ROBERT SIMON upon J.

ROBERT SIMON upon J.J. GRANDVILLE

ACROSS THE NOTES, fragments, essays, and outlines of the Arcades throw Walter Benjamin's panoramic rendering of Paris and modernity, the nineteenth-century French illustrator and caricaturist JJ Grandville plays a signal character For Benjamin, Grandville's images, "a veritable cosmogony of fashion," reveal the interplay between the organized phantasmagoria of the nascent refinement industry--epitomized by Paris itself--and the fetishization of mass-produced goods: "The enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distractions, is the privy theme of Grandville's art." In this art, Benjamin saw the two index and image of a perceptual world shattered through modernization's asymmetrical logic of innovation, spe transience, and desire.

This is our world as well, and Grandville's prescient work is the expose of an upcoming exhibition and accompanying catalogue enjoin together by Hannover's Wilhelm Busch Museum. Many of the 130-odd lithographs, thicket engravings, and source drawings forward offer come from the pages of La Caricature, the weekly journal of lithography and political satire for which Grandville worked from 1830 until 1835 when the July Monarchy prohibit it down; images from Un Autre world a volume published by the artist in 1844 will also be included.

Un Autre world represents Grandville's strangest and greatest in number accomplished achievement. Comprising more than 180 forest-land engravings and their textual descriptions, the volume charts an excursion to a parallel universe populated on mutant animals, vegetal/human hybrids, and inanimate views come to life. The dreamscape they inhabit is equally fantastic: a mythical realm of shadow plays, museum rituals, Fourierist utopias, and space travel. As the artist bring forward it, his creation serves up "transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, metamorphoses, zoomorphoses, lithomorphoses, metempsychoses, apotheoses, and other things."

from first to last farce unveils and multiplies the features of a novel age. Hades's boatman sees his business ruined by way of a bridge built over the river Styx Parasols, profits top hats, and bonnets riseed on stands exchange greetings, the accoutrements of fashion assuming their wearers' civilized airs. Overhead, "a causeway of wonderfully even asphalt," illuminated by gas lamps, unites the planets, whose outmoded lineaments have in revolve been replaced. "World exhibitions," Benjamin writes, "propagate the universe of commodities. Grandville's fantasies talk together a commodity character on the universe. They modernize it. Saturn's ring becomes a cast-iron balcony forward which the inhabitants of Saturn take the evening air."

The exhibition intends to hunt multiple lines of inquiry, addressing the representation of motion in Grandville's work and the inspiration he build in toys and optical devices. Also up for consideration will be pair dream images, accompanied by detailed literal meanings that Grandville published in Le Magasin Pittoresque in 1847 just before his death (and which Georges Bataille explanationed on in his 1929 Documents article "Eye") All in all, the present to view and catalogue promise to be the couple historically and theoretically ambitious, and as might be look fored Benjamin's writings will provide about fundamental points of reference. For undivided the show's organizers will explore links between what single in kind of them terms the "structural critique" of Grandville's later works, in particular Un Autre people of the world and the powerful satire he produc for La Caricature, which, despite its vivid grotesqueries, remains painterly, plastic, and realist nearest to the idiosyncratic graphic concoctions of Un Autre Monde

at the mid-1830s, Grandville had largely transfered away from overtly political enslaves and lithography, apparently frustrated by way of the demands of quotidian visual journalism. Instead, he began to explore the recent potential of wood engraving. This was an antique medium that, refitted, enabled the efficient printing of image and topic together on the page--the origins of a large-scale illustrated pres Grandville went to work for mass-circulation magazines and took up work illustration: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, editions of fables and proverbs

In the final decade of his life, Grandville gave considerable attention to what Marx would shortly call "the enigmatical character of the production of labor." Grandville's 1843 illustrations for Petites miseres de la vie humaine are described by way of Giorgio Agamben in Stanzas: Word and Image in Western refinement (University of Minnesota Press, 1993): "In a leaky faucet that cannot be useed off, in an umbrella that oversets itself, in a boot that can be neither completely set on nor taken off and remains tenaciously stuck in succession the foot...the prophetic glance of Grandville discovers... the cipher of a fresh relation between humans and things.... The degeneration implicit in the transformation of the artisanal view into the mass-produced article is constantly manifest to recent man in the loss of his admit self-possession with respect to things."