Word: daumiers
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...worth having. Hammer had one museum-quality Van Gogh, a writhing, energetic view of the madhouse garden at St.-Remy, along with fine to fair works by Sargent, Eakins, Gustave Moreau and Chardin. When LACMA was offered, by collector George Longstreet, a collection of good works by Honore Daumier, the great French social satirist, Hammer insisted on buying them all pre-emptively, on the promise that he would give them to the museum. LACMA believed this...
...Daumier: An Epoch Observed--MFA through July...
...curator of the Grooms show that started its national tour two years ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, sets him up as a real satirist. With a "keen political sense," she claims in her catalog introduction, "Grooms follows in the tradition of William Hogarth and Honore Daumier, who were canny commentators on the human condition." Alas, the history of American art criticism suggests that you need only sketch a bum to get popped into the pot with Daumier, or a street crowd to be compared with Hogarth. The truth in this case is the reverse...
...political bite, as recorded in a piece from the late '60s (Patriot's Parade, Lyndon Johnson with a skull inside his hat and a flower- bearing demonstrator under his enormous cowboy boot), it is cliche and does not rank with Robert Crumb or Ralph Steadman, let alone Daumier. Twenty years later, even these small fangs are gone. His work gums its subjects, rolls on its back and waggles its paws in its demotic eagerness to be liked. If this is the Whitney's notion of satire, no wonder it shelved its plans for a Keinholz installation last year...
...narrative" of the galleries is split in half. On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are -- Daumier, Millet, the Barbizon painters, Fantin-Latour, the rural sentimentalists like Jules Breton, culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion). On the right are academic idealism and romanticism, Ingres and his heirs, Delacroix and his, smooth recipes of Grecian flesh...