Art Against Censorship : Honore Daumier, Comedy, and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France.
Erin Duncan-O'Neill
In English. Softcover, 248 pages, 24 x 17 x 1.7 cm. Manchester University Press, July 2024.
Honoré Daumier (1808-79), who was imprisoned early in his career for a politically offensive caricature, painted scenes from seventeenth-century theater and literature in moments of suffocating censorship at the end of his career. He continued to find ways to express dangerous political dissent in the face of intense and changing censorship laws, drawing inspiration from La Fontaine, Molière and Cervantes, masters of dissimulation and criticism in a newly glorified literary past. This book reveals new links between legal repression and the subversive practice of the visual arts, showing the strength of Daumier's role in the broader histories of image-text relations and political expression.
