J. J. Grandville

Why this artist matters now

Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard was a prolific French illustrator and caricaturist who published under the pseudonym of Grandville ( ), and numerous variations throughout his career. Art historians and critics have called him "the first star of French caricature's great age", and described his illustrations as featuring "elements of the symbolic, dreamlike, and incongruous" while retaining a sense of social commentary, and "the strangest and most pernicious transfigurement of the human shape ever produced by the Romantic imagination". The anthropomorphic vegetables and zoomorphic figures that populated his cartoons anticipated and influenced the work of generations of cartoonists and illustrators from John Tenniel, to Gustave Doré, to Félicien Rops, and Walt Disney. He has also been called a "proto-surrealist" and was greatly admired by André Breton and others in the movement.

Source: Artsy · Trust score: 85% · Updated 1mo ago