Ten Assassinations for a Penny

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Artist: Théophile Steinlen (Swiss, 1859–1923)
Medium: Lithograph
Size: Sheet: 60.6 x 46.5 cm (23 7/8 x 18 5/16 in.); Image: 60.6 x 46.5 cm (23 7/8 x 18 5/16 in.)
Culture: Switzerland
Museum: Cleveland Museum of Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Nineteenth-century French lithographs, including Steinlen’s charged political images, offer wide-ranging documentation of the life at the time. In 1881 France passed a law granting freedom of the press, resulting in numerous magazines of humor and social criticism. An advocate for the poor, the downtrodden, and the working classes, Steinlen contributed artwork to journals linked to the leftist movement, such as the anarchist publication La feuille (The Newspaper), in which Ten Assassinations for a Penny was reproduced.

Steinlen’s illustrations for La feuille comment satirically on the articles written by Zo d’Axa, the editor-in-chief. A sense of gloom and violence that parallels the pessimism of the writing permeates the somber images. Marked by strong contrasts of black and white, Ten Assassinations for a Penny has an unsettling, even frightening quality intended to shock the reader into acknowledging the deep-seated problems in French society.