The Charged Image: Political Satire in the Age of Daumier

4 October–4 December 1988

Incited by the violent events of the July Revolution, and by the incompetence, corruption, and impotence of the July Monarchy headed by King Louis-Philippe, artists like Honoré Daumier, Gerard Grandville, and Charles-Joseph Travies de Villiers quickly turned the freedom granted to the press by the king against him. Through journals like La Caricature and Le Charivari, both founded by Charles Philipon, these artists created ongoing jokes about the government through caricature and political cartoons. These charged images usually played upon colloquialisms to depict Louis-Philippe and his regime as corrupt or idiotic. The most famous of these images is Philipon’s depiction of the king as a pear, poire in French, which is also slang for “imbecile.” The exhibition was selected from the permanent collection of the Smart Gallery, the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University, the Art Institute of Chicago, and from several private collections.

Curator: H. Rafael Chacón and Mark Hall, Smart Gallery interns and graduate students in the Department of Art, University of Chicago, with assistance of Alan Kahan, formerly of the University’s History Department.

Funding was provided in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Share this:
The University of Chicago smARTKids