Daumier and Exoticism

Produktbeschreibung

Best known as a satirist of Parisian politics and daily life, Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) was a prolific caricaturist. This book is the first to examine the role of exoticism in his art, and to offer a detailed history of the journal Le Charivari in which the lithographs appeared. These satires of China, Haiti, the United States, Africa, and the Middle East not only target the theater of international politics, but also draw on a broad range of physical stereotypes supported by contemporary ideas about race and cultural difference. In an art of comic inversion, Daumier used the exotic to expose the foibles and pretensions of the Parisian bourgeoisie. A pacifist and a Republican, Daumier also satirized the non-European world in order to covertly attack the imperialism of Napoléon III in an age of press censorship. Idealistic as well as pragmatic, he used humor to stage political critique as well as to envision a more unified and compassionate world. 

Kritik

®In this fascinating study, Elizabeth C. Childs gives us a Daumier for our times. As we stand on the brink of a globalizing world in all its complexity, Childs shows us how one man grappled with issues that had not yet been thematized, in a world that had not yet conceived of political correctness. In this first comprehensive study of this important aspect of Daumier's work, Childs is attentive to the prejudices and foibles of the artist and his fellow citizens as they attempt to comprehend a world beyond French borders. She shows us that Daumier's world was not so very different from ours after all.¯ (Patricia Mainardi, Professor of Art History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Author of 'Art and Politics of the Second Empire') 

Autoreninfo

The Author: Elizabeth C. Childs is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, where she has taught since 1993. She has published several articles on Daumier and has also edited two books on the artist: Honor‚ Daumier: A Thematic Guide to the uvre and (with Kirsten Hoving) Femmes d'esprit: Women in Daumier's Caricature. She has also edited Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts and has published widely on primitivism and exoticism in modern art.