| Sumario: | What type of icons can give face to a system that carries the mark of transience and rules with abstraction? Using this question as its point of departure, this article attends to popular representations of capitalism in the works of fin-de-siècle French graphic artists, especially those with radical political affiliations. The rise of speculative capitalism rendered the swollen body of 'the laissez-faire industrialist' an insufficient icon to capture the hegemonic financial system by the close of the nineteenth century. The print artists of this study found icons from the historical and mythical pasts as well as extracted modern icons from their daily lives to give recognizable faces to capitalism. Beyond being mere cogs in a mechanics of representation, these icons had to generate affective economies to unite, instruct and agitate their audiences. The biblical golden calf is among the most ubiquitous of these faces. This article brings the visual representations of Capitalism-as-the-modern-golden-calf in dialogue with a selection of nineteenth-century anti-capitalist texts in order to illustrate how the images of popular print culture present a comparable, yet largely overlooked capacity for theoretical interventions. Finally, I constellate these observations with artworks that animated, tamed, or destroyed 'the Bull of Wall Street' during the Occupy Movement (2011). The iconographic similarity between the calf and the bull not only bridges centuries and cultures together, but also opens up new pathways to explore historical moments marking the creation, dissolution, and resurfacing of popular icons that constitute a universally recognizable anti-capitalist visual vernacular.
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