Political Wits, 100 Years Apart
Daumier and Oliphant at the Phillips
Art thumbs its nose at politics in this election-inspired gallery, featuring works by Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–79) and Patrick Oliphant (Australian, b. 1935) from the museum’s permanent collection.
Exhibition Images
Patrick Oliphant, Homage to Daumier (2000)
Honore Daumier, Le Public du Salon: Un jour où l’on ne paye pas… (1852)
About the Exhibition
Art thumbs its nose at politics in this election-inspired gallery, featuring works by Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–79) and Patrick Oliphant (Australian, b. 1935) from the museum’s permanent collection. A master of caricature and satire, Daumier so lampooned King Louis-Philippe that the artist was charged with sedition and imprisoned for six months in 1832. Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Oliphant—whose work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery and the Library of Congress and published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—had a deep and longstanding admiration of Daumier’s work. During a retrospective at the Phillips in 2000, Oliphant produced a lithograph inspired by the exhibition and proclaimed in hisWashington Post review of the show, “Monsieur Daumier, you certainly are a humbler.”