Exhibit spotlights caricaturist, commentator

To celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of the 19th-century artist Honoré Daumier, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers is presenting Honoré Daumier and La Maison Aubert: Political and Social Satire in Paris.

Organized by guest curator Florence Quideau, the exhibit features more than 100 lithographs and rare sculptures of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and the Second Empire (1852-1870) from the Zimmerli's Daumier holdings and loans from the Hammer Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition's sculptural centerpiece is "The Celebrities of the Juste-Milieu (1832-35)," a portrait-caricature series comprising 36 painted clay busts of politicians and other personalities of the July Monarchy. The Zimmerli museum is the only American institution to own a complete set of this exceedingly rare series of painted clay busts, made from the original works now housed in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The sculpture series is displayed amid their lithographic counterparts to illustrate a series of three-dimensional statuettes made solely to be used as visual references for two-dimensional artworks.

The exhibition demonstrates the power of the press in shaping French social and political conscience, while exploring how Daumier used lithography to express individual freedom during a period of government censorship.

The exhibition also presents Daumier's lithographs of genre scenes that he made after 1835, when the overtly political journal "La Caricature" ceased publication due to reinstated censorship laws. These scenes of everyday life in Paris from the 1840s to the 1860s show various leisure activities of the Parisian bourgeoisie whose recently acquired wealth enabled them to enjoy new types of pleasurable outings.

Programs include "Honoré Daumier's Célébrités du Juste milieu (1832-35): An Examination of the Zimmerli Art Museum's Series," by Dr. Edouard Papet, curator of sculpture, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The event will be held on April 3 at 6 p.m. Also, "Laughing Matters: Daumier's Strategies of Humor," by Dr. Elizabeth C. Childs, department chair and associate professor of art history and archaeology at Washington University, St. Louis, will be presented on April 5 at 2 p.m.