Abstract

This dissertation proposes that the caricatures of Robert LaPalme, from his virtuoso celebrity portraits of the 1930s to the graphic political satires that focused on Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis in the 1950s, provided a body of work that fulfilled the conditions of a "golden age of caricature," as it is characteristically defined in the historiography of caricature studies in European and North American traditions, for the history of visual arts in Quebec. These "national" models are seen as fundamentally metropolitan productions that represent themselves as national in scope by addressing and trading in the identity markings which provide the material for ideological conflicts within national traditions. Robert LaPalme's imagery was developed in concert with a generation of leaders who laid the groundwork for the Quiet Revolution, the secularisation and modernisation of Quebec society, through a dynamic and contesting relationship with the Duplessis administrations of 1936-40 and 1944-59. LaPalme's caricature harnessed urban anxieties and licence, both depending on and mocking them: it represented the breaches between competing images of Quebec that were rehearsed throughout the culture, from the rural/urban ideological split to the swiftly reconfigured ground of sexual behaviour and freedoms. Caricature in LaPalme's hands was the expression of the troubled, corrupt, powerful and exciting city of Montreal as a centre where the future for Quebec was imagined around the wily and traitorous figure of Maurice Duplessis. The thesis examines through a broadly chronological framework LaPalme's treatment of subjects, his visual style, through his approach to the body and space, and his close collaboration with many of the leading artists editors, journalists, publishers and writers of his era