Word: daumier
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...National Gallery, blue-coated guards in reinforced numbers paced the corridors. Military policemen stood in every room. But the 202 paintings they were guarding (estimated value: $80,000,000) were not loot, though they too had been brought back by conquerors (TIME, Feb. 11, 1946). All but two-a Daumier and a Manet-had once hung on the walls of Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum...
Because he had little chance to paint in oils, Daumier has been called one of the most frustrated of artists, but cartooning was his chosen art. He never expressed any yearning for the ivory tower; the struggles of the marketplace were meat & drink...
Ministerial Washerwomen. Daumier's perspective on Paris was that of a fiercely republican poor boy. When the July revolution of 1830 toppled Charles X from the throne, Daumier was a hopeful 22; Louis-Philippe, the compromise "Pear-King," soon blasted his hopes. He caricatured the umbrella-toting King as a Gargantua being stuffed with gold by dutiful midgets. Gargantua was displeased, but Daumier got off with a suspended sentence. In 1832 he tried his hand at a cartoon in which the King's ministers appeared as washerwomen. That one cost him six months in jail...
...Dozen Don Quixotes. Except for a brief respite after the revolution of 1848, Daumier waged a running battle with the censors. When they bore down too hard, he turned from political to social satire, illustrated his favorite novel Don Quixote a dozen times, and ultimately got around to the easel-paintings-the blacksmiths and laundresses, as dignified as Rembrandt's illustrations of the Bible-on which his reputation as a 19th Century master largely rests...
...contemporary newsman reported that Daumier looked like one of his own cruelest caricatures, "but if one . . . tries to penetrate this bourgeois shell, the features soon brighten into life. That little eye with its heavy lid, half-closed in perpetual winking, thrusts at you its clear sharp look . . . even his nose seems to enjoy the observations he has just made...