Medium and context. On Artur Grottger’s press illustrations

Abstract

The article focuses on the problem of de- and recontextualisation of Grottger’s press illustrations. The imperative of contextualizing works of art belongs to the constitutive components of the paradigm dominating in our discipline. Press illustration as a medium seems to have been especially designed for such an analysis. However, 100 years ago, when Jan Boloz Antoniewicz was writing, in the perspective of the then prevailing stylistic-genetic paradigm, his monograph of Grottger, in which we find the most complete analysis of his press illustrations so far, the right approach seemed to be rather de-contextualisationIn this text we confront the approach of Boloz Antoniewicz (Section One: Jan Boloz Antoniewicz: Grottger’s illustrations as “petty masterpieces” leading to real masterpieces), consisting in fragmentation of press illustrations and their inclusion in the genesis of Grottge’s famous crayon cycles on cardboard, with a contextual approach (Section Two: Case Study: Grottger’s illustrations to Eine kokette Frau by J.D.H. Temme) restoring the original context to the illustrations and analysing Grottger’s transmitting strategy, the aim of which was to emotionally, visually and narratively connect the reader with the imaginary world of the literary work.. The summary concerns the dialectic of de- and recontextualisation with reference to the 19th century press illustration. Placing Grottger’s illustrations in their original context, which we have described as recontextualisation, is one of the many possible contextualisations, such as one governed by the modernist postulate of the purity of the medium, which assumes isolation of an examined medium in the sphere of its competence. In the case of the press illustration, this leads to referring it to the “only proper”, i.e. the original context. From this perspective, the de-contextualisation operations of Boloz seem, paradoxically, to be a different kind of contextualisation, involving the inclusion of Grottger’s illustration in his heterogeneous oeuvre, of which they were an integral part. Thus, the dialectic of de- and recontextualisation is abolished in the common denominator of different but equally legitimate contextualisations.