At the beginning of the 1850s the influential liberal critic Vissarion Belinskiy had commented upon this inherently "democratic" quality of images. Belinskiy had praised the handful of "polytype" albums" (polytipazhy) that had been published by artist-engravers Vasiliy Timm, Ignatiy Shchedrovskiy, and Taras Shevchenko in the 1830s and 1840s. These albums, which included Nashi, spisannye s natury russkimi (Our Folk, Drawn from Nature by Russians) (1841) (fig. 2), and Fiziologyia Peterburga (The Petersburg Physiology) (1844) were inspired by the European tradition of typological print-books or "physiognomies" which circulated widely in Russia during the late 1830s and 1840s, so that the Russian public was familiar with the work of such artists as Honoré Daumier, Paul Gavarni, and Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier.¹⁶ Indeed, Gavarni's Les anglais peints par eux-mêmes (The English Painted by Themselves) had been published to widespread acclaim in Russia only a few months before the publication of Nashi.¹⁷ For Belinskiy, the images in these albums were:

fully worthy of our age's aims of making everything generally and equally accessible to all and sundry, rich and poor. These polytypologies inspire the masses to read, explaining a text superbly, and offering a vital and vivid understanding of, here, a picture by a great master, or there, the many and varied subjects from the natural sciences and history.¹⁸

Belinskiy argued that these images are accessible, educational, and even inspirational, not only describing contemporary life, but also serving as a conduit between elevated art and science and the masses. In this they fulfilled the explanatory function attributed to art by the liberals, who believed that the work of art should be not merely "illustrative" or descriptive, but should provide explanations, or, in the case of the physiognomy tradition, quasi-scientific typologies of reality. However, these albums were a relatively short-lived phenomenon: they appeared in any quantities only between the mid 1830s and late 1840s, and eventually disappeared altogether after the boom in the periodical press in the mid-1850s onwards.¹⁹ Despite this, they clearly influenced the works of the newspaper graphic artists of the 1850s and 1860s, as is demonstrated by case of Nikolai Stepanov, the future editor of Iskra and one of the most prolific graphic artists of the new era. Stepanov was so struck by Nashi that he produced his own album of physiological prints called Znakomye (Acquaintances) in 1856-58, before founding Iskra a year later in 1859 with Nikolai Kurochkin, a poet and graphic artist.²⁰

The events that caused these changes also effected an increasingly mixed social composition of the audience. Dostoevskiy gave a vivid account of this variety in his vivid, metonymic description of the crowd at the 1860-1861 Academy exhibition:

The crowd consists of the most variegated elements. Here, there are heads in expensive hats, there, heads in scarves; here, full-bodied frock-coats, and short uniform jackets; helmets, greatcoats, and beards.²⁴

The graphics in Iskra similarly show men, women and even children from a range of clearly distinct milieus. In these graphics at least, the exhibition hall is represented as a public space in which an aesthetic experience can be shared regardless of social distinctions. The ability to read, for instance, is shown as secondary to the visual experience—indeed, reading is frequently represented as an obstacle to a genuine appreciation of the work of art. For instance, these graphics consistently mocked the authority invested in the guidebook/catalogue as provider of educational commentary, and they showed the deleterious effects of relying too much on the catalogue as a source of explanation. In one instance, a mother tells her child that a painting of a cherub is not a copy of the Italian Baroque-era artist Domenichino (as the child correctly states), but a portrait of the artist's son, because "that's what the catalogue says" (Iskra, 1859: 24). In another example, a man refuses even to look at a painting because "it's not even in the catalogue" (Budil'nik, 1867: 40). Budil'nik even published a satirical article, with graphic illustrations, entitled "Progulka s ukazatelem po khudozhestvennoy vystavke Markiza Fru Fru" (The Marquis Frou Frou's Stroll Around the Art Exhibition with Catalogue), in which much of the humor lies in Frou Frou's gleeful exposition of the catalogue's inadequacies as he goes around the exhibition (Budil'nik 1870: 11). Such images show dissatisfaction with conventional assumptions that aesthetic experience requires "authorized" explication from "experts"; instead, the exhibition space is shown as a place where audiences of all backgrounds are able to participate in a process of interpretation. In this respect, these graphics challenge expectations of interpretative authority by re-assigning it to an apparently undereducated audience.

This audience, however, is represented as diverse not only in social composition, but also in visual competence. Ignorance of the fundamental principles of the visual arts (e.g., the role of the exhibition, or basic artistic terminology) is depicted across class-boundaries. In one case, for instance, a farmer is unable to view the exhibition as an event of value in itself because he assumes that the role of the artwork at the exhibition is to serve as a decorative background for other forms of entertainment. Thus he exclaims as he leaves: "So this is your exhibition?! There's no music and no buffet! The devil knows what it is!" (Iskra, 1860: 52). In other images, however, it is the socially disenfranchized observer who displays a greater visual knowledge than the privileged, upper-class viewer, as in fig. 10. Here, ignorance of a term such as "perspective" reveals the gap in knowledge between master and servant:

Bigwig: And this picture isn't drawn correctly—at first all the houses are big, and then they get smaller and smaller. How is that possible?!
Servant: It's in perspective, sir.
Bigwig: Hmm! And I thought it was in our town.

The aesthetic issue that emerges with particular force from these images, however, is that of mimetic representation. This was a response to the increase in exaggerated naturalist works in public exhibitions, many of which represented contemporaneous social ills. This increase was due to a number of factors, including the influence of the social-democratic movements of the mid-1850s and mid-1860s upon artists, as well as the profound influence of the European realist movement after Gustave Courbet's "Realist Manifesto". It was also a result of the increased standing of the hotly debated daguerreotype, which by this period had found a place at certain exhibitions, as both a marketing tool and as an exhibition category in its own right (cf. Iskra 1865: 44, in which photographers are shown chasing artists out of the halls of the Academy). Although the graphics in Iskra largely predate the appearance of the full-blown Russian realist movement in the mid to late 1870s (in the form of the Itinerant Association), they nevertheless demonstrate an awareness of the new European movement. Some graphics thematize the question of the subject matter of the realist painting. For instance, one entitled "Reality for reality's sake, or realism an sich und für sich" (fig. 11), depicts, in two frames, a sparsely-furnished interior with the caption "Room Interior by Mr. Bobrov 2", and in the next frame, the same interior without furniture, with the caption "The Spark presents an even more simple room." (This deliberate misapprehension of realism as Spartan naturalism refers to the works of a specific artist, Viktor Akseyevich Bobrov, who became famous for his interiors from 1862 onwards.) Others address the role of "composition", since this was considered unimportant in the new naturalist aesthetic in which images should be drawn "from life" and "unstaged": in one case a man is shown as foolishly impressed by an artwork because, as he says, "I didn't realize it was a composition: I thought it was an ordinary painting." (Iskra, 1864: 46).

Most importantly, however, these graphic images engaged with the question of the techniques and conventions of representation in naturalist art. Audiences of all classes and backgrounds were shown as incapable of viewing the work of art as a form of representation, and instead as having been naively duped by the naturalist illusion to the point where they mistake the painting for the object represented. This is illustrated by fig. 12, in which fire-fighters gather before a painting, ready to take "precautionary fire measures" because of a picture's "fiery tone". In another image, a couple's discussion of a portrait takes the notion of the required "contemporaneity" of the image to an extreme:

Lady: Oh, that's so like him!
Man: Yes, mon ange, but it's too idealized, there's no reality. He's been retired for ages, but in the portrait he's wearing epaulettes. (Budil'nik, 1868: 40)

It is important to recall at this point that these images are, of course, satirical images. They cannot, therefore, be viewed as straightforward documentary evidence that the public who went to art exhibitions during this period were incapable of distinguishing image from reality. Indeed, the viewing public had travelled some distance from its first, astonished reaction to the visual "illusionism" of Bryullov's "Posledniy den' Pompeya" as described by Gogol',²⁵ and was increasingly exposed to illusionist, naturalist images of putatively contemporary reality through, for instance, daguerreotype images in the press.

In fact, the visual competence of the viewing public is explored, and, I suggest, implicitly praised, on another level altogether. While these graphics may show an absence of learned aesthetic knowledge or training in the public (in the sense of technical language, for instance), they nevertheless presuppose an innate visual capacity in the public. They do so by requiring the reader to attend to the material properties of the graphic image, and to understand it as the result of a set of visual conventions applied in an active relationship between observer and image. Many emphasize their own properties as images by drawing attention towards their own provisional nature, their sketchiness, and even their incompleteness. A particularly significant example comes in "The Trade Fair" (fig. 13), in which over half of the image is occupied by dark patches. To the left, a group of horses stands with heads drooping, and in the right-hand corner there is a partly legible written statement about the exhibition guide. The caption reads as follows:

The Trade Fair (by Sverchkov)

The viewer will note that the horses appear to be exhausted. It's no wonder: these bravehearts have transported the entire academic exhibition of 1865. We must alsow give the artist his due for having sacrificed the completion of his picture for the sake of putting the exhibition together.

Here the focus is not only on the labor behind the scenes of the exhibition, the literal "horse-power" required, but on a work which is rendered, and represented, as incomplete as a result of this non-artistic labor. This particular image is placed at the very end, bottom right, of a series of sequential images depicting the "art exhibition". The position of the image on the page, its visual incompleteness, and the caption, all encourage the viewer to refer to the world outside the work of art in order to make sense of it. In the traditional aesthetic of "high" art supported by the Academicians, the artwork was seen as hermetically sealed from the world around it. By contrast, this graphic image and others like it, such as those which show artists hastily "finishing" their works as exhibitions are hung (e.g., Iskra, 1861: 24) not only make the extra-aesthetic context of the work of art visible, but even "praise" the labor involved.

Other graphics similarly encourage readers to acknowledge their role in assigning meaning to the image or picture. A good example of this is a graphic image (fig. 14) of a "framed" picture of a woman reading Iskra, the cover of which bears an image of a female viewing a framed picture on a wall of a man seated at a desk, facing what looks suspiciously like a framed painting. The caption reads as the voice of the journal itself, as follows:

Woman Before a Portrait

The entire worth of this picture consists in the fact that 3 pictures can be made from it. See if you can spot them, Madame Reader of The Spark.

This caption offers no explanation of the image, but instead serves as an invitation to a woman reader to take part in the process of decoding the image itself. Here, the interactive process between observer and image is emphasized in the visual detective trail the caption encourages, placing the observer in a position of interpretative authority. Such graphics draw attention to their own material properties by breaking "frames" or encouraging an awareness of a context outside the image. This is even thematized in certain images in which the subjects of paintings break free of their frames: in one, entitled "Christian IV on his Horse", the Danish king leaps through the frame in order to escape the viewing audience. (Iskra, 1867: 38). In another graphic a crowd is shown fleeing from a painting in which a group of rampaging horses is depicted: the caption undoes the notion of a static relationship between observer and observed by noting that both horses and people have been "startled by the painting's unbelievable price" (Iskra, 1867: 38).

One further example, taken from Stepanov's earlier publication Znakomye (1857), reveals the extent to which this irreverent approach to the conventions of "high" representational art was a conscious and long-lasting feature of the non-academically trained graphic artists who worked for Iskra. This image shows a framed painting of a woman with a strangely curved figure. It is accompanied by the following text:

The artist has depicted this lady in the form of a guitar in order to express her love for music, and especially for the guitar. The idea of giving portraits a similarity to inanimate objects belongs to the artist himself, and we, as caricaturists, bow down before his discovery. (fig. 15)

Here a distinction is made between the "artist" who has discovered a technique of representation through equivalence of form, and the "caricaturist", who "bows down" before this discovery. However, the mock-reverential abasement of the "low" artist before "high" art implies quite the opposite. The caricaturist, or graphic artist, already works in a medium that relies upon a process of suggestive "equivalence"—because it is line-based, sketchy, small-scale, and ephemeral, it simply cannot exploit the illusionist conventions of the painting. The medium of the graphic artist makes him aware of the conventions of visual representation, while the "high" artist has only just arrived at a discovery of one of these conventions.