Word: daumier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Picasso, the author explores the lives and times of famous artists and the hot issues that caused them to turn their hands to political cartoon, savage caricature and posterish polemic. Hundreds of black-and-white illustrations do justice to the likes of Jacques Callot, Lucas Cranach, George Cruikshank, Daumier, Courbet, Rouault, Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz. Fascinating, especially for an age of rage, despair and pungent partisanship...
Unprejudiced View. By midcentury, the time's inherent romanticism found expression in a burst of landscape painting-and a new respect for human problems. Corot marched out of doors to paint, and the Barbizon school followed. Jean-Francois Millet captured the inherent dignity of peasant farmers, Daumier the poetry of the Parisian poor. But the overall point that the Minneapolis show makes is that 19th century French painting has too long been viewed as a vast academic conspiracy against the innovators who are now enshrined as the founders of modern art. It makes for a story of martyrs...
...funniest heads, stretches to a peak in a tuft of hair. A foldable top lip falls to a point, the mountainous nose above and a wing collar binding neckless jowls threaten to envelop the pyramidal brain. Mouths snarl from monstrous faces, others just venture a gawky grin. Yet Daumier models even the most hideous mask with humor...
...bizarre "Ratapoil," in a rippling tail coat, who symbolizes the evils of the Bonaparte government. It sweeps the eye around its angular limbs jabbing the air with elbow, beard, and a cane. Questions of authenticity begin with a group of bronze figures that resemble the bourgeois types of the Daumier lithographs, but are of unknown origin. The incredibly detailed catalogue points to subtle inconsistencies in style of these sculptures, hinting that they may have been copied from Daumier's lithographs by an amateur artist...
...easy to spot most of the other pieces possibly misattributed to Daumier. You see that the dramatic self-portrait bust doesn't look like anything else he did. According to the catalogue, Carrier-Belleuse, a friend of Daumier, probably made it, but no one is sure. Hair tossed like a conductor's, hollowed eyes, this face is an idealized version of the artist, whom a nearby photograph reveals as a fat, distinguished gentleman. It would be inappropriate irony that Daumier sculpt himself with none of the humor with which he depicts others...