Nineteenth-century Paris is often celebrated as the capital of modernity. However, this story is about cultural producers who were among the first to popularize and profit from that idea. Graphic Culture investigates the graphic artists and publishers who positioned themselves as connoisseurs of Parisian modernity in order to market new print publications that would amplify their cultural authority while distributing their impressions to a broad public. Jillian Lerner's exploration of print culture illuminates the changing conditions of vision and social history in July Monarchy Paris. Analyzing a variety of caricatures, fashion plates, celebrity portraits, city guides, and advertising posters from the 1830s and 1840s, she shows how quotidian print imagery began to transform the material and symbolic dimensions of metropolitan life. The author's interdisciplinary approach situates the careers and visual strategies of illustrators such as Paul Gavarni and Achille Devéria in a broader context of urban entertainments and social practices; it brings to light a rich terrain of artistic collaboration and commercial experimentation that linked the worlds of art, literature, fashion, publicity, and the theatre. A timely historical meditation on the emergence of a commercial visual culture that prefigured our own, Graphic Culture traces the promotional power of artistic celebrities and the crucial perceptual and social transformations generated by new media.

Jillian Lerner teaches art history at the University of British Columbia and media history at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Jillian Lerner's profile page

"Lerner deftly combines archival research at French institutions (such as the Bibliothèque Nationale's Cabinet des Estampes and the Musée de la Publicité), close readings of individual works, and an interdisciplinary approach made necessary by the fundame

"Graphic Culture is deeply researched, brilliantly argued, and thoroughly compelling. Jillian Lerner has established a reputation for her ground-breaking scholarship in this field, and this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century French visual culture and the role images played in the construction of modernity." Richard Taws, University College London

"Jillian Lerner's Graphic Culture is a remarkable example of interdisciplinary scholarship that brings to vivid life the burgeoning publishing world of July Monarchy France through careful analysis of its players, products, and practices. Working across the disciplines of art history, social history, and cultural studies, Lerner has written a captivating and richly researched history of the decades of radical transformation of media culture that will be of great use to scholars of visual culture, art history, social history, and French cultural studies." Histoire sociale / Social History

"There is something brave about Lerner's admission … that while some have wanted to see 'subversive' behaviour in the carnival costuming and playful posturing of Gavarni and his circle, these artists 'did not transcend the nascent capitalist market but kn