
J.J. Grandville at the Staatliche Kunsthalle
ACROSS THE NOTES, fragments, essays, and outlines of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's panoramic rendering of Paris and modernity, the nineteenth-century French illustrator and caricaturist J.J. Grandville plays a signal role. For Benjamin, Grandville's images, “a veritable cosmogony of fashion,” reveal the interplay between the organized phantasmagoria of the nascent culture industryepitomized by Paris itselfand the fetishization of mass-produced goods: “The enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distractions, is the secret theme of Grandville's art.” In this art,