For its a hundred and twenty fifth birthday, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt is to obtain one of many largest collections of works by Honoré Daumier outdoors France as a present from the collector Hans-Jürgen Hellwig. A choice of these are happening present on the museum from 24 January till 12 Might.
Hellwig has agreed to donate 4,200 lithographs and wooden engravings, 19 drawings, two work and two bronze sculptures by the Nineteenth-century French artist to the Städel’s mates’ affiliation in June this yr. Lots of the works have by no means been exhibited. The Städel will present 120, amongst them 17 drawings.
The present will make the Städel “one of the vital centres for Daumier analysis in Germany,” Philipp Demandt, the director of the museum, stated in a press release. He promised an exhibition that “presents guests sensuous pleasure, sharpens minds and invitations debate in regards to the fundamental questions of our time.”
Honoré Daumier, La lecture du Charivari (the studying of the Charivari, 1840) © Non-public assortment
Greatest recognized for his cartoons, Daumier was a pointy, satirical commentator on the politics of his period; a republican who often scorned King Louis Philippe I and a staunch defender of liberal concepts and free speech. Daumier’s cartoons have been revealed within the newspaper La Caricature and Le Charivari. Contemporaries corresponding to Eugène Delacroix and Charles Baudelaire admired his draftsmanship.
A number of the prints in Hellwig’s assortment bear feedback from censors, “giving a captivating perception into the complicated publication course of of those pages in an period of censorship,” the Städel assertion stated. After the censors turned extra iron-handed in 1835, Le Charivari‘s cartoons focussed totally on satirical observations of society and on a regular basis life.
Daumier created the character Robert Macaire, an unscrupulous con artist bent on getting wealthy fast—and a mocking embodiment of the materialistic mindset of the July Monarchy.
His later creations included Ratapoil, a shabbily dressed unofficial policeman employed by the president and later emperor Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Daumier’s matters ranged from world commerce gala’s and the railway to Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris and the invention of images. An 1862 work within the exhibition is known as Nadar elevating images to the extent of artwork.
Honoré Daumier, Madame déménage! (Madame is transferring!, 1867) © Non-public assortment
Hellwig is a lawyer and long-serving Frankfurt native politician who has collected artwork for the previous 60 years and was suggested by Margret Stuffmann, a former prints and drawings curator on the Städel who inspired him to increase his assortment past Daumier’s political cartoons to work, drawings and sculptures, and put him in contact with sellers around the globe. Hellwig has additionally served greater than three many years on the board of the Städel’s mates’ affiliation. His assortment displays a selected curiosity in Daumier’s political lithographs.
His assortment started, he wrote in an introduction to the exhibition catalogue, together with his father and with Konrad Adenauer, the primary post-war chancellor of West Germany. Hellwig’s father, an avid collector of historic maps, was a member of the German parliament. He was charged with shopping for a gift for Adenauer on behalf of the parliamentary economics committee and bought quite a few political cartoons. Of those he put aside two Daumier works which weren’t in excellent situation.
He supplied them to the younger Hellwig. “However now you could discover out extra about them—who was Daumier, who’re the folks depicted and why have they been caricatured,” he stated. Hellwig was eager to gather, however he didn’t need to compete together with his father on maps. “So by way of Adenauer, I got here to Daumier,” he wrote.
