Cologne: TASCHEN. 2023. ISBN: 9783836507868. Published May 12 2023. £60.

Review by Katie Snow (ks596@exeter.ac.uk)

Alexander Roob’s enchanting The History of Press Graphics opens by setting the evolution of illustrated news against key political revolutions, reforms, and crises. The history of graphic journalism, Roob shows, is in many ways the history of democracy, forged through changes in how diverse publics produced, consumed, and responded to information. It is perhaps surprising then, that press graphics do not feature more heavily in modern scholarship. Reductive attempts at thematic categorisation combined with a squeamishness surrounding artistic hierarchies has too often left them, Roob writes, ‘consigned to the bottom drawer with various kinds of ephemera.’ Lavishly illustrated and politically astute, this new work rightly reinstates press graphics to the centre of conversations about artistic movements, media, and industry from the Age of Enlightenment through to the advent of the First World War. Roob is particularly well placed to write this one-hundred-year history; his career has seen him work as a church painter and comic illustrator as well as a teacher of graphics and painting. This combination of creative and scholarly expertise enables an academically rigorous and wonderfully adventurous tour of pictorial journalism as it built upon the golden age of graphic satire and laid the groundwork for avant-garde modern art.

Split into two parts, History of Press Graphics chronicles what it describes as the ‘Classic Period’ of newspaper illustration from 1819-1868 followed by its ‘Modern’ age from 1869-1921. Each section marries conversations about press censorship, war, and rebellion with discussions of key developments in press reporting, design, and production. The first half of the book sheds light on the early days of pictorial journalism, a mode which had its genesis in the letterpress and woodcut printing processes of early modern Europe, became deeply embedded in the late eighteenth-century culture of caricature, and which was irrevocably transformed by the spectacular engravings printed en mass in the satirical magazines of the late 1860s. This section also provides an interesting account of pictorial journalists – known as special artists, or specials for short – and their extensive role in reporting public knowledge. Specials, Roob explains, were responsible not just for producing rapid responses to current events, but also worked as researchers who conducted full-scale journalistic investigations. Often classically trained in the painting of historical subjects, they also contributed to travel books, public lectures, and autobiographies, presenting themselves as ‘bold adventurers’ adept at working across artistic genre, mode, and style.

James Gillray, Lieutenant Governor Gall-stone, inspired by Alecto; or The Birth of Minerva (1790). British Museum, BM Satires 7721.  Hand-coloured etching with aquatint. One of Gillray’s most famous works, Roob writes that it shaped the works of Neoclassical artists in mainland Europe including that of Joseph Anton Koch and Jacques-Louis David.

One of the strengths of Roob’s scholarship lies in its capacity to look beyond illustration, to consider how the landscape of any given period affected – and was in turn affected by – news illustration. The study thus offers an excellent basis for future work not just by historians of art, but by those interested in industrial change, politics, science, and in particular, literature. The literary scene of the 1800s, Roob points out, was irrevocably shaped by social satire, with William Hogarth and James Gillray – in many ways, the pioneers of pictorial journalism – animating the grotesquely raw urban realism that permeates the works of Dickens and Balzac. Whilst Roob gives plenty of room across the volume to obscure artists and works, references to household names remind us of the popular cultural significance of a body of work often framed as artistically niche. The second half of History of Press Graphics, focusing on the ‘modern’ period from1869-1921, is notable for its inclusion of renowned artists and their works. Vincent Van Gogh, Roob memorably retells his readers, was an enthusiastic admirer of press graphics who considered his personal collection of illustrated news a ‘kind of Bible for artists.’ Reproducing work by Felix Nadar, Käthe Kollwitz, and Jean Cocteau to name but a few, Roob rediscovers the far-reaching impact that graphic journalism had upon popular art.

Käthe Kollwitz, Portraits of Misery I (Homeworker) (1909), in Simplicissimus, No. 31. Getty Research Institute (85-S1389). Roob singles out Kollowtiz out as one of many artists who ‘shifted away’ from history painting and towards artistic realism in the early 1900s, producing ‘socially conscious’ graphic work depicting poor living conditions.

A chapter on ‘The Triumph of Caricature’ also stands out in this second section, featuring observations on how figures such as Victor Hugo harnessed the political power of satire in 1850s France. More drawn-out discussion is devoted to technical developments in areas of graphic journalism such as photoxylography, which Roob explains created new opportunities for etching in the 1860s. This included the use of cerography, a printmaking technique employed by William James Linton and his assistant William Luson Thomas to provide illustrations for notable works including William Blake’s poems and fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson.  At times, Roob’s artistic expertise – and especially his familiarity with technical language – runs the risk of alienating the less-informed reader. A glossary of terms, perhaps accompanied by a timeline of key events, would offer a useful space for readers to recap new vocabulary and keep track of artistic developments. The true value of Roob’s book, however, lies not in its precise language or attention to dates, but in the colourful, contradictory, and often messy history of illustration it reproduces. Showcasing activist histories of censorship, social revolt, and radicalism alongside images intended to intervene in the public imagination, Roob makes a compelling case for restoring press graphics to the centre of conversations about the political and aesthetic panorama of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.