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Joris-Karl Huysmans, A Dénicheur of Jules Chéret's Posters
- Nineteenth-Century French Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 41, Number 1 & 2, Fall-Winter 2012-2013
- pp. 122-141
- 10.1353/ncf.2012.0036
- Article
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This article analyzes Joris-Karl Huysmans's essay on French poster designer Jules Chéret (1836-1932) as an early example of art criticism devoted to mass-produced advertising posters. Huysmans's "Chéret" essay, published in the collection of art criticism, Certains (1889), interpreted late nineteenth-century poster imagery as capturing the sexual allure of the female figures represented. In doing so, Huysmans, a dénicheur—or cultivator of unconventional interpretations of popular culture—wedded decadent themes of the comic and sexuality in order to challenge bourgeois morality and capitalist forms of culture.