Art Against Censorship

Art against censorship traces the centrality of literary and theatrical satire to the artistic and political expression of the artist Honoré Daumier. Daumier drew on seventeenth-century theatre and literature in moments of stifling censorship, foregrounding the subversive potential of a newly glorified literary past. The artist Honoré Daumier (1808–79) gained early notoriety after being jailed for a caricature of King Louis-Philippe. He continued to test the electric fence of shifting censorship laws throughout his career, using experimental portrait strategies and subversive reinterpretations of seventeenth-century literature.This book examines Daumier’s deep and abiding engagement with the authors Jean de La Fontaine, Molière, and Miguel de Cervantes, all of whom were masters of dissimulation and critique in their own time. The resulting artworks functioned as critiques of authority in large part because their publics understood Daumier’s appropriations as coded forms of dissent. The authors offered vital representational strategies to the visual arts, and their famous characters, narratives, and motifs allowed Daumier to filter his political statements through a newly glorified literary past.Featuring more than a hundred illustrations, Art against censorship offers a compelling account of this remarkable artist’s work, in which literature, theatre, and politics converge in a way unique in art history. Honoré Daumier (1808–79), who was imprisoned early on for a politically offensive cartoon, painted scenes from seventeenth-century theatre and literature at moments of stifling censorship later in his career. He continued to find form for dangerous political dissent in the face of intense and shifting censorship laws by drawing on La Fontaine, Molière, and Cervantes, masters of dissimulation and critique in a newly glorified literary past. This book reveals new connections between legal repression and subversive fine-arts practice, showing the force of Daumier’s role in the broader stories of image-text relationships and political expression.