‘La Revue Blanche’: The History of Illustrating

Abstract

The article reconstructs the illustrating history of “La Revue Blanche”, the leading French literary and artistic magazine of the fin de siècle epoch. Leaving out the analysis of literary content, the authors considers the petite revue through the prism of its most significant artistic achievements. In order to achieve this goal, a rather wide range of graphic artists who collaborated with “La Revue Blanche” at one time or another is outlined, and the conditional genre ranking of engravings published and distributed with the help of the journal is carried out. Based on the data obtained, a periodization of the short history of “La Revue Blanche” illustrating is proposed. The article attaches great importance to the stylistic and iconographic analysis of individual artworks. In the case of the ones by Vuillard, Roussel, and Bonnard, it is possible to put forward new semantic interpretations and emphasize the confessional nature of the prints created by the masters for the design of the journal’s frontispiece. In the article significant attention is given to the history of introducing the practice of publishing graphic literary portraits by Vallotton in “La Revue Blanche”, which at some point are forced to take on the utilitarian function of vignettes. Equally important is the review of the publication history of the independent illustrated supplement “NIB”, which, as is well known, has only had three issues. The authors see in “NIB”, at the same time, an artistic reincarnation of fumiste chatnoiresque satire, clearly close to Toulouse-Lautrec, Valloton and Bonnard, and a graphic revealing of the internal philosophical and aesthetic conflict that existed within the Nabis art group. In addition, the authors also describe the features of the Nathanson brothers’ publishing activity, emphasizing the direct dependence of the content of published products on the owners’ tastes.