In Pierrot and His World: Art, Theatricality, and the Marketplace in France, 1697–1945, Marika Takanishi Knowles investigates how art, theater, and commerce converge through a shared aesthetic of performance and surface display, enabling the negotiation of social identities. According to Knowles, a distinct dynamic emerges at the tail end of the seventeenth century, a “marketplace of theatricality as a form of social address” (2). The figure of Pierrot crystallizes this dynamic over the two and a half centuries covered by the book, a continuity all the more striking in this figure’s adaptability to shifting variables across time and historical context.

Through a series of close readings of a wide range of objects from both high art and popular culture alike, Knowles makes a case for the figure of Pierrot as the privileged signifier that illuminates the dynamic holding together the marketplace, theater, and art. He is the quintessential agent of surface, where appearance becomes a site of negotiation for social identity. Through the figure of Pierrot, the author demonstrates how desire in the marketplace extends beyond commodities to encompass the visibility of subjects, their appraisal by others, and the performed nature of personhood itself. Knowles uses a series of terms to describe the constitutive components of this process. Fête marchande, anchored in the theatricality of the early eighteenth-century marketplace, is the principal function through which the retail marketplace becomes the foundational paradigm of “a way of being and a way of seeing and a way of encountering other people” (214). In a context where “the criteria of personhood had become utterly intertwined with surface social appearance” the paradigm of marketplace encounter becomes generative of social identities (50). Costume emerges as a key device in Knowles’ account through which social identities are performed in the marketplace. These encounters are staged in Pierrot’s solicitations to the audience during his parades in front of the fairground. Pierrot is an interface between the marketplace and its public. He faces the viewer at the “threshold,” another operative concept in the book that structures and mediates social encounters (33). The term “liminality” underscores a series of formal features, interrelated yet distinct across the book’s chapters, that defines Pierrot’s position on this threshold.

The book consists of five chapters and a conclusion. Each chapter focuses on a specific historical moment in which Pierrot enacts a particular function that is central to marketplace encounters. Chapter one, “Antoine Watteau and fête marchande” examines the conditions of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century, centering its discussion on Watteau’s enigmatic large-format oil painting Pierrot (ca. 1718–19, Musée du Louvre). This painting represents a foundational moment in which Pierrot becomes indelibly associated with marketplace encounter, placed on display for appraisal. According to Knowles, Watteau’s painting reconsiders the genre of costume prints, while its very compositional structure echoes the dynamics of any social encounter conditioned by the marketplace. Pierrot’s plain, blank suit serves as an analogue of the toile of the canvas, both operating as surfaces awaiting their next costume, their next role, anticipating appraisal.

Chapter two, “Pierrot-co-co,” traces the convergence of rococo aesthetics and the figure of Pierrot within the ornamental arts of eighteenth-century France. Watteau’s version of Pierrot, in this account, becomes a motif central to the visual language of the rococo, a style characterized by “marketplace practices of reuse and assembly,” particularly in the form of the arabesque cartouche (212). The key work through which Knowles offers a compelling analysis of these dynamics is Louis Crépy’s etching Arabesque for a screen, with Pierrot (ca.1727) after a design by Watteau. In this arabesque, Pierrot faces the viewers on a floating platform suspended by garlands, embedded within an elaborate, curvilinear structure. As highly modular visual forms, such arabesque cartouches were capable of crossing media boundaries, from porcelain to boiserie to upholstery, while maintaining their market-oriented theatricality. With their airiness and symmetrical balance, they embodied the rococo’s principle of exchangeability, where motifs like swirls, garlands, and figures like Pierrot could be recombined in endless configurations. Watteau’s Pierrot marked a new direction in this context, “one that used a more frankly theatrical mode to offer its figures to the marketplace” (70). Ornamental designs attributed to Watteau enact a theatrical logic both in their composition and their address to the viewer: frontality and a certain blank expressiveness. These were also qualities mirrored in Pierrot’s formal traits associated with his liminality. In this chapter, Pierrot becomes not only a character but a visual technology of display, one which was tailor-made for the rococo’s decorative, commercialized surface culture.

In chapter three, “Manet bric-à-brac,” Knowles reconsiders the reappearance of the figure of Pierrot as a street urchin in Manet’s The Old Musician (1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) against the background of the ubiquitous second-hand marketplace for clothes and goods in post-Revolutionary Paris. She situates this figure within the material culture of the bric-à-brac, which shaped a specific definition of a Romantic bohemian milieu, where the marketplace materializes “as a residue of things” (212).

Chapters four and five examine the persistence of Pierrot’s marketplace functions within a broad range of new media. Chapter four “Nadar Charlatan” discusses a spectacular kind of market that emerges in the universal exhibitions of the nineteenth century. In this context, Knowles investigates the adaptability of the figure of Pierrot to this phantasmagoric marketplace through the photographs of Charles Deburau, son of Jean-Gaspard-Baptiste, one of the quintessential Pierrots of the Théâtre des Funambules, taken by Nadar’s brother Adrien Tournachon, and exhibited at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In an excellent passage of close visual analysis, Knowles demonstrates how Tournachon’s photographs of Deburau jeune “enact the theatricality of the marketplace,” a marketplace now defined by the blockbuster scale of international exhibitions (145). The chapter then shifts from photography to the history of technologies of projected images, examining Pierrot’s formal qualities as he appears in a variety of formats, from the choreutoscope to the praxinoscope. These new technologies retain key aspects of Pierrot’s earlier functions, while accentuating his airiness and lightness as qualities that now position him as a paradigm of celebrity in this new iteration of marketplace encounter.

Chapter five, “Old Clothes and the Dreams of the Artist,” extends the exploration of Pierrot’s centrality to the marketplace into the twentieth century through a close examination of the 1945 film Children of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis) directed by Marcel Carné. This chapter is a tour de force, analyzing the Aryanization of Pierrot across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the works of figures such as Adolphe Willette as well as in the substrate of the antisemitic imaginary of Carné’s film. By tracing Pierrot’s racialization in these later contexts, Knowles demonstrates how Pierrot’s whiteness became entangled with antisemitic and nationalist ideologies.

Knowles’s Pierrot and His World is a well-researched and insightful study that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the overlapping economies of art, theater, and commerce as sites for the construction and negotiation of subject positions. Yet her otherwise compelling account overlooks how structures of otherness might have been already embedded in the visual economies of the marketplace encounter Pierrot inhabited in earlier periods, long before his Aryanization at the turn of the twentieth century. Building on Knowles’s insight into the continuities of Pierrot’s marketplace functions across historical contexts, we can extend this analysis to consider how these functions might have been already inflected by economies of alterity from the outset. Consider the rococo arabesque cartouche examined in chapter two. According to Knowles, in the transition from the grotesque to the arabesque that emerged in rococo decorative schemes, Watteau’s designs in general and his Pierrot in particular played a key role. Yet the fantasy of Pierrot as a blank, permeable figure relies on a visual regime that was shaped by imaginaries of otherness, one which drew boundaries around self and other, as evident in the ornamental excesses of the rococo arabesque cartouches that Knowles so convincingly analyzes. This racialized function of ornament is illuminated by Robert Brennan, who,  in “ ‘Arabesques’: The Making and Breaking of a Concept in Renaissance Italy,” argues that the arabesque ornament, from its sixteenth-century association with invention to later definitions as “chimerical” and “capricious,” functioned to cordon off Islamic art, and “set the whole storyline of Western art on an avowedly racial basis” (The Art Bulletin 105, no. 1 2023: 31).

What is the place of such demarcated otherness within the visual economies of the marketplace encounter shaped by processes of extraction and commodification? These economies were embedded in a system in which the visual pleasures of decorative surface masked the erasures and appropriations that made them possible. In chapter one, in discussing costume books as another site where surface became a medium for projecting and containing otherness, Knowles argues that they “catered to readers whose curiosity had been aroused by the expansion of trade and empire. While visualizing encounters with strangers from other nations, costume books insisted upon clothing as a surface for the performance of social and national identity” (42). Attending to these structures of otherness invites further inquiry into how Pierrot’s apparent openness might already have been mediated by imperial and racial imaginaries shaping his marketplace functions from the outset.