Word: daumiers
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...Fogg exhibition "La Caricature: Wit, Humor and Politics in French Caricature, 1830-1835" spotlights the master of the form, Honore Daumier. Daumier and his contemporaries created the pieces in this small show in response to the activities of the French monarchy...
...Daumier's work does not only focus on the king: other government officials were also the artist's targets. The drawing "D'Argout" exaggerates the long nose of its subject, the chief censor. Beneath the image is a coat of arms featuring the nose and a pair of scissors, which represent the office of censor. This common practice of embellishing one aspect of a person's features is known as "portrait charge...
...Daumier's "It Sure Was Worth Getting Ourselves Killed" is a much more politically charged piece. This lithograph appeared as the last piece in "La Caricature," which ended publication in 1835 as ordered by the king's censors. The piece shows several figures rising from their graves. According to people who were killed in the Revolution, rising to assess the state of their country after their deaths. The work suggests the revolutionaries' sense of futility: upon looking at the world from the grave, the men see little change...
...cavernous Piranesian spaces of the anteroom to the Palace of Justice known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, or Room of Wasted Steps, the frightened clients, the stone-faced ushers, the bewildered accused in the dock. It took another 19th century genius, Dickens, to convey in fiction what Daumier gives in line and wash: the sense of the law, not as a means toward fairness or justice but as an enormous and self-feeding machine, abstract and inhuman, operating far beyond the lives it is supposed to regulate, masticating its diet of human hope...
...Daumier do this? By fixing his pincer gaze on the theatrics of the law. In the drawing known variously as For the Defense and The Lyric Advocate, the lawyer's court robes puff out in baroque splendor -- one thinks, perhaps not irrelevantly, of Bernini's bust of Louis XIV -- on the hot air of his rhetoric, as he gestures at the man in the dock, a Jean Valjean whose simian face betrays not the slightest comprehension of what is being said on his behalf. Emphasized by the dark mass of the lawyer's sleeve, the short distance between...