Like caricature itself, this site has rather odd and complicated orgins. From 1972 to 1974, I was living in West Berlin, Germany and working on a dissertation on Jane Austen under the direction of Earl Wasserman at Johns Hopkins University. I had just sent him the first chapter of that dissertation, when I received a letter from the English department informing me that Professor Wasserman had passed away very suddenly and that my dissertation would now be supervised by Professor Ronald Paulson.

I had never taken a course from Professor Paulson while I was on campus at Hopkins, so I began to read some of his work to acquaint myself with his perspective. I found myself fascinated with his books on Hogarth and Rowlandson and with the whole new world of 18th century caricature that had now been opened up to me.

After finishing my dissertation, I returned to the notes I had made about Rowlandson and wrote my first article on caricature: "Distance and Humor: The Art of Thomas Rowlandson" which Professor Paulson was kind enough to regard as "necessary corrective" to his point of view.

As my knowledge and interest in caricature expanded beyond Rowlandson, however, I began to realize that caricature is not a simple or monolithic genre, and that the definition which used Rowlandson or Bunbury as its primary representatives would be very different from one that centered upon Ghezzi or Beerbohm. This led to my second essay called "Four Modes of Caricature: Reflections upon a Genre" which was published after a considerable delay due to New York City funding problems in the Bulletin for Research in the Humanities.

But, alas, it was a difficult time for academics like myself as well as for academic publications, and by the time my second article was published, I had been forced to leave academics to support my family. I became a technical writer and later a Supervisor in the AT&T Labs (formerly Bell Labs) Technical Publications group at AT&T. And it was there in 1992/93 that a member of my group introduced me to a beta version of Mosaic, the prototype for the first web browser. It was a Eureka moment. And it immediately re-set my career in the direction of online publication and web site design and development. Within a few of years, I was no longer managing writers, but coders, graphic artists, and multimedia experts, and my concern was no longer with rhetoric and organization but HTML, code efficiency, and cross-browser compatibility.

Now that I am retired from AT&T, I am returning to my interest in caricature, but using the skills and knowledge I acquired in my work life to reach what I hope will be a more general audience. So the site you see before you is solely designed, produced, and written by me. Its mistakes, limitations, and omissions are likewise my responsibility. But in the spirit of Bell Labs, I hope that it inspires and facilitates further research on an amazing and under-rated artist, James Gillray.

The French academic painter Henri Regnault’s life and legacy straddles two eras. He practiced his art during the liberal regime of the Second Empire, but died during the Franco-Prussian war, to have his history written during the Third Republic’s “moral order”. Written during the “law and order” climate of the Trump Administration, this review questions the effectiveness and relevance of the strategies used to write this account of Regnault’s life.

Dance and drawing are intimately linked to the gesture that performs them. The dancing body creates a figure in space and leaves an impact on site, while the action of the artist sets a point into motion and captures an ephemeral event, which is reproduced in graphic or visual form. Throughout the 20th century, the performing and visual arts thus converged on many occasions. While visual artists investigated the embodied and energetic value of form, dancers and choreographers experimented with the interfaces between sign and action, between notation and improvisation, between a spatial sense of self and an architectural configuration of movement. The hybridization of dance and drawing quickened from mid-century onward, as performance art introduced innovative practices and as borders between disciplines were worn thin, causing interdisciplinary forms to emerge. The body of the artist—whether a dancer or a visual artist—is thus shared by these practices and has become the instrument of their simultaneous realization. Drawing has indeed collided with dance in opening up to three-dimensional space, incorporating surfaces (floor, ceiling, walls) as well as volumes into its process.

This correspondence is the focus of this volume, a collection of original essays and interviews in which the accounts of theoreticians and practitioners echo each other. It aims to evaluate and discuss the specific interaction of the two media and how their practices have diversified since 1962, namely since the first public performance of the Judson Dance Theater in New York.

Authors and contributors include Cindy Van Acker, Gabriele Brandstetter, Sarah Burkhalter, Pauline Chevalier, Mark Franko, Katrin Gattinger, Julie Enckell Julliard, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Magali Le Mens, Laetitia Legros, Anna Lovatt, Nolwenn Mégard, Robert Morris, OpenEndedGroup, Nadia Perucic, Catherine Quéloz, Yvonne Rainer, Robin Rhode, Susan Rosenberg, Laurence Schmidlin, Katia Schneller, Alexander Schwan, Alan Storey, and Catherine Wood.

The book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writing.

Gift exchanges are among the most intimate ways that artists participate in print collecting. Personalized with the recipient’s name and other inscriptions, gifted pieces document friendships and professional camaraderie while providing insight into the social complexities of viewership. Three etchings presented by B. J. O. Nordfeldt (1878–1955) to fellow etcher Bertha E. Jaques (1863–1941), now part of the permanent collection of the Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico, form an intriguing example. Embellished with notes and informal drawings, these impressions recall aesthetic trends associated with the Etching Revival while underscoring the often private nature of print consumption.

In questo volume, dal ricco corredo illustrativo, David S. Areford indaga le vicende di una preziosa collezione di stampe del XV secolo. Un tempo appartenuta a un notaio e avvocato, Jacopo Rubieri da Parma (1430 ca. - 1500), che incollò xilografie di varia provenienza alle pagine dei propri manoscritti giuridici, la raccolta è fin dal XVIII secolo conservata alla Biblioteca Classense di Ravenna.
L’innovativa ricerca dell’autore riconduce queste rare opere al loro contesto originale, quello di un raccoglitore di immagini di santi che affrancano le sue fatiche di copista e assemblatore di testi giuridici, illustrandoli e segnando le tappe della sua personale devozione. Le popolari raffigurazioni vengono così adattate agli scopi della quotidiana vita di devoto, della cui religiosità si fanno espressione personalizzata. Il volume vuole gettare nuova luce sul rapporto fra testo e immagine nei manoscritti giuridici della nota collezione di xilografie classensi, fornendo al contempo un saggio di come le immagini agiografiche potessero interpretare i temi fondamentali della devozione del tempo, quali il pellegrinaggio e le vite dei santi.

The first monograph on Lionel Davis, artist, educator and activist, published on the occasion of Gathering Strands, Davis’ retrospective exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery.

This dissertation presents the first study of the British print publishers Robert Sayer (1726–1794) and John Bennett (c. 1745–1787). From 1748 to 1794, the two men ran one of the largest print- and map-publishing businesses in the London. The importance of their firm lay chiefly in its ability to influence the design, production, distribution, and consumption of prints across the British Empire and the European continent. In the 1770s, the publishers issued a series of mezzotints that responded to the conflict in the British colonies in North America. Though intended to be short-lived, one of them—"The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering"—instead became an enduring emblem of the American Revolution. Following this print from its creation, through its transatlantic travels, and into its nineteenth-century afterlives demonstrates that Sayer & Bennett’s publications significantly shaped how British and American viewers understood their changing empires in an age of revolution.

This dissertation argues for the necessity of foregrounding the publishers’ perspective in order to study the aesthetic, political, and social changes that occurred in the print-publishing industry in the second half of the eighteenth century. Arranged in roughly chronological order, each chapter examines Sayer’s priorities in a given decade alongside an aspect of the print-publishing business. Chapter 2 evaluates the audience for prints and the effects of print shops within the London streets. Chapter 3 reconstructs the relationships Sayer formed with the tradesmen he employed, since the significance of any one firm cannot be ascertained without an understanding of the industry as a whole. Chapter 4 returns "Tarring & Feathering" to its original political context to recover how its meaning shifted from specific and local to general and imperial. Chapter 5 posits a study of a visual culture of dissolution by tracing the material histories of the firm’s copper mezzotint plates, whose limited durability amplified their publisher’s tenuous mental stability. Finally, the epilogue investigates how translations across media in the nineteenth century transformed "Tarring & Feathering" into a trigger for cultural memories about national origins and a contested symbol of the dangers of popular democracy.

The National Gallery of Art acquired a collection of chalcographic prints from the United States Library of Congress in 1986. The collection includes engravings and etchings pulled in the early 20th century from original 17th-19th-century copper and steel-faced plates, as well as 19th century photogravures and chromolithographs. Most are considered 'reproductive' prints after the original compositions of 16th-19th century European painters and were produced by 'chalcographic' institutions (i.e. insitutions dedicated to the distribution of reproductive prints to the public for educational and commercial purposes).