Word: daumiers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Honore Daumier spent his days wandering about Paris like a man with nothing to do. He rode the horsecars, peeked into Parliament and sat twirling his thumbs through the drone and drama of courtroom trials. He was looking for pictures. But he never brought paper or pencil, because Daumier found it impossible to draw what he saw. Like a photographic film, his mind absorbed pictures, and at night he would develop those mental images in furious and funny lithographs composed with an actor's flair for gesture and a sculptor's knowledge of form...
...cartoons that Daumier produced for the republican papers La Caricature and Charivari were like so many knives hurled at his enemies, the Bona-partists and the bourgeoisie. Time has dulled their politics but not their bite. The French government's selection of them on view in Manhattan last week looked at first glance like enormously artful propaganda, but an onlooker circling the gallery could forget that they were propaganda, forget that they were art, and accept them as pictures of the real thing-life in Paris a century...
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...
That done, the Met and the Modern got down to the serious business of swapping some of their incongruities. First to cross the border was to be Daumier's Laundress. It was now 86 years old, and an obvious "classic"; the Modern would turn it over to the Met. In exchange the Met would deliver Maillol's bronze Chained Action and Picasso's 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which Gertrude had hopefully willed to the Met (TIME...
...Dale, who has spent over $6,000,000 for French and American paintings). Other buyers (mostly anonymous) paid $30,000 for one Toulouse-Lautrec, $27,500 for another. A Corot went for $18,000; a Cezanne portrait of his wife for $24,500; a view of the Seine by Daumier for $15,250, and one by Monet for $11,000; a Renoir nude sold for $12,000. Total evening's business: $221,500 for 20 paintings, almost double what art experts expected the lot to sell...