Microscopes, Laternae magicae, and Soap Bubbles: Round Frames in 19th Century European Satirical Imagery and Early American Comics
Christian A. Bachmann
As Jonathan Crary and others have noted, the 19th century is enthralled with optics and visuality. Gadgets like the (older) laterna magica, the thaumatrope, and the stereoscope become household staples in well-to-do families, and microscopic studies become a favorite pastime of the upper class. Always seeking new visual metaphors to badger the ruling and the political classes with ever pointier sticks, the visual satire of the time, especially after 1848, quickly picks up on these trends. From new media spring new ideas for satirical images that sometimes coalesce into specific types of visual satire. Often, these spread over all of Europe. Just as often they comprise not only certain representations of imagery but also particular framings to enfold this imagery and support its remediation. In a time when each broadsheet is to be filled to its utmost, round frames are badly suited for the layout of the satirical journal—they waste space on both the paper and the printing plate. Yet, for microscopic and telescopic images, coins, images of laternae magicae, and even soap bubbles, round frames are predominantly used to demarcate not only the image but also the respective visual satire type.
This paper follows examples of round frames from German-language satirical journals such as Kladderadatsch, Fliegende Blätter, and Kikeriki into American Comics, highlighting types of visual satire and their continuation and transformation in graphic narrative around 1900.
Late Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Periodicals and Panoramas: Friedrich Wilhelm Heine’s Pictures of German and American Political Unity
Vance Byrd
Articles in illustrated periodicals and images at traveling panoramas presented pivotal moments of national history to broad audiences, and these media celebrated political unity over internal military disorder in the United States and Germany. While both conflicts were among the first documented extensively by photography, I want to stress the centrality of the printed word, engraved image, and painted canvas for the commemoration of these conflicts as well. In particular, my paper is a case study on how the visual and verbal narratives about the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War were unified by the figure of Friedrich Wilhelm Heine. A war reporter who led a group of German artists who created commemorative panoramas of the Battle of Sedan in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Heine immigrated to Milwaukee from Dresden in 1885 to run the American Panorama Company. In the United States, he and other German artists created American Civil War panoramas for audiences in Chicago, Milwaukee, Chattanooga, Atlanta, New Orleans, and other cities. I argue that it is crucial that we investigate the pre-history of these panorama shows. Heine’s engravings for late nineteenth-century German illustrated periodicals suggest how pre-photographic visual culture helped German readers on both sides of the Atlantic understand debates on national unification and primed global audiences for engagement with military history in panoramas.
The Krodo Altar and the Matter of German History in the Napoleonic Era
Alice Goff
This paper discusses the transcendent powers accorded to visual art in the early nineteenth century. Through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic occupations, and developments in the field of aesthetics, administrators of culture in German states charged artworks with the capacity to enable their beholders’ transcendence beyond the confines of discrete individual existences and into an elevated realm of ideal reason, moral truth, and spiritual unity. The visual experience of art was to be an anti-revolutionary force through which social orders might be transformed and states revitalized. At the same time, at the material level, art objects were experiencing quite untranscendent fates, caught up in iconoclasms, looting, and the secularizations and nationalizations of church property that attended the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. My paper asks how these events changed cultural administrators’ faith in art’s transcendent potential by following the fate of a mysterious altar from the Harz town of Goslar. This work was at the center of a struggle between local administrators and Prussian officials over the power of visual cultural heritage to establish political, religious, and national identity in times of conflict. The paper considers an episode in the genealogy of aesthetic transcendence, a concept central to nineteenth century Germanists’ concerns with the transgression of borders between material and ideal, the creation of identities beyond institutionalized categories, and the mobility of people, objects, and images that embed the field in the larger world.
Changing Places: On Poets’ Prints and an Artist’s Novel
Cordula Grewe
German Romanticism began as a literary movement, and as such, one of its driving desires was a radical rethinking of the nature of the text and the laws of its composition. Despite this initial focus on questions of textuality, however, the contemporaneous crisis of representation was largely perceived—and subsequently addressed—in terms of vision. Indeed, a key principle of the new understanding of writing and reading was the arabesque, which Friedrich Schlegel famously defined as “artificially regulated confusion” and “chaotic form.” The primordial role of a synthesizing and synesthetic mixture of genres and different arts in the evolution of a Romantic arabesque aesthetic might explain why many of its literary pioneers also dabbled in the visual arts. Poets often contributed designs for their own publications, from singular ornamentation image, like a frontispiece, to entire illustrative cycles. Focusing on the respective frontispieces of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1805-1808) by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Armin, this paper looks at the different notions of arabesque as paradigm and concrete design practice emerging from these poets’ prints. Then, changing places, it finishes by looking at an artist’s book, Wilhelm Schadow’s autobiographical novel The Modern Vasari (1854), and the rewriting of the early Romantic arabesque that occurred, in word and image, in this late revival of a formerly avant-garde form of writing.
“In der Stube, nach der Natur”: Adalbert Stifter, Amateur Culture, and the Representation of Nature around 1850
Agnes Hoffmann
As is well known, Stifter did not only write extensively on landscape and landscape painting in his literary texts and art criticism, but also devoted himself to landscape painting in practice. His studies, sketches, painter’s diaries, and (mostly) unfinished paintings give insight into contemporary artistic ideas and ideologies of landscape representation—from the angle of an amateur painter who was more than familiar with contemporary aesthetic theory and developments in the field of the visual arts. Focusing on Stifter’s use of auxiliary techniques (like sketching, perspective constructions, and documentation of the painting process in his journal), I would like to follow up ideas of reproduction, copying and mediated recording in his painterly works, which can be related to developments in contemporary media/visual culture as well as to notions of nature and its representation in Stifter’s literary work.
Image Consumption and Cultural Participation: Postcard Communication in the 19th Century
Anett Holzheid
It is well known that photographic picture postcards—a mass picture carrier for land- or cityscapes with a distinct repertoire of image and written forms—are the epitome of the postcard today. In view of this restricted prototype, the functional area the postcard actually occupied within the visual culture of the 19th and early 20th centuries has been all but forgotten in a rapidly expanding and changing media hierarchy. At a time when photography had already been invented, the postcard was first introduced as a strictly written medium. It became popular as a modern universal medium and intermedium through a multipartite, self-driving interplay of exploratory use, new production technologies, an advanced distribution system, a thriving paper industry, and rapid social and cultural changes with expanding concepts of space and time.
Along with the resulting postcard communication came a new image culture, in which the reception of depictions with the most diverse origins—symbolism, idyllic scenes, literary-artistic references—combined with productive strategies of interpretation/implication, depiction, attribution, and alienation towards an aestheticized culture of communication.
This talk breaks down the facets of postcard-specific consumption (Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns)—the opportunities for action associated with postcard images—as well as the participating actors, production processes, and distribution mechanisms. To this end, historical, documentary, and literary sources of German-language texts as well as dated postcard material will be analyzed.
Paper, Scissor, Stone
Catriona MacLeod
In my paper on nineteenth-century paper cuts (Scherenschnitte), I call for a reassessment of their status as diminutive, innocuous, and nostalgic craft works. On the contrary, they can take the form of social caricature (in the case of Luise Duttenhofer and Adele Schopenhauer) and thematize (in the case of Hans Christian Andersen) the proliferation and disposability of paper during the nineteenth century, when the production of images for a mass readership was burgeoning thanks to new print technologies such as lithography. This generative encounter between the old and the new is encapsulated in one of Andersen’s cutouts of 1830 that he executed in newsprint, using a waste product of modernity to regenerate an older art form and critique a new reading and viewing experience. Andersen thus engaged with and transformed the vertiginous, disposable, and cheap print culture of the day, anticipating by several generations the Dada avant-garde’s use of newspaper in collages. My paper will focus on the papercuts, collage albums, and decoupage that preoccupied Andersen throughout his career.
Hot Air Balloons as Seeing-Machines
Kathrin Maurer
The invention of hot air balloons by the French Montgolfier brothers in 1783 not only marked a new phase of human history, namely the manned exploration of the sky, but also triggered a European-wide balloon craze. Although France was the primary stronghold of adventurous balloonists, in Germany ballooning soon became a spectacle as well (shows, cartoons, paintings, magazines, and literature). Of particular interest for this paper is the literary representation of imaginary balloon journeys (for example Jean Paul and Adalbert Stifter). Research has shown that the balloon motive in nineteenth-century German literature functions as a symbol for political and social change in modernity. However, I would like to focus on ballooning as a technology of seeing. Balloons in nineteenth-century literary texts can embody gigantic, eye-like seeing-machines, that in turn destabilize the paradigm of central perspective (flattening), decenter the human subject, and ultimately generate modes of non-linear and uncontrolled writing. Jonathan Crary’s theories on technology and vision provide the theoretical backdrop to show that balloons can shape the human sensorium and, in doing so, can generate social imaginaries and modes of perceiving the world.
Reading the Unreadable: Hieroglyphics between Metaphor and Electrophorus
Antje Pfannkuchen
Hieroglyphics were popular around 1800 as concept and reference in fields as diverse as theology, poetry, and science. Attempts at decipherment of the Egyptian kind coexisted with use as metaphor for several types of secret knowledge. Romantics like J.W. Ritter and Novalis dreamed of a “Golden Age, when all words become—figurative words—myths—And all figures become—linguistic figures—hieroglyphs—” (Novalis). While promising deep wisdom, hieroglyphs remained mostly unreadable images. The dream for them to relate to linguistic and therefore comprehensible signs referred to both directions of that relationship: the desire to make the world more wondrous and the wish to find deeper understanding of life’s mysteries. The “idea of a symbolic language of nature that could materialize before one’s very eyes” (Holland) was studied in visual manifestations on natural (crystalline formations) and scientific (electrophorus) surfaces and the readability of this image-based language was part of the Romantic imagination.
The Dialectical Aspect of the Natural History Image: The Blaschka Marine Invertebrates
J. P. Short
The paper examines one strand of the visual culture of natural history in nineteenth-century Germany: the glass models of marine invertebrates by Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka, and the series of specimens, published illustrations, and sketches to which they belong. The Blaschkas embody the convergence of artisanal labor, commerce, art, and autodidact science; they operate in global circuitries of trade and knowledge. Their models are special cases of the natural history object, at once commodity and life form, objectification and representation, and part of the endlessly expanding elaboration of the global as zoogeography. I want to consider how they reveal subjective aspects of the first modern globalization by connecting the Blaschkas’ work both to the commercial traffic in undersea naturalia and to other strands of contemporary visual culture, and considering the resulting constellation in the light of the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism and the related concept of the dialectical image.
Christian A. Bachmann
As Jonathan Crary and others have noted, the 19th century is enthralled with optics and visuality. Gadgets like the (older) laterna magica, the thaumatrope, and the stereoscope become household staples in well-to-do families, and microscopic studies become a favorite pastime of the upper class. Always seeking new visual metaphors to badger the ruling and the political classes with ever pointier sticks, the visual satire of the time, especially after 1848, quickly picks up on these trends. From new media spring new ideas for satirical images that sometimes coalesce into specific types of visual satire. Often, these spread over all of Europe. Just as often they comprise not only certain representations of imagery but also particular framings to enfold this imagery and support its remediation. In a time when each broadsheet is to be filled to its utmost, round frames are badly suited for the layout of the satirical journal—they waste space on both the paper and the printing plate. Yet, for microscopic and telescopic images, coins, images of laternae magicae, and even soap bubbles, round frames are predominantly used to demarcate not only the image but also the respective visual satire type.
This paper follows examples of round frames from German-language satirical journals such as Kladderadatsch, Fliegende Blätter, and Kikeriki into American Comics, highlighting types of visual satire and their continuation and transformation in graphic narrative around 1900.
Late Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Periodicals and Panoramas: Friedrich Wilhelm Heine’s Pictures of German and American Political Unity
Vance Byrd
Articles in illustrated periodicals and images at traveling panoramas presented pivotal moments of national history to broad audiences, and these media celebrated political unity over internal military disorder in the United States and Germany. While both conflicts were among the first documented extensively by photography, I want to stress the centrality of the printed word, engraved image, and painted canvas for the commemoration of these conflicts as well. In particular, my paper is a case study on how the visual and verbal narratives about the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War were unified by the figure of Friedrich Wilhelm Heine. A war reporter who led a group of German artists who created commemorative panoramas of the Battle of Sedan in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Heine immigrated to Milwaukee from Dresden in 1885 to run the American Panorama Company. In the United States, he and other German artists created American Civil War panoramas for audiences in Chicago, Milwaukee, Chattanooga, Atlanta, New Orleans, and other cities. I argue that it is crucial that we investigate the pre-history of these panorama shows. Heine’s engravings for late nineteenth-century German illustrated periodicals suggest how pre-photographic visual culture helped German readers on both sides of the Atlantic understand debates on national unification and primed global audiences for engagement with military history in panoramas.
The Krodo Altar and the Matter of German History in the Napoleonic Era
Alice Goff
This paper discusses the transcendent powers accorded to visual art in the early nineteenth century. Through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic occupations, and developments in the field of aesthetics, administrators of culture in German states charged artworks with the capacity to enable their beholders’ transcendence beyond the confines of discrete individual existences and into an elevated realm of ideal reason, moral truth, and spiritual unity. The visual experience of art was to be an anti-revolutionary force through which social orders might be transformed and states revitalized. At the same time, at the material level, art objects were experiencing quite untranscendent fates, caught up in iconoclasms, looting, and the secularizations and nationalizations of church property that attended the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. My paper asks how these events changed cultural administrators’ faith in art’s transcendent potential by following the fate of a mysterious altar from the Harz town of Goslar. This work was at the center of a struggle between local administrators and Prussian officials over the power of visual cultural heritage to establish political, religious, and national identity in times of conflict. The paper considers an episode in the genealogy of aesthetic transcendence, a concept central to nineteenth century Germanists’ concerns with the transgression of borders between material and ideal, the creation of identities beyond institutionalized categories, and the mobility of people, objects, and images that embed the field in the larger world.
Changing Places: On Poets’ Prints and an Artist’s Novel
Cordula Grewe
German Romanticism began as a literary movement, and as such, one of its driving desires was a radical rethinking of the nature of the text and the laws of its composition. Despite this initial focus on questions of textuality, however, the contemporaneous crisis of representation was largely perceived—and subsequently addressed—in terms of vision. Indeed, a key principle of the new understanding of writing and reading was the arabesque, which Friedrich Schlegel famously defined as “artificially regulated confusion” and “chaotic form.” The primordial role of a synthesizing and synesthetic mixture of genres and different arts in the evolution of a Romantic arabesque aesthetic might explain why many of its literary pioneers also dabbled in the visual arts. Poets often contributed designs for their own publications, from singular ornamentation image, like a frontispiece, to entire illustrative cycles. Focusing on the respective frontispieces of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1805-1808) by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Armin, this paper looks at the different notions of arabesque as paradigm and concrete design practice emerging from these poets’ prints. Then, changing places, it finishes by looking at an artist’s book, Wilhelm Schadow’s autobiographical novel The Modern Vasari (1854), and the rewriting of the early Romantic arabesque that occurred, in word and image, in this late revival of a formerly avant-garde form of writing.
“In der Stube, nach der Natur”: Adalbert Stifter, Amateur Culture, and the Representation of Nature around 1850
Agnes Hoffmann
As is well known, Stifter did not only write extensively on landscape and landscape painting in his literary texts and art criticism, but also devoted himself to landscape painting in practice. His studies, sketches, painter’s diaries, and (mostly) unfinished paintings give insight into contemporary artistic ideas and ideologies of landscape representation—from the angle of an amateur painter who was more than familiar with contemporary aesthetic theory and developments in the field of the visual arts. Focusing on Stifter’s use of auxiliary techniques (like sketching, perspective constructions, and documentation of the painting process in his journal), I would like to follow up ideas of reproduction, copying and mediated recording in his painterly works, which can be related to developments in contemporary media/visual culture as well as to notions of nature and its representation in Stifter’s literary work.
Image Consumption and Cultural Participation: Postcard Communication in the 19th Century
Anett Holzheid
It is well known that photographic picture postcards—a mass picture carrier for land- or cityscapes with a distinct repertoire of image and written forms—are the epitome of the postcard today. In view of this restricted prototype, the functional area the postcard actually occupied within the visual culture of the 19th and early 20th centuries has been all but forgotten in a rapidly expanding and changing media hierarchy. At a time when photography had already been invented, the postcard was first introduced as a strictly written medium. It became popular as a modern universal medium and intermedium through a multipartite, self-driving interplay of exploratory use, new production technologies, an advanced distribution system, a thriving paper industry, and rapid social and cultural changes with expanding concepts of space and time.
Along with the resulting postcard communication came a new image culture, in which the reception of depictions with the most diverse origins—symbolism, idyllic scenes, literary-artistic references—combined with productive strategies of interpretation/implication, depiction, attribution, and alienation towards an aestheticized culture of communication.
This talk breaks down the facets of postcard-specific consumption (Michel de Certeau, Kunst des Handelns)—the opportunities for action associated with postcard images—as well as the participating actors, production processes, and distribution mechanisms. To this end, historical, documentary, and literary sources of German-language texts as well as dated postcard material will be analyzed.
Paper, Scissor, Stone
Catriona MacLeod
In my paper on nineteenth-century paper cuts (Scherenschnitte), I call for a reassessment of their status as diminutive, innocuous, and nostalgic craft works. On the contrary, they can take the form of social caricature (in the case of Luise Duttenhofer and Adele Schopenhauer) and thematize (in the case of Hans Christian Andersen) the proliferation and disposability of paper during the nineteenth century, when the production of images for a mass readership was burgeoning thanks to new print technologies such as lithography. This generative encounter between the old and the new is encapsulated in one of Andersen’s cutouts of 1830 that he executed in newsprint, using a waste product of modernity to regenerate an older art form and critique a new reading and viewing experience. Andersen thus engaged with and transformed the vertiginous, disposable, and cheap print culture of the day, anticipating by several generations the Dada avant-garde’s use of newspaper in collages. My paper will focus on the papercuts, collage albums, and decoupage that preoccupied Andersen throughout his career.
Hot Air Balloons as Seeing-Machines
Kathrin Maurer
The invention of hot air balloons by the French Montgolfier brothers in 1783 not only marked a new phase of human history, namely the manned exploration of the sky, but also triggered a European-wide balloon craze. Although France was the primary stronghold of adventurous balloonists, in Germany ballooning soon became a spectacle as well (shows, cartoons, paintings, magazines, and literature). Of particular interest for this paper is the literary representation of imaginary balloon journeys (for example Jean Paul and Adalbert Stifter). Research has shown that the balloon motive in nineteenth-century German literature functions as a symbol for political and social change in modernity. However, I would like to focus on ballooning as a technology of seeing. Balloons in nineteenth-century literary texts can embody gigantic, eye-like seeing-machines, that in turn destabilize the paradigm of central perspective (flattening), decenter the human subject, and ultimately generate modes of non-linear and uncontrolled writing. Jonathan Crary’s theories on technology and vision provide the theoretical backdrop to show that balloons can shape the human sensorium and, in doing so, can generate social imaginaries and modes of perceiving the world.
Reading the Unreadable: Hieroglyphics between Metaphor and Electrophorus
Antje Pfannkuchen
Hieroglyphics were popular around 1800 as concept and reference in fields as diverse as theology, poetry, and science. Attempts at decipherment of the Egyptian kind coexisted with use as metaphor for several types of secret knowledge. Romantics like J.W. Ritter and Novalis dreamed of a “Golden Age, when all words become—figurative words—myths—And all figures become—linguistic figures—hieroglyphs—” (Novalis). While promising deep wisdom, hieroglyphs remained mostly unreadable images. The dream for them to relate to linguistic and therefore comprehensible signs referred to both directions of that relationship: the desire to make the world more wondrous and the wish to find deeper understanding of life’s mysteries. The “idea of a symbolic language of nature that could materialize before one’s very eyes” (Holland) was studied in visual manifestations on natural (crystalline formations) and scientific (electrophorus) surfaces and the readability of this image-based language was part of the Romantic imagination.
The Dialectical Aspect of the Natural History Image: The Blaschka Marine Invertebrates
J. P. Short
The paper examines one strand of the visual culture of natural history in nineteenth-century Germany: the glass models of marine invertebrates by Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka, and the series of specimens, published illustrations, and sketches to which they belong. The Blaschkas embody the convergence of artisanal labor, commerce, art, and autodidact science; they operate in global circuitries of trade and knowledge. Their models are special cases of the natural history object, at once commodity and life form, objectification and representation, and part of the endlessly expanding elaboration of the global as zoogeography. I want to consider how they reveal subjective aspects of the first modern globalization by connecting the Blaschkas’ work both to the commercial traffic in undersea naturalia and to other strands of contemporary visual culture, and considering the resulting constellation in the light of the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism and the related concept of the dialectical image.