Champfleury et le « matériel de l'art » : le langage de l'imagerie populaire

In his History of Caricature, Champfleury takes means of not only poetics (for genders) and sociology (for social pratices), but also of semiotics (for forms) to describe at once specifities of popular art and images. Indeed, some developpments demonstrate than Champfleury, when he does not delude himself upon false evidences of an universal iconic language, is able to recognize semantic fading in images. His attention for formal properties of iconic medium must to be link with primitivism in the late XIXth Century and with freudian analysis of humoristic images published in the Fliegende Blätter.