The Real Daumier


Subject: The Real Daumier
From: Paul Miller (phm@midsouth.rr.com)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2000 - 09:41:39 EST


Here is a link to many Daumier, (the real one), prints, mostly satire. Also
a little info on the man himself to see if any light is shed since Salinger
had the main character in "Blue period" choose Daumier's name for himself.
http://grizzly.umt.edu/partv/famus/print/daumier/daumier.htm#30

 DAUMIER, Honoré

   (1808-79). The caricaturist, painter, and sculptor Honoré Daumier is best
known for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics
and society. Also important were his paintings that helped introduce
techniques of impressionism into modern art. The paintings were hardly
known, however, during his lifetime.
Daumier was born in Marseilles, France, on Feb. 20 or 26, 1808. His parents
were artists but were not successful. Daumier received a typical lower
middle-class education, but his studies did not interest him. He wanted to
draw. His family therefore arranged for him to study with Alexandre Lenoir,
a fairly well-known artist who had studied with Jacques-Louis David, a
leading classicist painter.

At age 13 Daumier became a bailiff's messenger in the law courts. He then
worked as a bookstore clerk at the Palais-Royal, one of the busiest spots in
Paris. There Daumier saw picturesque personalities--men and women of
fashion, intellectuals, artists, and swindlers--who lent themselves to
caricature.

At age 18 or 20, Daumier decided to embark on the artistic career he longed
for. He soon found he could not make a living from painting or sculpting
what he pleased and therefore accepted commissions for portraits and
cartoons of morals and manners. From 1830 to 1847, Daumier was a
lithographer, cartoonist, and sculptor.

In his cartoons Daumier created unforgettable characters. He used these
colorful characters when he attacked a regime, form of society, or concept
of life that he scorned.

His types were universal: businessmen, lawyers, physicians, professors, and
petits bourgeois. After two uncomplimentary caricatures of King
Louis-Philippe in 1832, Daumier was thrown into prison for six months.

In 1848 Daumier discovered impressionism, a form of art in which faces and
bodies tend to be devoured by the surrounding light and become one with the
atmosphere. From lack of demand, Daumier's impressionist lithographs are not
very numerous, but these and his paintings, also few in number, show that he
had been converted to impressionism.

As a cartoonist, Daumier enjoyed a wide reputation, though as a painter he
remained unknown. He died in Valmondois on Feb. 11, 1879, having produced
4,000 lithographs and an equal number of drawings.

Anyone done anymore digging into the Rilke/Rodin/DDSBP connection?

Paul

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