Word: daumier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...lifetime, Honore Victorin Daumier was known chiefly as a relentless political cartoonist, but a few contemporaries appreciated him for the gifted painter that he was. "Daumier," wrote the poet Baudelaire, "knows all the absurd misery, all the folly, all the pride of the small bourgeois-this type that is at once commonplace and eccentric-for he has lived intimately with them and loves them." Last week the serious side of Honore Daumier was on view at Lon don's Tate Gallery in 231 paintings and drawings, the biggest Daumier show in 60 years. Daumier's reputation...
...Daumier was the son of a Marseille glazier who wrote a little poetry on the side and who thought so much of his talent that in 1816 he decided to move himself and his family to Paris. At twelve, the glazier's son became a messenger boy for a process server's office and then a clerk for a bookstore-jobs that opened up to him every corner of Paris. He sketched everything he saw, finally started studying art with an academician whose idea of instruction was to have his pupils copy plaster casts hour after hour. "This...
Louis Philippe as Sargantua. The lithograph was a comparatively new art in those days, but it quickly became Daumier's bread and butter. He began turning out political cartoons for an ardently antiroyalist magazine called La Caricature. One cartoon portrayed King Louis Philippe as Gargantua gobbling up every last sou in France. For such indiscretions Daumier spent six months in prison...
...married a young seamstress and settled down in an apartment on the Quai d'Anjou. There, in a bare attic studio, using crayons until they were so worn that he could no longer hold them, and whistling the latest music-hall tunes, Daumier turned out lithographs of arrogant aristocrats, greedy landlords, sour-faced men and nagging wives, sinister lawyers and pompous judges. In one scene, a judge says to a half-starved prisoner: "So you were hungry; that's no reason for stealing. I'm hungry too-nearly every day. But I don't steal...
...Like Daumier, Yeats was a master of the candid snapshot (see color), but unlike Daumier, he was not out to scourge the human race. By the time he painted The Horse Lover in 1930, his technique was loose, almost wild. The brush often surrendered to the palette knife; flat statement gave way to poetic suggestion; line and color broke and quivered with emotion. "Yeats," said Austrian Painter Oskar Kokoschka on hearing of the Waddington exhibition, "was an outsider who did not follow or belong to any school. All his work bears the mark of fantastic imagination and individuality...