NEW RESEARCH RESULTS

The Daumier-Register has been working together for quite some time with ALEX DJORDJEVIC, an art lover and hobby art researcher with a focus on Crypto iconography. In this context, many subjects of Daumier's oeuvre were discussed in detail and examined. We came to the conviction that in a great number of Daumier's works more information is included and hidden than was originally known to the censors (and later to the art historian). Thus, the image of a hitherto little known, politically highly committed Daumier crystallized. As you probably know, Daumier was sentenced to six months in prison after the court or the pervasive censors had judged some of his works (Gargantua, Les Blanchisseurs and others) as subversive. His publisher and friend, Charles Philipon, fared similarly.

It was therefore clear that Daumier and his colleagues either had to limit themselves to harmless genre scenes, or try to find safety beyond the French border. The convinced Republican Daumier decided not to turn his back to France, but rather to fight his way against arbitrariness and political violence. As can be seen in the great number of lithographs and their interpretations that are and still will be added to this section of the Daumier-Register, Daumier succeeded time and again to disguise biting satire in his oeuvre, and thus to outwit the overworked censors.

His encrypted messages refer not only to political issues of his time. The often hidden allusions to public persons he did not want to offend or to his own friends he "staged" lovingly and in a humorous way are a constant in his work. Added to this are many forgotten circumstances and allusions to the social or cultural events of the period that Alex Djordjevic and the Daumier-Register have transported back to the surface.

We are happy to announce that also ADA ACKERMAN has offered to collaborate with the Daumier-Register to enrich the section of “New Research Results”. Former student of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ada Ackerman works as a researcher in art history for the laboratory ARIAS (CNRS, Paris). She focuses on Russian and Soviet culture and on crossings between art history and cinema. She has taught art history at University Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense and at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. She has also worked for Centre Pompidou-Metz as a head researcher. Ada’s new book “Eisenstein and Daumier” has recently been published (Armand Collin Publication, Paris, 2013) and offers new and unexpected insights into Daumier’s influence on the Russian filmmaker. The articles she writes for the Daumier-Register can therefore be expected with great anticipation and are certainly a promising addition to this section.