Honoré Daumier
Daumier - Visions of Paris
Royal Academy of Art

Páginas: 221
Formato: 29x25x3
Peso: 2.0 kgs.
ISBN: 9781907533327

Daumier spent a lifetime as a caricaturist. But after that episode his illustrations grew more subtle as censorship laws (after initial liberalisation) were once again tightened. He produced around 4000 lithographs in all, so the Royal Academy's wonderful exhibition only contains a fraction. Here is the infamous Gargantua, as well as a remarkable lithograph of François Guizot, the king's interior minister, who Victor Hugo once said reminded him of an honest woman running a brothel. Through his awkward demeanour and meditative gaze, Daumier captures complexity and contradiction, while still managing to make Guizot look like a crook. The exhibition gives equal weight to Daumier's paintings, emphasising the fact that he was part of an artistic milieu in Paris, even though his paintings were little known and rarely exhibited after initial success at the official Salon. The exhibition begins with a shadowy and exquisite little painting by Corot of Daumier working in his studio, painted in 1864, and quotes Baudelaire's claim that Daumier was one of the most important men in the whole of modern art. Certainly later artists tended to agree, with the greatest draughtsmen among them, Degas and Picasso, not only admiring his extraordinary facility as a graphic artist but admiring his focus on realist subject matter. The paintings are a departure from the more allegorical commissioned prints.