Pleasure, Parody and Propaganda: A New History Reexamines Illustration Art

In a sweeping journey through the visual language of illustration, D.B. Dowd’s new book “Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration” challenges conventional hierarchies between fine art and commercial imagery. The 400-page volume, published by Princeton University Press, invites readers to reconsider illustrations not as mere decorative elements but as sophisticated visual texts meant to be read.

Dowd, a professor of design and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, begins his exploration with what is considered the first known illustration—the frontispiece of the “Diamond Sutra” from AD868 in Tan China—and traces the evolution of the medium through to Molly Crabapple’s powerful pictorial reports from Gaza in 2015.

The book highlights how illustrations function differently from museum paintings. Take Jules Chéret’s 1891 poster advertising the Alcazar d’Été Club in Paris, featuring a glamorous singer known as Kanjarowa in a ruffled pink dress. While reminiscent of John Singer Sargent’s elegant society portraits, the image served a purely commercial purpose—to attract patrons to the club at 8 Avenue Gabriel where Kanjarowa performed nightly.

Though “illustrator” as a professional designation emerged in the mid-19th century, Dowd emphasizes cross-cultural and historical continuities. Chéret’s poster art, for instance, drew heavily from xylography techniques perfected by 17th-century Japanese printmakers. These artistic influences flowed in multiple directions, creating an intricate global dialogue through visual media.

The political dimension of illustration emerges clearly in examples like Stuart Davis’s 1913 cover for the socialist magazine “The Masses,” which deliberately countered Chéret’s fanciful “Chérettes” by depicting working-class women with the sardonic caption “Gee, Mag, Think of Us Bein’ on a Magazine Cover.” Later, during the Vietnam War, Duong Ngoc Canh’s 1966 poster “Look after the Land, Look after the Youth” showed a young Vietnamese revolutionary carrying not a fashionable fan but a machine gun.

The book weaves a complex tapestry that connects historical Japanese woodcuts of courtesans with Wu Youru’s 1890 ink drawing for Shanghai Pictorial, which cleverly juxtaposed traditional music with modern power lines—a commentary on the collision between old and new in urban life.

Dowd doesn’t shy away from illustration’s darker applications. He examines how children’s books became propaganda tools, citing a disturbing 1938 Nazi picture book that taught German children to differentiate between Jews and non-Jews through mushroom analogies. Similarly, he analyzes how early advertising, such as the Mitsukoshi Kimono Store’s 1920 display in Tokyo, created visual shrines to consumerism that trained viewers in new shopping behaviors.

The author’s analysis truly shines in his caption writing, where he offers nuanced interpretations of individual images. His description of a scene from Jippensha Ikku’s 1806 Japanese picaresque novel “Footing It along Tōkaidō Road” demonstrates how illustration could amplify humor, as two buffoons mistake a temple statue for a sleeping maid, panicking when she won’t wake up and accidentally breaking her nose.

Despite the book’s comprehensive scope, some critics note a significant omission in the neglect of natural history illustration—a rich tradition exemplified by John James Audubon’s pioneering life-sized aquatints of North American birds (1826-38) and Ernst Haeckel’s Art Nouveau-inspired invertebrate studies (1899-1904). These examples would have reinforced Dowd’s central argument that illustration should not be considered inferior to “real art.”

The book concludes with a delightful example that turns art world hierarchies on their head: Oscar Cahén’s 1951 cover for Canada’s MacLean’s magazine showing an artist painting a conventional landscape while surrounded by a wildly Cubist environment—suggesting that sometimes illustrators might capture reality more truthfully than fine artists.

“Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration” makes a compelling case for illustration as a sophisticated form of visual communication with its own distinct language and cultural importance, challenging readers to look beyond traditional artistic categories.