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The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (2015) PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/184357 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2021-09-27 and may be subject to change. Review of Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (2015) Thomas Smits Journal of European Periodical Studies, 2.1 (Summer 2017) ISSN 2506-6587 Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence The Journal of European Periodical Studies is hosted by Ghent University Website: ojs.ugent.be/jeps To cite this review: Thomas Smits, review of Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (2015), Journal of European Periodical Studies, 2.1 (Summer 2017), 56–57 Reviews Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 205 pp. ISBN 978-1-4724-3298-8 In her book Printing and Painting the dichotomy, famously posited by Glement News in Victorian London (2015) Andrea Greenberg in his Art and Culture (1989), Korda examines the work of three painters between the ‘modern’ image and the — Frank Holl, Luke Fildes, and Hubert ‘modernist’ artwork: the first being an Herkomer — to answer a longstanding easily digestible and commercialised visual question: what happened to the work of opiate for the people, while the latter art in the age of mechanical reproduction? necessarily incites viewers to question the The three ‘social realist’ painters — not status quo.2 Theorists of visual culture such to be confused with the ‘socialist realism’ as Jonathan Crary,3 have broadened this of the Soviet Union — make fine case opposition by claiming that modernist studies because they were closely tied to artists invite spectators to see the world in the Royal Academy, but also worked as a new light, while objective modern image illustrators for William Luson Thomas’s makers, like the scientist, the doctor, the Graphic, a successful illustrated journal and the photographer, press towards an that distributed mechanically reproduced increasing standardization and regulation illustrations of news events on a massive of the observer. scale. Besides these obvious connections, Korda argues that the work of Korda contends that the three artists Holl, Fildes, and Herkomer reveals shared a unique response to the age of important aspects of modern life — mechanical reproduction: ‘tells us something about modernity’4 — without intentionally challenging its Rather than spurning mechanical commercialized visual culture. She uses a reproductions as the products media-archaeological approach, based on of commerce and industry, […] the work of Michel Foucault, to ‘excavate’ they adopted the strategies of a the logic of social realism. Social realism commercial and mechanical mass ‘offered an alternative response to the culture as a means of revitalizing high conditions of modernity, one that engaged art, looking specifically to the new with both modern problems and modern medium of the illustrated newspaper media, but that has since been purged as their model.1 from teleological histories of modern art’.5 It is precisely this point — the appropriation In order to demonstrate her central of mass-culture by the three painters in thesis, Korda compares the visual regimes order to revitalize high art — that makes of the two most famous British illustrated Korda’s book so interesting. She positions newspapers: the Illustrated London News their work as a counter-narrative to the and the Graphic. Building on the work 1 Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 2. 2 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989). 3 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 4 Korda, p. 7. 5 Korda, p. 11. 56 Journal of European Periodical Studies 2.1 of media historian Jean Chalaby,6 who priced at six pence, while the Illustrated describes the shift from a partisan press London News sold for five pence). The financed by political factions in the early success of the Graphic, selling around nineteenth century, to a commercialized 70,000 copies in 1870, attests to both his and ‘objective’ press financed by artistic sensibility and his business sense. advertisements, Korda claims that the To conclude: Printing and Painting regime of the Illustrated London News the News in Victorian London sheds a new can be characterized by its accessibility, and well-deserved light on the artistic objectivity, and instant legibility. In other value of the work of Holl, Fildes, and words: by its commercialized nature. Herkomer and the illustrations of the The images of William Luson Thomas’s Graphic, while rightly trying to excavate Graphic, on the other hand, encouraged both the medium of the illustrated a ‘renewed sense of immediacy’, inviting newspaper and the style of social realism readers not only to see an event but also to from their graves in teleological accounts experience it through the image.7 of (art) history. However, Korda is less The social realism of Korda’s painters successful in untying the theoretical knot developed in relation to the visual regime of between modern images and modernist the Graphic. According to the author, this works of art. Instead, she seems to mainly regime can almost be viewed as modernist, redraw the borders between the two because of its challenging and de-regulatory categories, claiming artistic avant-gardism nature. In order to substantiate her point, for the Graphic, while dismissing the she describes Thomas and his ‘fellow commercialized Illustrated London News. workmen’ as true modernist artists, who The frequently cited admiration of Vincent in starting the Graphic ‘were motivated by a van Gogh for the Graphic, who as the dedication to their art and their labour, not modernist painter par excellence is made by profit’.8 Conversely, Herbert Ingram, to serve as its expert witness, illustrates the founder of the Illustrated London News, this point. The taste of the famous is portrayed as a money-hungry capitalist, painter was, however, broader than Korda without any interest in the artistic value of suggests: he was also a fervent admirer of his paper, or the human value of his artists. many illustrations in the ‘commercialized’ These sharply drawn differences between Illustrated London News. the motivation of Ingram and Thomas In the end the reader is left are essential to Korda’s argument: in the wondering if the opposition between classic dichotomy, modern image-makers modern image-makers and modernist reinforce commercialized society, while artists is useful in explaining the modernist artists critique it. significance of the work of Holl, Fildes, It is well accepted among Victorian and Herkomer and influential publications periodical scholars that the Graphic paid like the Graphic and Illustrated London more attention to the quality of its News, which can easily be characterized illustrations than the Illustrated London as being part of both trends. Maybe it is News. However, it is the question what precisely the ambivalence of the artists motivated this: artistic inclination, and these kinds of enterprises that tells us commercial gain, or maybe both? To something about modernity; the fact that answer this somewhat rhetorical question: they thrived at a point were mass-culture Thomas was an inspired artist who saw and artistic sensibility met in the middle. an interesting niche for a high-quality magazine that targeted the upper-regions Thomas Smits of the British public (the Graphic was Radboud University, Nijmegen 6 Jean K. Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 7 Korda, p. 174. 7 Korda, p. 53. 57.
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