Word: daumiers
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...Masses and The New Yorker together, shake hard, Gallicize, move back a century to the time when to be Left in France was to be Republican, and you have something like La Caricature and its daily successor Le Charivari, the periodicals by which Honore Daumier earned 30 years' living, six months in jail, and undying fame as an artist. Beginning in the second decade after the Napoleonic Wars, hardworking lithographers including Traviès, Gavarni and Grandville filled these sheets with caricatures of Bonapartist reactionaries and canting bourgeois. Daumier, who worked hardest & longest, died blind and penniless...
More than any other great 19th Century French artist, Daumier has been imitated, forged and mistreated. One aim of the Pennsylvania Museum and of Curator Henry Plumer Mcllhenny, who assembled the present show, was to admit only those Daumier items whose authenticity is 100% established. So hard did young Mr. McIlhenny plug at this task of curatorial scholarship that his exhibition is by way of being a landmark in the scientific treatment of art. On the cover of the Daumier catalogue is no lithograph or painting but an X-ray photograph. The X-ray shows a section of the wood...
...Technical Notes on Daumier," included in the catalogue, Philadelphians are given the results of a study conducted by Art Expert David Rosen and Curator of Paintings Henri Marceau, by means of X-ray and infrared photographs of twelve paintings and seven wash drawings. La Blanchisseuse and most of the other paintings were done on wood. Messrs. Rosen and Marceau discovered that each of the X-rayed wood panels had been scratched over as if by a fine-toothed saw, producing a texture like that of woven fabric. This gave a firm grip to the ground of gesso (whiting and glue...
Even more characteristic was the artist's method of feeling out and establishing his forms. Daumier had an extraordinary visual memory and a sculptor's grasp of three-dimensional movement. His famed drawings of lawyers, legislators, railway travelers, acrobats, street characters and bourgeois at home were done usually at night, under great journalistic pressure, without models or sketches. Although Balzac said Daumier had "Michelangelo under the skin," until 1860, when he was 52, he had scarcely any time to give to painting. When he was able to work in oils he went at it slowly using tentative outlines...
...Philadelphia show includes, besides 152 lithographs and 52 oils and watercolors, seven pieces of Daumier's sculpture and three original lithograph stones from which prints can still be made. Notable among the paintings are six watercolors whose discovery was announced a few weeks ago in Baltimore by researchers who are still engaged in sorting out the vast collection left by Henry Walters, "the South's richest man" (railroads), who died in 1931. Three of these, Interior of an Omnibus, First-Class Carriage, and Lawyer exist in no other version and had not been seen for 40 years...