a place as a innovator of book illustration in France.

At the beginning of this work were Grandville's 100 (out of a total of 120) woodcuts for the "Œuvres complètes" of the popular republican poet and lyricist Pierre-Jean de Béranger , who had been in prison for his texts critical of the regime. The three-volume, illustrated edition of his song lyrics was a great success. A children's book ( Le Livre des enfants ) was written between 1836 and 1838 , in which Grandville and other illustrators illustrated well-known fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood , Bluebeard and Puss in Boots . In Saint-Mandé, Grandville began work on the fables of Jean de La Fontaines ( Fables de la Fontaine ) in 1837 . In ten months he drew 300 illustrations and vignettes for this , reviving his motif of human-animal transformations. Drawings for Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels ( Voyages de Gulliver dans des convées lointaines ) followed in 1838 , in 1839 for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe ( Aventures de Robinson Crusoe ) and the works of the classic French author Nicolas Boileau ( Œvres de Boileau ). From 1840 to 1842, Grandville mainly worked on two books, which he himself counted among his main works: Small accidents in human life ( Petites misères de la vie humaine ) and pictures from the state and family life of animals ( Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux ), the latter an encoded satire on the prevailing political situation with anonymous contributions from respected writers such as Balzac, Alfred de Musset and George Sand .

In 1844, Grandville worked on the Hundred Proverbs ( Cent proverbs ) and a text by Jean de La Bruyère ( Les Charactères ou les mœurs de siècle ). His late work Eine Another Welt ( Un autre monde ) appeared in book form , which had been published in 36 weekly episodes the year before. There was no comparable example in the art of that time for the bizarre fantasy of around 180 illustrations and the text that was subsequently written by Taxile Delord . In the 20th century, this work initiated the rediscovery of Grandville; it was now viewed as an anticipation of surrealist image inventions. The two volumes illustrated by Grandville, Don Quichotte de la Manche by Miguel de Cervantes , were published posthumously in 1848 .

Beastmen and human animals

Natural History Cabinet , 1833

Shrew, nature study, around 1837

Grandville was famous for his depictions of hybrid creatures, mainly people with animal heads and animals with human heads; But he also drew combinations of people with plants or of people with machines or he connected parts of completely different animals with one another. The artist knew and appreciated the work of the Swiss writer and philosopher Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), who in his work Physiognomische Fragmente… in 1775 had provided instructions for recognizing certain characters from facial features and body shapes. In 1788 the Swiss scholar published his work Constructed Caricatures and Metamorphoses , Studies on the Comparability of Human Faces with the Heads of Animals. These theories were hotly debated in Grandville's day. Unlike Lavater, who aimed at a general typification, Grandville dealt with individual, specific individuals, which he also placed in a concrete historical environment through clothing and utensils.

His drawings combine precise realism in the details with fantastic compilations and satirical content. Intensive observation of nature was a prerequisite for such work. Grandville conducted his studies mainly in the Paris Jardin des Plantes , but also in his own apartment. Alexandre Dumas reports in his memoirs of visits to Grandville, where he found canaries, goldfish and lizards, Grandville's friend and biographer Samuel Clogenson mentions cats in the various apartments of the draftsman and saw frogs as objects of study on the table. In spite of all the scientific accuracy, Grandville's interest in drawing parallels to the human can already be seen in some study sheets. An example of this is the drawing of a sitting shrew , which this animal is actually not able to keep.

Intensive botanical studies were carried out in the Jardin des Plantes and the Paris Père Lachaise cemetery as the basis for the illustrations in which plants mutated into human forms and behaviors. An essential example of this is, alongside Une autre monde , the book Les Fleurs animées ( The soul of the flowers ) from 1846/47, again with texts by Taxile Delord. Flowers appear in them as elegant ladies, their gestures correspond to the actual or symbolically ascribed properties of the various flowering plants. Around 1,350 nature studies from Grandville are kept in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy .

meaning

The steam concert from Another World , 1843/44

Although Grandville was a well-known and successful draftsman with an extensive oeuvre, he was largely forgotten relatively soon after his untimely death in 1847 and was only recognized as an important artist of the 19th century around a hundred years later. There were three main reasons for this development. Since he worked exclusively as a caricaturist and illustrator, Grandville could not occupy a high position in the academic hierarchy of image genres that was valid at the time . In addition, his work consists to a large extent of political caricatures and socially critical sheets and was strongly time-bound by this content. In addition, the writer and posthumously famous lyric poet Charles Baudelaire had judged him very critically in his text on the French caricaturists ( Quelques caricaturistes français ) published in 1857, especially in comparison with Grandville's temporary colleague and competitor Honoré Daumier. Baudelaire was friends with Daumier, who he called a “genius”. For him, Grandville was “a sickly literary spirit who always sought inadequate means by which his thoughts could be transferred to the realm of the visual arts; which is why we often saw him apply the old procedure, which consists of equipping his characters with banners that hang out of their mouths. "

The philosopher and translator Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) dealt with Grandville from a special point of view - not as an art historian (although he had also studied art history, among other things), but as a philosopher of history. In one chapter of his fragmentary work of passage , written in exile in Paris in the 1930s, he examined early French capitalism and, in particular, the development of commodities into the new fetish of human society. In Grandville's drawings, especially Another World , he saw a glorification of this development: "The enthronement of goods and the surrounding splendor of distraction is the secret theme of Grandville's art". He wrote about the artist: "If the goods are a fetish, Grandville is their magical priest".

Grandville's often enigmatic pictorial creations, however, allow widely differing interpretations. The illustrations for Another World in particular were interpreted as a sarcastic , almost desperate warning of a future dominated by machines and capital. Baudelaire wrote: “This person has spent his life with superhuman courage trying to improve creation. He took it in his hands, turned it around, wrestled with it, laid it out, and nature turned into an apocalypse “The German art historian Thomas W. Gaehtgens wrote the title of his 2007 essay : Absurd imagery and social criticism in JJ Grandville's Un autre monde . The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), in turn, described Grandville as a “ schizophrenic petty bourgeois” whose ridicule produced only “utopian nonsense”.

Honors

In 1849 the city of Nancy announced a competition for an Eloge de Grandville . In 1855 600 drawings by Grandville were exhibited in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nancy. His surviving son from his second marriage donated 50,000 francs to the city for a memorial to his father, which was completed in 1893. At the same time, an exhibition of 1,400 Grandville drawings began. During the German occupation in World War II , the metal parts of the monument were melted down. Today, in front of Rue Grandville in Nancy, there is a copy of the original bronze bust created by Ernest Bussière.

literature

• Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (Ed.): JJ Grandville. Caricature and drawing. A visionary of French romanticism . Exhibition catalog. Hatje Cantz Verlag Ostfildern, 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0987-8 .
• Charles Baudelaire : Quelques caricaturistes français, Œvres complètes. Paris 1968, OCLC 492040265 .
• Eva-Susanne Bayer-Klötzer: The tendencies of the French caricature 1830-1848. Dissertation Würzburg 1980, DNB 811026507 .
• Walter Benjamin : Grandville or the world expositions. In: Walter Benjamin: Illuminations. Selected writings, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
• Stefanie Heraeus: Dream vision and picture idea. Surreal strategies in 19th century French graphics . Reimer, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-496-01177-7 .
• Raimund Rütten ao: The caricature between republic and censorship. Image satire in France from 1830 to 1880 - a language of resistance? Jonas, Marburg 1991, ISBN 3-922561-97-7 .
• Hans Burkhard Schlichting: The Fantasies of Grandville. Prints 1829–1847 . Melzer, Darmstadt 1976, ISBN 3-7874-0133-4 .
• Gottfried Sello (introduction): Grandville. The entire work . 2 vols., Rogner u. Bernhard, Munich 1969, DNB 456794441 .
• Vie privée et publique des animaux. Vignettes par Grandville. Publ. Sous la dir. de PJ steel. Avec la collab. de Balzac. Hetzel , Paris 1867. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf

Web links

Commons : Grandville (caricaturist)  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Grandville  - Sources and full texts (French)

• Literature by and about Grandville in the catalog of the German National Library
• Text about Walter Benjamin's passage work and the goods as a fetish of the 19th century in France
• Essay by Thomas W. Gaehtgens: Absurd imagery and social criticism in JJ Grandville's "Un autre monde"
• Works by Grandville at Zeno.org .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Another World by Pliny the Youngest Illustrated by JJ Grandville . Epilogue. Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 1979, ISBN 3-257-26002-4 .
2. ^ JJ Grandville. Caricature and drawing . Exhibition catalog, p. 15. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0987-8 (book trade edition)
3. ^ JJ Grandville. Caricature and drawing . Exhibition catalog. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0987-8 , pp. 91-97.
4. ^ JJ Grandville. Caricature and drawing. Exhibition catalog. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0987-8 , p. 17.
5. ^ JJ Grandville. Caricature and drawing. Exhibition catalog. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0987-8 , p. 166.
6. ^ Melton Prior Institute . In: meltonpriorinstitut.org .
7. ^ Walter Benjamin: The passage work. Collected Writings V, p. 249.
8. ↑ Essay by Thomas W. Gaehtgens: Absurd imagery and social criticism in JJ Grandville's "Un autre monde"
9. ^ JJ Grandville. Caricature and drawing. Exhibition catalog. Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0987-8 , p. 51.